Siege Line

by Myke Cole

  As if the old man had heard his thoughts, Schweitzer felt a sudden gust pushing him toward Yakecan’s soul. The magic shoved them together, and Schweitzer felt the flood of the man’s memories washing over him. A gambling game, Yakecan bouncing on his knees to a throbbing drum, flashing hand signals and trading bits of broken twigs to keep score. The aluminum gangway up to an amphibious transport, the dark green camouflage of Canadian soldiers all about him. The backseat of a freezing pickup truck, fumbling for a warm breast and laughing at the shriek evoked by his chilly fingers.

  Schweitzer turned away from the memories, gave the man his privacy. Ninip had ravaged Schweitzer’s secrets when they’d been paired, and he still remembered the sick feeling of violation, of helplessness. He was not like Ninip. Wasn’t like his brother, even. Integrity was the last vestige of his humanity, and he exercised it every chance he got. Schweitzer had been able to push back against Ninip. Yakecan wouldn’t communicate with him, was helpless to resist him, but Schweitzer let him be regardless. He embraced the impetus of Plante’s magic, let it wrap him more tightly around Yakecan, felt the lines between them blur. The thundering of Yakecan’s biology receded into the background a bit. Still painfully loud but not as jarring as it had been before, dialed back enough for Schweitzer to focus on his surroundings.

  Where his own internality had been black, Yakecan’s was red, a warm closeness that left Schweitzer feeling claustrophobic. The pushing sensation ceased, and Schweitzer reached out, feeling for the same levers he’d always pulled when he’d been back in his old body, the reporting of his dead nerve endings, the corpse-fibers twitching and contracting according to his spiritual commands.

  With Ninip, control of his body had been a constant struggle. With Yakecan, the absence of resistance was almost sad, and Schweitzer surged forward, sliding his spiritual limbs into the spaces that drove Yakecan’s physical ones, a diver putting on a second skin.

  James Schweitzer opened his eyes.

  The aurora shimmered above him, green ribbons snaking out into the blackness of the sky. He could hear the popping of the bonfire next to him, feel the heat of it against the side of his face.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Plante’s voice, thick with wonder. “First time I ever did that.”

  Mankiller’s face appeared over his own, her eyes wet. “Joe! Joe, can you hear me!?”

  “I can hear you.” Schweitzer was used to coaxing air through his corpse’s punctured larynx, but Yakecan’s working lungs pushed it up effortlessly, and Schweitzer felt a strange queasiness at the sound of his . . . Yakecan’s voice sounding in his ears. Speaking forced him to inhale, and the sweetness of breath overwhelmed him.

  How long had it been since he died? He had forgotten how amazing it was to simply breathe, to have lungs that expanded and contracted, a stomach that pinched with hunger, a bladder that was dangerously full. The air tasted of charcoal and diesel fumes; the cold had a metallic bite that made his earlobes burn. His foot itched. There was a cramp in the back of his leg. It was a chorus, a litany of smells, sounds, aches, and pains. All had been reported to him secondhand by the magic that kept his corpse animated. Now he was in it. He was feeling it. A human at last. His heart raced, but the very feeling of it beating was so indescribably wonderful that he pitched forward as he sat up, groaning.

  Mankiller wrapped her arms around him. “Joe! Are you okay?! Say somethin’!”

  Schweitzer had never thought about Mankiller romantically, but the mere touch of another human being nearly sent him into spontaneous orgasm. Schweitzer felt blood flooding his crotch, his cock stiffening in his snow pants. Oh, God, he thought. I’m a man again.

  Mankiller was shouting in his ear, barely choking back tears. He managed to flash her a thumbs-up sign, which got her to back off long enough for him to get shakily to his feet. Ghaznavi stared at him openmouthed. “Your eyes,” she said. “They’re normal.”

  Schweitzer raised his fingertip, pulled up his eyelid, tapped the soft-wet surface beneath. He felt the slight pain, the jerking revulsion of his body’s involuntary response, reveled in it. All around him, the wolves looked up, the gold fire burning in their still-living sockets. “Guess it’s different,” he offered.

  “Why?” Ghaznavi asked.

  Schweitzer shrugged, thrilling at the feeling of the parka sliding over his shoulders and back. “Dunno. Maybe it’s because Yakecan was a person.”

  “You are Yakecan.” Mankiller sounded devastated.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” Schweitzer said. “I’m Jim Schweitzer. Your deputy is in here with me, but I’m driving right now.”

  The look of girlish wonder on Mankiller’s face would have been comical if it hadn’t been so full of grief and naked need. “Did you . . . did you tell him what I told you to . . . Can I talk to him, just for a sec?”

  Schweitzer put a hand on Mankiller’s shoulder, partly to comfort her and partly to drown in the joy of simple human contact. He pulled his face into a small smile, feeling the muscles crease on natural lines, well worn. Joe Yakecan had smiled a lot. “I did,” he said. “And he said what I thought he would. You have nothing to be sorry for. You were a good boss and a good friend.” A lie, but a worthy one.

  Mankiller struggled with words, clapping a hand over his own. She stammered, and Schweitzer knew she was on the verge of bursting into very un-Mankiller-like tears. He decided to put a stop to it, for all of their sakes, and forged back through Yakecan’s memories, looking for something that would cement the truth for Mankiller, that her old friend was still in here. Sorry, man, Schweitzer said to Yakecan’s smiling, idiot soul. Just a little something, for her.

  “He says the twenty he owes you is in his locker. It’s stuffed into the bottom of his old hip holster. The one he never uses. Or, he says, once this is all over, you can go double or nothing. He’s confident he’ll win it back.”

  And now Mankiller did weep, a short, shuddering cough that made her look nearly as old as her grandfather. She gave a strangled sound, gritted her teeth, and the spasm was gone as quickly as it had come. She looked up at Schweitzer, swallowed hard, nodded.

  Plante beamed at him. “Can’t believe it worked, honestly,” he said. “That’s the first time I ever worked inkoze like this.”

  “I told you, sir,” Schweitzer said through Yakecan’s mouth. “This thing you call inkoze’s got hard edges, and they’re nowhere near where you think they are.”

  “Can you show me?” Plante asked.

  “No.” Schweitzer shook his head. “But I know somebody who can.”

  “We can worry about that once we win this fight,” Ghaznavi said. “What matters for now is that it works.” She offered Schweitzer a pistol. “Let’s get this sledge loaded with supplies and get our ass back to town. Every second we spend out here is another second for the bad guys to overrun the station.”

  Plante nodded, turning back to the cabin. “All right, Jim. Your first task as a member of the living is to help me get the sledge loaded. Let’s see that super strength my granddaughter’s been goin’ on about.

  Schweitzer chuckled and followed him. His stomach churned, an unpleasant tightening that he only now realized was the sour twinge of anxiety. It was a feeling he’d barely felt when he was alive and certainly not since his death. The unfamiliarity of it was unsettling.

  Because the truth was that Schweitzer had awakened in Yakecan’s body no stronger than a normal man. The popping of the fire had come through the tinny haze that Schweitzer now knew was normal hearing. His eyes saw the aurora just as anyone else, the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums invisible to him now. His breathing labored under Yakecan’s bulk, the bones straining to hold up layers of muscle and fat built by too much beer and not enough exercise. He shivered in the cold, blinked away the brightness as he moved from the darkness outside to the relative light of the cabin.

  Plante was kneeling, rolling back a thre
adbare rug and hauling open a corrugated metal hatch. “It’s all down here.” He looked up at Schweitzer, and his smile looked nervous, so that Schweitzer couldn’t help but wonder if he knew.

  That Schweitzer had been bound into Yakecan’s body, that this miracle had preserved everything that Schweitzer had once been, his memories, his goals, his wants and needs. It had taken all this and bound it within a mortal shell with mortal limits, and had jettisoned everything else. The strength that enabled him to lift a car. The speed that meant he could run faster than a cheetah. The senses that could tell when an enemy was approaching. The steadiness that made his aim as accurate as any laser-guided ordnance.

  All gone. Schweitzer was alive, but as he followed Plante down the hatch and thought of the fight that awaited him back at Fort Resolution, he wondered for how long.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  DEAD GIVEAWAY

  The Director couldn’t believe it had come to this. Fort Resolution was a wasteland. Columns of smoke rose from at least three ruined houses. The Loon was a roofless wreck littered with the debris of overturned trucks and the scattered remains of the helicopter.

  The wreckage was a reminder of the fact that his tiny force had triumphed over incredible odds, had beaten back the Canadian QRF he was certain would overwhelm them. Schweitzer was broken, the town depopulated and burning, the cavalry turned back before they could save the day. By all rights, he was winning.

  Except that he wasn’t. The idiot sheriff and the ragged remains of her village were huddled in their makeshift pillbox, ready for his next charge, the one that would surely overwhelm them. Except that he couldn’t, because that damned woman was the only leverage he had on her grandfather, and she would clearly rather die than help him. Which meant she had to be taken alive.

  If she hadn’t gotten away already, that was. The bloody assaults on the town had whittled his platoon down. He couldn’t keep a cordon anymore, not nearly as completely as he would have needed in order to ensure that no one got away. The few scouts he’d detailed to search for the old man were a further drain on his precious living manpower. He needed the living more than the dead for once. Living men could capture the sheriff. The Golds weren’t interested in taking people alive.

  “People of Fort Resolution!” he bellowed, his throat flexing to project his voice farther than the greatest stage actor. “Why are you doing this? Look at your town! Ruined! Your precious Army tried to save you and failed. Their deaths are on your head. You killed them as surely as if you’d pulled the trigger yourselves. But it doesn’t have to be like this. It can all end right now. Send out Sheriff Plante. No one else has to die! We will take her for a little walk, and then she will be returned to you, safe and sound. Surely, you can save your own precious lives for that.” The truth was that he wanted the sheriff for his own uses once she’d brought her grandfather around. A spirit as powerful as hers might pair well with a soul from the void. Maybe she could be the third Silver in the history of the program. Silver or Gold, he’d still have the satisfaction of killing her. After all the trouble she’d caused him, it would be small recompense, but he’d take what he could get.

  There was no response from the station, not even a ranging shot at his men, though he knew the sheriff’s people could see them. “They’re low on ammunition,” he mused. “They must have spent their stores when they saw the helicopters coming in.”

  “Think it’s safe to rush them, sir?” Mark breathed from beside him, elbows propped on an overturned rowboat as she peered through a pair of binoculars. “You said you wanted to avoid further casualties.”

  “No, not yet,” the Director said, instantly regretting the words. He couldn’t be letting his subordinates think he was weak, frightened. But he was frightened. Frightened of losing his chance to find another Summoner, frightened of his body being destroyed and his soul condemned to return to that churning horror that he knew awaited him. Nonsense. What have you to fear? He was immortal. He didn’t need food, water, even air. He could walk out into the waste and hide himself until the threat passed, even if it took years. The only creature on the earth that could have harmed him had proved unequal to the task. He felt a twisting in his spiritual gut at the thought of his brother, but he wasted little time on it. He had given Schweitzer a chance. Even with all the advantages of death, Schweitzer had been too wedded to the trappings of life to take advantage of it. No, the Director would not waste thought on him.

  There was nothing to fear. The game was rigged in his favor. Win or lose, he would be fine. So, why did he feel so uneasy?

  Mark set the binoculars down and raised her satellite phone to her ear. It worked on a coded channel that the Director had left open for his own people. “Go for ops.”

  The Director heard her heart quicken before he could dial his hearing down to eavesdrop on the call. “Are you sure?” Mark was saying as he snatched the phone out of her hand.

  “Do you know who this is?” he breathed into the receiver.

  “Yes, sir.” The man on the other end sounded terrified. “I don’t want to overstate—”

  “Just tell me what you were telling her, please.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve got eyes on a fire, sir. About a quarter-klick out, we think. We’re at waypoint Golf, sir.”

  “A forest fire?”

  “No, sir. Smoke was greasy, and we got a whiff of the chemicals. Could be a cookout or a garbage fire. We’re trying to locate it now.”

  “Mark”—the Director dipped the receiver away from his mouth—“do you know of any human habitation within a one-kilometer radius of waypoint Golf?”

  “No, sir,” she said, “but it could be a trapper out on . . .”

  The Director ignored the rest of her words. Something deep within him was thrumming, making his spiritual gut tighten. He couldn’t be sure it was them. It could be any number of things. But one of those things could be Sheriff Plante’s grandfather, and he couldn’t shake the suspicion that it was.

  “Get eyes on,” he whispered into the phone. “Call me back the minute you find the source.”

  He disconnected and handed the phone back to Mark, busied himself with planning the approach. He did his best to concentrate on the task at hand, to trust his people to do their jobs. But the team out by waypoint Golf was a splinter in his mind, and he found himself counting the minutes. How long did it take to move a quarter-klick, even stealthily? Surely, not this long.

  “I am tired of playing with these people,” he said to Mark, alarmed by the edge of anger in his own voice, powerless to stop it. “I’ll go down with your team, and we can make two approaches. I want an LWIR scope, and we’re going to count bodies and bulk.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mark sounded confused. “What’s the objective?”

  “To see if Sheriff Plante has flown the coop. If she’s inside, we’ll try for a final assault with our regular operators.”

  “And if she’s not?”

  “We turn the Golds loose. All of them.”

  “Sir, are you sure that—”

  “I said I was done playing with these people! Didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?” He was barking, growling, his voice easily as loud as when he had called on the station’s occupants to surrender. Which meant they could hear his outburst. It was unprofessional, weak, far beneath him. He knew it was the fear driving him, the frustration. He knew he should be beyond those things, that the outburst would degrade the morale of his dwindling, precious living troops. He didn’t care. It felt too good to not hold back. He had fought so hard to get here, had planned and shifted with speed and agility when those plans went awry. He would not be beaten by a living woman, no matter how hard-bitten she might be.

  “Y . . . yes, sir,” Mark was saying. “I’ll . . .”

  But her pocket was buzzing, the satphone inside chiming out its call on the coded channel. The Director struck out, quick as a snake, and plucked it from h
er pocket, ignoring Mark’s wincing flinch as he lunged. He raised the phone to his ear, took a moment to calm himself before answering. “Yes?”

  “Sir.” The man’s voice was even more frightened than before. “It’s an old shack, built into a hill. There’s a bonfire here, still dying. Burned remains in it.”

  The Director barely contained the urge to scream at the man, to tell him to get on with it already. “And?”

  “It’s human remains, sir. We can smell cooked glycerol, and there’s chromium fragments mixed in with the ash.”

  Molybdenum-infused chromium was a rare metal. Heavy, expensive, strong. Its cost meant it had few practical applications. Lock-cutter jaws, race-car crankshafts.

  The cables and bone reinforcements in the Cell’s undead operators.

  Schweitzer.

  CHAPTER XIX

  MUSH

  Even piled high with supplies, the sledge wasn’t much heavier than it had been with Schweitzer and Yakecan’s bulk slung across it, and now Schweitzer, in Yakecan’s body, was pulling, straining against a makeshift harness of creosote-soaked rope and bungee cords that Plante had strung together. Plante ambled alongside, surprising Schweitzer with his speed, darting in occasionally to check the straps that cinched the blue plastic tarp over the piled cans of food and cardboard boxes of bullets.

  Within moments of setting out, Schweitzer felt the all-too-human effects of his labor. His shoulders burned; his neck felt like a spring wound too tight. He sweated freely, so hot that he would push back his hood only to raise it a moment later, when his sweat froze and left him shivering. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this miserable, and he wouldn’t have traded it for the world.