Atlantis Reprise

by James Axler

  For those who were part of the sec force, these fears were channeled into a desire to learn how to fight back. Mark had started to learn some of those skills when he’d begun to train for the Nightcrawlers, yet there was little he was able to impart to those keen to learn.

  As they watched him, it soon became obvious to Ryan, Jak and J.B. why this could be. The seriousness of their situation weighed heavily on the sec chief and made him impatient in dealing with his men. As the would-be soldiers lined up to practice on crudely made mannequins, as they fired at targets from standing and running positions, as they learned hand-to-hand with blunted knives and also unarmed, so it became apparent that Mark soon tired of their ineptitude. It was as though he despaired of their ability to learn the skills needed to become a competent sec force, and he hectored and bullied them so that they felt that they could do nothing right. The more he yelled, the less confident they became.

  ‘Ryan, need talk him,’ Jak said softly. ‘Mebbe men always be shit, mebbe not. Not get ice inside with him shouting.’

  Ryan knew what the albino youth meant. In combat, you made the fear work for you. No one ever went into a firefight feeling relaxed. Always you approached battle with that fear in your gut, your heart pounding and the adrenaline coursing through your system. But you didn’t yield to it. You turned it in on itself so that you froze inside, became still, like ice on the surface of a river. Underneath, the current may be raging. On the surface, you were still, you were solid. You acted solely by instinct. That told you what you had to do and you rode into it smoothly, without wasting time on thought, without sparing the time to worry if you were making the right move. These men weren’t getting the chance to hone that instinct. Instead, they were being undermined unintentionally on every move, so that the fear was always flowing outward, without channeling or direction.

  Mark’s own frustration with what he saw as a race against time was reflecting back off his own men, with the result that there would never be enough time for them to get it right.

  J.B. watched Ryan as he observed the training, and could tell what was going through his head.

  ‘They’re keen. They look pretty strong. And they’re not cowards, we know that for certain. If you talk to him, then me and Jak can start to work with the sec.’

  They were standing on the edge of a fenced-in yard that stretched for over a thousand yards in width and around five thousand in length. At one time, before skydark, it had served as the parking lot for a Cineplex that had long since crumbled to the elements, its inability to exist as long as the concrete and brick buildings surrounding it a monument to the poor standards of late twentieth-century construction as much as the force of weather fluctuations postnukecaust. The neglected skeleton of the building threw shadows over the packed earth and traces of asphalt that now made up the sec training ground.

  Ryan strode over to where Mark was addressing his men. A row of targets stood about seventy yards from where the group of eight were clustered, and the seven trainees were covered in dust and grime, scored by grazes and the welts of bruises that were starting to rise and color. The targets in the distance were splattered by blobs of paint and dye that were unevenly distributed.

  As he approached, Ryan could hear the tail end of Mark’s rant.

  ‘…and you truly think that the Crawlers will stand there and raise their hands saying “Please, take your time, I’ll just stand here and wait”? What kinds of fools are you if you truly think this? You must learn to adjust your aim and fire as you move, not stop dead and take vital seconds to sight the target. Great heavens, if you do this, then you will surely forfeit your lives. Not just yours, I may remind you—the lives of everyone in Memphis is dependant upon us and how well we fare when we come up against the enemy, and—’

  ‘Mark,’ Ryan barked, levering his way into the man’s rant by force. ‘Stop berating your boys for a second and tell me what’s going on. Why are the targets covered in dye?’

  Mark whirled. His face was a dark cloud of tension and anger that lifted slightly when he caught sight of the one-eyed man. ‘Ryan, good to see you. Good to see someone who knows what he’s doing when faced with an enemy that wouldn’t hesitate to kill you on only half a sight.’

  Ryan shook his head and kissed his teeth. ‘Boys have got to learn to be men, Mark. It doesn’t come overnight, it takes some time.’

  ‘Time is something that we don’t have,’ Mark snapped in return.

  ‘Mebbe,’ Ryan acknowledged, ‘but it seems to me that you don’t have a choice. Boys have to train to be men, and that takes time. Meantime, you make the best of it. Can’t fight things like that in the same way you can fight a stickie.’

  ‘Fight a what?’ Mark questioned, suddenly perplexed.

  It hadn’t occurred to Ryan that the sucker-fingered muties that populated the vast expanses of dead earth across the old U.S.A. wouldn’t have penetrated into these areas, yet if convoys—with their wealth of old tech to help them—had only rarely traversed these lands, then it made sense that the muties would be an unknown quantity. Still, if nothing else, it had served a purpose by halting Mark’s tirade.

  ‘Tell you about it sometime,’ Ryan answered with a dismissive gesture. ‘Right now, we need to talk about a few things.’ He put his arm around the sec chief’s shoulders and led him away from his men. Jak and J.B. took this as their cue to move in.

  While Ryan continued his discussion with the rapidly calming Mark, the two fighters stood in front of the sec detachment.

  ‘Things not going great?’ Jak asked them.

  They shuffled their feet, looked embarrassed. Then one of them, rubbing idly at a graze that ran from elbow to wrist, spoke up.

  ‘It’s not easy. We’ve never had to do this before, and Mark expects perfection every time. I believe that we are all improving, but he makes us feel as though we are going backward. The targets have more hits—not in vital areas, it is true—than ever before, but it’s hard. None of us ever fired a blaster before we fled from Atlantis, where Mark began to train as a Crawler. And these blasters—they’re not like the ones we use when we scout and patrol. They feel completely different.’

  The man shrugged as he held up a blunt-nosed blaster that didn’t look like anything J.B. had ever seen before. The Armorer beckoned him to hand it over, and examined the strange weapon.

  ‘Dark night! It’s a paint ball gun. Next to useless,’ J.B. muttered, shaking his head. ‘These blasters have a completely different weight and balance to what you’ll use in combat, and these little fuckers—’ he squeezed the ball so hard that it burst, splattering dye over his hand, water running down his arm ‘—don’t fly like any kind of ammo you’d use. How can you learn to fire straight with shit like this?’

  ‘Mark figures that we might be shit, but at least we don’t waste ammo this way.’

  Jak spit on the ground in disgust. ‘Stupe idea. You know fire these, but not real blaster…’

  ‘If you use these to train, and then use your own blasters when you’re up against an enemy, the balance and aim of the thing is going to be completely different,’ J.B. explained to the trainees. ‘Problem with that is that if you’re not used to using blasters, as you people aren’t, then you’re not going to be able to make the adjustment in the heat of battle. And that’s you buying the farm.’

  ‘So what are we supposed to do about it?’ asked another of the trainees. ‘Mark makes the rules.’

  J.B. looked over to where the sec chief was engrossed in conversation with Ryan.

  ‘Mebbe we can do something about that,’ he stated.

  While Jak and J.B. had been talking to the sec men, Ryan had been trying to convince Mark that his men should train with live ammo.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Ryan said, winding up his argument. ‘I know what it’s like to be a leader. Everything comes down to you, and you’re not just looking out for yourself but for everyone else. And it’s hard, real hard. But right now all you’re doing is making your men f
eel like they’re shit. You’ve got to cut them some slack. Combat is won through guts, and guts comes with courage. They have to feel like they can come through. Bawling them out all the time isn’t going to do that. And they’re going to have problems with those chickenshit blasters being different weights and balances. You’ve got to train using the weapons they usually use…’

  Mark shook his head. ‘I know that makes sense, but—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But what about ammo? Our supplies are so limited.’

  Ryan shrugged. ‘How much do you need? Strikes me that—from what you say and from what we know—a lot of the combat is hand-to-hand and uses blades. That’s the way the Nightcrawlers work. Mebbe you should be concentrating on that some more?’

  ‘We do, but I want to put us in a position where we can kill them before they get close enough to engage in that manner. Rather than purely defensive, I want our strategy to be offensive.’

  ‘Well, that sounds good to me, it makes a lot of sense,’ Ryan acknowledged. ‘But you can’t run before you can walk. While you’re working on your long-term strategy, then you’re going to lose men in hand-to-hand. There’s got to be some kind of balance.’

  ‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Mark said slowly. ‘It’s just that… We’re not equipped to look after ourselves as a community, not yet. And I have to—’

  ‘Fireblast, man, you don’t have to do anything,’ Ryan said with emphasis. ‘That’s why we agreed to stay. We’ll help you take that weight, make it easier to carry.’

  Mark allowed himself a smile, the first time his grim visage had cracked in the short time that Ryan had known him.

  ‘That’s more like it.’ Ryan grinned broadly and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Now let’s do something about getting your men into shape on unarmed and knife fighting.’

  Mark nodded decisively. ‘But there’s something I must do first,’ he said, almost to himself.

  While Ryan followed in his wake, he strode over to where his men were waiting, and he took the paint-ball blaster from J.B.’s hands, holding it out to his men.

  ‘See this?’ he asked. The trainees exchanged bemused glances, then nodded. Mark’s smile broadened. ‘This was a mistake. Forget it. We start over, and this time we learn properly.’

  Pulling back his arm, he threw the blaster toward the standing row of targets. Ryan couldn’t help but note that he had an excellent throwing arm; the blaster reached the level of the targets, smashing against one before falling in pieces to the ground.

  ‘Okay, these people are going to show us how we should be fighting. I suggest that we take note of what they have to impart,’ Mark continued. ‘These may be the most important lessons we ever have to learn.’

  ‘That’s some build-up,’ J.B. muttered to Ryan. ‘Too bad Millie and Krysty can’t be here to help.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ryan mused, ‘whatever they’re doing now, I’d bet serious jack that they’re not enjoying it.’

  ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT we’re doing this,’ Mildred muttered venomously as she began to stitch another tunic. ‘We should be teaching these idiots how to fight, not learning how to sew.’

  Krysty placed her tongue firmly in her cheek to prevent herself from laughing out loud. It would be impolite to their hosts, and would also probably make Mildred explode. Already, it seemed that she was on a short fuse that was burning ever closer to the detonator. However there was one thing she couldn’t resist.

  ‘So you never really learned to sew, then? Back in Harmony, it was one of the first things that Mother Sonja taught me.’

  ‘Sweetie, I always wanted to be out playing baseball, and I never did all that well in home ec at high school,’ Mildred murmured darkly, her gaze smoldering as she looked around the room at the other women.

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for that, as some of it sounded like an alien language to me,’ Krysty commented, having to concentrate extremely hard lest she howl with amusement.

  ‘Don’t make me explain,’ Mildred whispered. Then she caught Krysty’s eye and could see how hard the woman was trying to contain her mirth. ‘Yeah, very funny…’ Mildred forced through gritted teeth before the absurdity of the situation hit her, and she beat Krysty to the punch, her own frowning face cracking.

  ‘It could be worse,’ Krysty pointed out.

  ‘Yeah? How?’ Mildred countered.

  From her perspective, it was easy to see how she could feel this way. It had soon become apparent that the roles of men and women in Memphis—which were, of course, defined by the learned behavior that they had brought with them from Atlantis—were rigidly defined and archaic in their structure.

  Atlantis had been run very much as a patriarchy of the old type, almost classical in its design. Mildred had never been interested in history during her days in education, always being oriented more toward the sciences, as befitted her eventual calling as a physician. However, she knew enough of the ways of predark antiquity to know that whatever else lay underneath the philosophy of Atlantis, there was a strong strain of classical Greek contained within.

  So it was that while the men farmed, engineered and fought, the women raised children, made clothes and cooked. Not that these women in Memphis were without accomplishment. There was artistry in the clothes they made, and many were responsible for the painted hieroglyphs and decorations on the murals that dotted the red-and-white landscape. Where there was intricate scrollwork on much of the building renovation, this, too, could be attributed to the women of the ville. Yet they weren’t armed. They didn’t take part in the heavy restoration and maintenance work. They didn’t heal the sick.

  This latter irritated Mildred intensely. Medicine was her territory, and yet when she had offered her services to Lemur and Cyran, they were politely declined. She had never been in a ville where they hadn’t welcomed another pair of hands and a little more experience when it came to medical help, and it seemed to her that she had experienced nothing less than a slap in the face.

  Yet when she had questioned why this was so, she had been met with nothing more than the assurance that the medical bay situation was in good hands…male hands. There was nothing more to be said, and this bland acceptance of gender roles irritated her in a way that the others couldn’t comprehend. For Krysty as much as for the men, it was just one of those things. Every ville had its own ways, and you adjusted to these so as not to cause unnecessary conflict. For Mildred, however, it was something that went deeper. It was unthinkable that women should be anything other than equal. Of course there were times when men did things women couldn’t, and vice versa. Size, strength, and even the individual all figured in that equation. But such a strict and arbitrary division, based on nothing more than an accident of birth, was the kind of thing she had spent her youth watching others fight for, and fighting against herself. So it was with an ill-concealed lack of grace that she watched the men go off to do real work, following Krysty as they were shown how the women of Memphis contributed to the running of the ville.

  The first day or two had been spent baking and preparing food for sale and trade within the ville. With no system of jack, the people of Memphis operated a barter system whereby people exchanged services and good for others. So a meal could be purchased at the cost of a roof repair among the men; a toga for several days’ child care among the women. It was a complex system, but one that the Memphis people operated almost as second nature.

  After this, the two women were sent by Cyran to assist in the manufacture and repair of clothing. Again, only women worked in this trade, which was seen as a feminine preserve. They had been in this building for the past three days, and it was driving Mildred crazy. She had never enjoyed seam-work, and to be expected to keep up a high work rate on something in which she had neither real skill nor interest was something that was making her already short temper shorter by the minute.

  ‘Another damn thing,’ she added to Krysty after putting a needle through her finger yet again. ‘If I’m not
helping as a healer, then I’m going to be asking for a blood transfusion. I swear, I’ve been in firefights where I’ve had less injury than this.’

  Krysty suppressed another smile. ‘Come on, Mildred, we’ve got to go with what they do here. If the time comes to stand and fight, then we can forget all this. But if we’re to be any good at all, we’ve got to meet them halfway.’

  Mildred sighed. ‘You’re right. I know you’re right. But that isn’t making it any easier. Besides which, I’m going to be ruining most of the clothes that come through here, dripping blood on them. So how’s that going to go down?’

  Krysty acknowledged that. ‘Okay, mebbe we should have a word with Cyran or Lemur.’

  ‘Have to be her, ’cause she’s in charge of the women,’ Mildred said with heavy irony. ‘Still, it might make things a little better.’ She put down the toga on which she’d been attempting to work and sat back, surveying the workroom around her. At benches and tables, women worked with their heads down, hardly talking or exchanging the briefest of words. ‘You know something? When I was a kid I saw this thing on TV about sweatshop workers in the garment industry. All women, all heads down, working not talking…things don’t really change, do they?’

  ‘Don’t they?’ Krysty echoed. ‘Mebbe not. I don’t know about then, but I do know that people’s fundamental drives don’t alter. We’re all driven by the same impulses, throughout history.’

  ‘Damn, girl, you’d better watch it. You’re starting to sound like Doc.’ Mildred grinned mischievously. ‘You don’t want to make a habit of that.’