The woman laughed. Tristan wasn’t certain she was joking. The woman rose and moved from person to person, touching shoulders, speaking gently. Tristan followed suit. When she touched the bald man’s ankle, he sat up with a gasp. A sleep-erection poked from his pubic hair. She slapped her palm to his mouth.
“Be quiet,” she murmured in his ear. He shifted, crossing his legs. She withdrew her hand, keeping her eyes on his face, which blushed so hard she could see it in the starlight. “Someone’s here. He’s going to help us escape.”
The man nodded and sat still, unwilling to meet her eyes. She supposed she should be embarrassed, for him and herself, but she’d been diapered or naked so long she no longer automatically thought of her body as a thing to be guarded. Besides, months of training—first with Alden, then in the orange—had left her smooth and lean. Her flesh had become more than a vessel for food and a perch for the male gaze. It had become a weapon.
She smiled sharply, ashamed at last, and moved on to wake the next woman.
They waited in silence. Tristan watched the tower. Its top window flashed with the same blue as the bolt that had struck down the woman with the rocks. She waited for an alien to burst from the door, gibbering, lasers lashing from each of its tentacles and pincers. Instead, a man as lean as herself dropped from the doorway.
The others gasped. Tristan whirled on them, glaring them into silence. Walt jogged up and winked at her. He crouched down, blunt black pistol in his hand, and lasered through the wires.
“You were in there a long time,” Tristan said.
“Did you miss me?”
“Who would miss a failure?”
Walt smiled at her. “Get the others over here.”
She padded to the others. “Time to go. Unless you’d rather take your chances with the space-monsters.”
They followed, wordless. Tristan bent under the smoking wires, contorting her body away from their razory ends. The prisoners filed from the pen one by one.
Walt gestured at the ground. “Now get down and crawl until we’re outside the light.”
“We’re naked!” the bald man whispered.
“Would you rather get a thorn in your balls or a laser in your back?”
“Can’t you steal a car?”
Walt fingered the gun. “Crawl.”
That shut them up at last. Tristan stayed beside Walt, eyeing the gun; if he were shot, it would be her first move. Rocks jabbed her knees. Dust ground into the scrapes. Her elbows rasped through yellow grass. Behind her, whines and pained gasps punctured the night. She fought the urge to stand and run as far from them as she could get. Walt stopped, gesturing them to do the same, and got out a pair of binoculars. He stared back at the tower for some time, then stood and motioned the others to follow. They stepped lightly, hands cupped to their groins. Dust caked their knees. Tristan kept her eyes on her feet, one hand held before her, as if expecting to meet a wall at any time.
Walt leaned forward, jogging up a sudden slope. Tristan’s feet hit asphalt. The tarred pebbles had never felt so good against her bare skin. Walt passed around water. As they shared, he glanced back toward the dark city repeatedly, but his eyes held no particular fear. She watched him as closely as he watched the silent grounds. He hadn’t been surprised by the alien city, that much was clear. He was a survivor. Not in the sense that he hadn’t died. In the sense that he actively refused to.
“Well,” Walt said abruptly, “good luck.”
The bald man laughed. “Good luck? With what?”
“I’m not your shepherd,” Walt said. “Besides lying down in a big human bull’s-eye, traveling in a group is the stupidest thing we could do. They’d find us in an instant. I’m leaving. On my own. If you like living, you should do the same.”
“That is insane,” Tristan blurted. She flung her arm at the others, appealing to whatever misplaced goodness had caused him to rescue them in the first place. “We’re hungry. We’re tired. We don’t even have any goddamn clothes. They shipped me here from San Francisco and I don’t even know where here is. People are going to die. You can’t just walk away.”
Glacial coldness swept over his face, killing the happy-go-lucky action-boy who’d busted them loose. Involuntarily, Tristan fell back a step.
“I got you out,” he said flatly. “You can figure out what to do next.”
Walt walked down the road. The bald man hesitated, then followed behind him, joined by a half dozen others. Walt turned, scowled, and swerved off the highway into the brambles. One by one, the prisoners stopped and watched him go, their shoulders slumped in the starlight.
“What an asshole,” said the red-haired woman. “What do we do now?”
Tristan scanned the side of the highway for anything she could use as shoes. It was like the old joke about being chased by a bear: she didn’t have to outrun the bear, just the people she was with.
“At best, we’ve got a few hours before they find us,” Tristan said. “They’d have to be blind to miss our tracks.”
“Do we know for sure they aren’t?” said the red-haired women.
“You’ve seen the size of their eyes. Or do you think those things are implants?”
The woman snorted. “What, then? Follow the road?”
The others began to drift back from the field. The bald man wiped sweat from his brow. “He’s gone. He just walked right off!”
“I saw that,” Tristan said.
“Why would he do that? Let us loose and leave us to die?”
“Because we don’t have to die. Not unless your master plan is to stand here all night.”
The man flung out his hands, then quickly covered himself back up. “Then what do we do?”
“Split up,” Tristan said. “Half one way, half the other.”
“How do we decide who goes which way?”
“It doesn’t fucking matter!” Anger flooded her nerves, tapping the oceanic reservoir that had gathered in her ever since her capture. It was all she could do to stop herself from driving her elbow straight into the bald man’s prissy lips, or from kneeing his shabby little cock. Instead, she turned and strode down the road.
Footsteps rasped behind her. The entire group was following her. Not a single one had turned to try the other way. She clenched her jaw until it ached. She wasn’t their leader. Their mother. She wanted to spin on her heel and run the other way, but she knew they’d reverse with her, following like a school of bait fish. She upped her pace. Their steps slapped behind her, keeping up. Such idiots. So, so stupid. Weeks in captivity had stripped them of any ability to choose for themselves.
But if a willingness to follow was their flaw, hers was her frustration. She saw this too clearly not ten minutes later when the alien city across the plain blazed with blue and orange lights. These strobed through the darkness, stirring the creatures from their homes, their hives. Engines blasted through the still night.
Tristan ran. The others ran with her, twenty naked shadows, far too pale beneath the white of the stars.
19
The post stuck from the dust like a warding finger. Ness’ mouth was dry. Gulls laughed from way on down the river. Larsen nodded, his face as flat as a tablet. The eyes of the workers urged Ness forward as strongly as a hand to the small of his back. He stepped to the post and raised his arms above his head. Gently, Larsen tied the thin ropes to Ness’ wrists. Sweat prickled his back and brow. He twisted his head around. A whip dangled from Larsen’s hand.
“No speeches,” the tall man said. “You all know what this is about. Don’t make me repeat it.”
“Do you really think this will make me work harder?” Ness moaned.
“Hell if I know,” Larsen said. “Five lashes. I’ll keep track if you can’t.”
The first stroke fell before Ness had time to tell him he was ready. It hit his back like something molten. His knees collapsed and he dangled from the ropes, writhing, spikes of heat searing his spine. He screamed and choked. He had no frame of reference for t
he pain: a hundred bee stings, followed by a hundred more, followed by a hundred more—pain without end, his back tensing so hard he thought his bones would break. Sweat dripped from him in cataracts, soaking his shorts, pattering to the ground. Blood mingled with it; the crowd was so silent he could hear it hitting the thirsty dust.
On the second stroke, he wet his pants.
The third stroke stole what little strength was left in his legs. He hung there, too dizzy to find his feet, panting without end or ease, white sparks overwhelming his sight. Time became a single awful thing. He forgot to scream. Spit dribbled from his lips.
There was no fourth stroke.
“Looks like enough,” he heard Larsen say. A strong arm wrapped around his shoulders. Ropes scratched his wrists and fell away. Larsen carried him to his bed and laid him on his stomach. Someone cleaned his back while he was still too dizzy to speak. Nausea cramped his belly. He emerged from the fog and wished he hadn’t. Pain beat his back like a tide, drawing back just enough to think it would soon drain away before surging back in a white-hot roil that left him gasping for breath. The swamp cooler strained at the window. He sweated through his sheet.
“You don’t look too hot,” Shawn said from behind him.
He opened his gummy eyes. He’d somehow been asleep. The light from the window was the yellow of late afternoon. “Feels like I was left in the oven too long.”
“They said you haven’t been working. I’m shocked, man.”
Ness rolled a couple inches on his side, back burning. It was worth it to sneer at Shawn. “Why are we here?”
“To kill the aliens. As long as they’re on our dirt, that’s the only duty we got.”
“I’m not sure how many aliens I’m going to kill by growing corn for the tailors of Spokane.”
“Shit.” Shawn sighed and sat on the neighboring bed. “We all got to do work we don’t want to, Ness. That’s what life is all about. I thought you’d turned that corner already.”
Ness shut his eyes. “That’s such bullshit.”
“Maybe you never noticed, living under Mom’s teat all your life, but none of us liked our jobs.”
“I liked it in the mountains.”
“Me too. Right up until the plague-lobsters rode up in their jets.”
Ness closed his eyes. He hurt too badly to argue. Even if he were fit, whole, he doubted he could express what he felt to Shawn. He could feel the shape of the lie being passed from the people across the river, but Ness didn’t yet know it well enough to describe.
“What do they have you doing over there?” he said.
“Wiring stuff,” Shawn said. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Nope. The less I know, the less I have to understand.”
Ness shook his head into his pillow. “You don’t even sound mad. That would be a first.”
“I heard they warned you.”
“They did.”
“Well, then you got to take responsibility for what happened, don’t you?” Shawn stood, mattress springs creaking. “This won’t last forever. You just need to buckle down and ride it out.”
His boots clomped across the wooden floor. Ness drank the last of his water and napped again, woken a couple hours later by his roommates returning to change out of their work clothes and towel off. No one spoke to or looked at him. Nick showed up after dinner, gazing at the floor.
“You okay?”
“I’ll live,” Ness said. It was a cliché, but the words slapped his awareness like an open hand. He tried to sit up, but a wave of pain arrested him as soon as he tensed his back.
“That’s cool.” Nick picked up a book from Ness’ bedside table and ruffled the pages. “Man, I tried to warn you.”
“It’s not your fault. I didn’t think anything would actually happen.”
“That shit was crazy. That was like something out of the Bible. A lot of the guys are actually mad at Larsen.”
Ness eased onto his stomach. His pillow was stained with sweat and drool. “I’m not.”
“You kidding me?” Nick laughed. “I’d want to stab the guy. With his own bones. That’s what I’d do—cut off Larsen’s arm, carve the bone into a knife, and stab him.”
Ness laughed, pain pulsing through his back. “What do you expect him to do while you’re whittling his ulna? Stand there and wait?”
“I don’t know, man. He looks pretty dumb. If they weren’t stuck to his legs, I think he’d forget which feet were his.”
Nick left. Past the window, people laughed, clanked dishes. Ness was hungry but had no appetite. He napped more, waking to snores and the wash of moonlight through the window. The air conditioner blattered on. Ness rolled slowly from bed and walked stiffly to the bathroom. He could feel himself bleeding beneath his bandages.
After he peed, he stood outside in the dust, shirtless and barefoot. The night was dry and just this side of cool. He could smell the river. Crickets chirped from all sides. His back ached dully. But he was alive. He had been whipped—literally whipped, like a slave or an old English criminal—yet here he was, not twelve hours later, and he could walk. That knowledge seemed to turn a key in him. He had expected to wallow in bed for days, soaking in the soothing bath of his self-pity, but the notion repulsed him. When Larsen came to his room in the morning, hours after the others had left for the fields, Ness looked the man in the eyes.
“Come to finish the job?” Ness said.
“To make sure you’re alive. Never whipped a man before.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“But you’re all right.”
Ness stretched gingerly, stopping as soon as the lash-wounds began to sear. He still felt sick, weak, and woozy, but he knew it would pass. “I question the wisdom of your methods. How long do you think it’ll be before I can swing a hoe again?”
Larsen gazed into his thick hands. “Is there something you’d like to do better?”
“Win the lottery. Exist without hurting.”
“I am asking you if there is another job you’d rather do.”
Ness cocked his head. “You’re serious?”
“I don’t like to mismanage my resources.”
“I don’t know,” Ness said. “I’m not really sure how this place runs yet. I don’t know what I can do that you need.”
Larsen cracked his knuckles. “Think on it. I’ll be across the river.”
“When should I go back to work?”
“When you’re ready.” The laconic man nodded at him and left. Ness eased himself back into bed. Everything hurt. Even walking to the bathroom left him sore and exhausted. Nick brought him meals, water. It was several days before he could walk well enough to fetch his own food. He spent a few days shuffling along the fringes of the fields, doing what he could to regain his strength. Men glanced up from the rows of tall green shoots. Ness wanted to get back beside them, prove he belonged.
He didn’t know what they were doing across the river—besides keeping the power plant operational and overseeing the safety and resources of the community, of course—but the structure on this side was simple enough. Some twenty percent of the citizens managed the workers and the logistics of their labor while the rest cultivated the fields. Sometimes they were allowed to use combines and tractors and trucks, but for the most part labor was done by hand. Ness sent a letter to Larsen asking for a chat. Larsen crossed the river two days later.
“Why don’t we run the tractors all day long?” Ness gestured at the tall green corn. “There must be thousands of gallons of gasoline back in town.”
“Less than you’d think,” Larsen said.
“Even so.”
“One day, the tractors would stop.”
“And one day we’ll all drop dead.”
Larsen eyed him. “Sustainability. Don’t do anything we can’t still be doing in a hundred years. No bad habits. No crutches. That’s how we survive.”
Ness leaned on the stick he’d taken to carrying. “Then why
are we trading with Spokane?”
“To get what we don’t make for ourselves.”
“I thought we want to make everything for ourselves.”
“Once the silos are full.” Larsen pointed his thick finger to the high, steely grain elevators projecting from the eastern fields. “We’re producing more than we consume. That’s good. Once we have enough to outlast disaster, we can start peeling people off to work on other things.”
It made sense. Ness went to the old woman at the warehouse and requisitioned a pen and a notebook. As he rested in his room or in the shade of the trees by the river, he wrote to himself, thinking things through. When it came down to it, the Hanford colony ran a very simple economy. Ness had participated in one of those once. Before finally giving up on it, he’d played the Star Wars Galaxies MMO for far too long, sticking with it more out of a loyalty to its half-assed universe than to the mechanics of the game itself. Its biggest virtue was its economy: while enemy NPCs dropped loot like any other game, a sizable portion of its weapons, armor, spaceships, clothing, and vehicles were craftable by players—in some cases, such as housing, exclusively so. Ness had started life as a smuggler, sticking with it despite the thorough shittiness of the class, but once they introduced spaceships to the game, he became addicted. Soon, he dropped more and more combat skills in favor of the newest crafting class: the shipwright.
At first he sold nothing. Despite two years of play, he only had a couple million credits, and he could barely afford the mines to begin extracting resources needed to craft his parts. Meanwhile, established weapon- and armorsmiths literally hopped ship, investing tens of millions into new factories and resources to immediately crank out the best TIE Fighters and blasters and engines.
Bit by bit, Ness grew his business. Got better resources. Made better parts. Soon, a few people dropped by his shop. He tracked resources obsessively, relocating his few extractors as soon as rich new veins opened. Every credit he made went back into the business. Soon, he was relocating entire fleets of extractors weekly. He hit his limit on the number of buildings he could set down at once and hired more spots from players who didn’t use them. People flocked to his store. He spent less time in his ship PVPing and more time combining parts from his factories. He upped his prices, but still couldn’t keep up with demand. By the time he retired from the game a year later, he was the server’s top shipwright, with nearly a billion liquid credits to his name and untold wealth in his parts, buildings, and resources.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 125