by Jeff Long
“Bait?” she said. “That’s all the children were for you?”
“Wombs, of course, ripe and ready, or nearly so.” He said it frankly. “Or food if they can’t produce. I’ll see what comes of them. Give it a thousand years or so. Their great-great-grandchildren could turn out to be something. Or nothing. I’ve been wrong before. I saw glimmers of greatness in your hadal cousins. I invested in them for eons, so sure they were the ones. But then their fire went out, don’t ask me why. Weak seed. The environment. A glitch in the neuro wiring. Whatever it was, they just didn’t have the right stuff.”
“And we do?”
He looked at her. “Only time will tell.”
“And what happens if we fail you?”
He shrugged. “Then I move on to the next pretty young thing.”
His voice was like an ocean, calm and at the same time full of old and violent storms. He was tapped into their deepest roots. He knew things Ali had always wanted to know. And she knew things he needed to know. That was the problem.
“Where will you go when you’re free?” she said.
“I don’t care,” he said. “All I want is a bit of ground to lie on under the sun. Nothing fancy. Consider. I started with nothing, not even the shirt on my back. Like Adam and Eve, a babe in the woods.”
“You keep talking about your poverty and humble needs,” she said. “And yet, right now I’m looking over your shoulder at a palace built for you by slaves. How do you reconcile one with the other?”
He had promised to give her the tour when she could walk again. He was frank about that, too, his violence upon her. It went beyond a simple rape. He had lost all control. His description, so graphic and sickening that it had actually awed her, made his frenzy sound both savage and holy. That, too, was a test, she had decided. A test and a teaching. He was telling her to learn from her suffering. And to expect more.
“Empires,” he said. “They come, they go. Do you know how many I have fathered and nurtured, only to see them come crashing down? Before Egypt or Babylon, long before, there were my hadal orphans, hunted and haunted and benighted. They came under and I built them into greatness, and then they sank into darkness. And then came America.”
“No,” Ali corrected him. “And then came the world. America was only part of the incursion.” Not invasion, too explicit, too provocative. She kept reaching for the softer words, trying to shield her country from him.
“Yes, the world came crashing in on us,” he said. “But it was America that brought the poison down to exterminate my poor, wild hadals.”
“This is all about revenge then? You took the children just to get even?”
“Hardly my pound of flesh, do you think? Your plague wiped out all their generations, the last of their memory, every last one of the hadal nations.”
“Not quite,” said Ali. “There were still enough left to make your raid.”
Where was he keeping the children? They were hidden in his stories somewhere, that was increasingly clear. And he was lonely, or at least—for the moment—amused by her company.
“I like America,” he said, steering them back to the beginning. “I love your gung-ho, can-do, Wild West spirit. It could yet be my salvation. It needs a little executive intelligence is all, although with some of your executives, a lot of intelligence. But my point is that America’s fling at empire is faltering. You need me as much as I need you. Think of it as a new covenant. A second coming for the once-and-future Pax Americana. And a little patch of sunshine for me. Alexandra, we can do this thing together.”
“What do you expect from us?” Ali had asked it yesterday, and it had frustrated him. She pressed it again. “Drill a hole for the sun to shine down on you? Drain the ocean? Cut you out of the planet? Do you want a Cesarean section, or an engineering marvel, or a miracle? What is it that’s supposed to set you free?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about an invisible bolt cutter for an invisible chain,” she said. “Because as far as I can tell, there’s nothing keeping you down here.”
He calmly shoveled his hand at the sand. But her mockery—and his not knowing—infuriated him. That was the very reason she kept pressing the question. For all his knowledge and recall, this was something he didn’t know. His captivity had to do with ignorance. Ignorance was his captivity.
“You want to breed your way out of here,” she said. “But how many times has that not worked for you?”
“Try, try again,” he said.
“Let the children go.”
He smiled at her foolishness.
Ali cranked herself up onto one elbow. She drew a symbol in the sand with her finger. He saw the aleph. His smile faded.
“Open, sesame,” she said.
His voice darkened. “If you know the answer, speak.”
“Let them go,” she said. “That’s the beginning of the answer.”
“And the rest of it?”
She pointed at the symbol in the sand.
“Free me now,” he said.
“I can’t. I don’t know the answer,” she said. “Yet.”
He did not contemplate her terms or dicker or threaten. He knew his mind. “Done,” he said.
“You’ll let them go?” Ali searched his face for any deception, but it was a blank slate. She could have written any emotion or intent there.
He opened his fingers and the sand poured from his hand. Only later would Ali wonder whether he had scooped up the sand in order to release it, at this very moment, as his answer for a question he had known she would ask in a dialogue he might have orchestrated. He knew his mind. How well did he know hers? She was in a web with a spider.
“Your daughter’s name,” he said.
“What?”
“I need your daughter’s name.”
In the guise of Ike, he had asked for the name before. “Why?”
“The children’s lives depend upon it.”
Did he think it was another of his magic words? How superstitious was this creature? Ali saw no harm in giving him the name. “Maggie.”
He dusted his hands of the sand and stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“To set them free.”
“Take me with you,” she said. “I want to see you let them go.”
“You can walk?”
“Carry me.”
“All right,” he said, “you can watch, but from a distance. If you try to go closer, one step closer, if you say one word, it could mean the children’s doom. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
He lifted her in his arms. His skin was exactly the temperature of the air and sand. If there was any blood in him at all, it was cold as a reptile’s.
They exited the garden with its raked sand. He walked for miles, up and down steep trails and through stone arteries. At the cliff’s edge, he hopped nimbly from ledge to ledge. The land lay ruptured and cracked and partially flooded by plastic rock. Buildings made of massive stone stood empty and fractured by quakes. Whoever had sweated together this sprawling architecture was long gone.
A golden monastery sparkled in the distance. As they drew closer, Ali saw that the monastery was more ruins. Its walls were encrusted, not with gold but crystal pyrite. Her leg brushed against a crystal, and the edges cut her. Beautiful from a distance, the reality was treacherous up close.
He descended into a valley behind the monastery. It looked like a long, winding cemetery, with open holes bored here and there into the hillsides, and piles of rocks sealing others shut. “The children are here?” she asked.
“Patience.”
“But this is a cemetery. Are they dead?”
“Once upon a time,” he said, “monks meditated in these holes. Fat lot of good it did me. I finally closed the place down.”
As they entered the valley of tombs, the stench of diarrhea and rotting meat almost gagged her. Bones and skulls dotted the slopes here and there, some fresh, the skin and hair still on them. Scattered
among them were remains of Homo species that Ali could only guess at. It looked like the den of a lion, an ancient lion. “Dear God,” she said. “What did you do to them?”
He made no excuses. “Quid pro quo,” he said. “They got, they gave. Some were the greatest hunters or warriors of their time. Some were wise men or prophets. All came to confront the darkness, and I was here for them, their holy grail. I gave them purpose. They gave me…an appetite.”
As they sank deeper among the bends, Ali was startled to hear men groaning from inside the tombs. She lifted her head. Some were speaking with American accents, some in hadal tones.
“Newcomers,” he volunteered. “Wounded and dying, human and hadal, they’ve been straggling down to me for weeks. Leftovers from the glorious crusade to save the children.”
“You put them in holes?”
“Rough lodging, I admit. But here they have a place to lay down their heads. And season.”
Ali found a small hope in that. Because if these wounded combatants were still alive, then the children might be also. She listened for slighter voices. “Which one holds the children?”
“I have never seen the children.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if she had simply forgotten.
“You said—”
“I promised to free them, not to show them.” He kept in motion.
“Where are we going then?”
“Have faith,” he told her, “in something.”
He climbed a slope to a stone barricade and laid Ali down where a gap had tumbled open. “Watch from here. This is a safe distance. But you have to stay very still. No matter what you see, not a peep out of you.”
“Watch what?”
“You want me to save the children?” he said. “Then first I must draw the sword.”
What children? What sword? She was sick of his game.
“And remember, not a word or the children are damned.”
ARTIFACTS
From NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE BASIC SNIPER TRAINING
Breathing
The control of breathing is critical to the aiming process. If the sniper breathes while aiming, the rising and falling of his chest will cause the muzzle to move vertically. To breathe properly during aiming, the sniper inhales, then exhales normally and stops at the moment of natural respiratory pause. The pause can be extended to eight to ten seconds, but it should never be extended until it feels uncomfortable. As the body begins to need air, the muscles will start a slight involuntary movement, and the eyes will lose their ability to focus critically. If the sniper has been holding his breath for more than eight to ten seconds, he should resume normal breathing and then start the aiming process over again.
38
The end was near. Rebecca saw it in their impromptu prayer sessions, their letter writing, their graffiti notched into the stone, and their little shrines to themselves. At every station, mementos and snapshots were propped next to their ammunition clips and grenades. They had quit talking about next Christmas or how much beer they’d drink or the pussy they’d score once they got out of this thing.
On day six of the siege, Hunter went down into the hospital that was really a morgue and a jail for Clemens, and he shot the two radar men like dogs. It was the proper thing to do, everyone agreed. Their groans and screams had gotten too awful to bear anymore. The blow darts had been tipped in rabies virus, meaning they had zero chance of recovering.
The citadel reeked of life and death.
Unable to sleep, Rebecca stayed in motion. She made herself their muse. Traveling endlessly she went from station to station, she mothered those who needed it, took confessions, and joshed with the diehards. It helped her make peace with them. This was their Alamo, not hers. They were warriors. This was their logical end point. She, on the other hand, still had a daughter to find.
Hunter told her not to visit Clemens. “Let the Judas rot,” he said. But she couldn’t stay away. He lay on the ground, hog-tied with flex cuffs and duct tape, oblivious to his still neighbors wrapped in ponchos.
“Drink,” she said, holding up his head.
“Free me,” he said. “I can save you.”
“Not without Sam. And the other children.”
“I promise.”
“I have to think,” she said.
They had this same conversation several times over the days and nights. She went so far as to steal a knife to cut his bonds, but couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. It would take all her courage and faith to let him go, because every instinct warned that he might simply bolt and save his own skin. It wasn’t that that stopped her. Rather, she kept Clemens tied because he was her sole link to Sam. He had seen her alive. In that way, he was her muse.
At the end of every conversation, he would ask again if she had eaten any of the hadal meat. She answered the same way each time, “Not yet.” One after another, even the most reluctant of the troops had joined in the feast. They had gone through both the hadal’s thighs and calves, and were nearing the end of the shoulder meat. She held off because of Clemens.
“Stay pure,” he said. “Keep fasting. It’s a time for visions and clarity. Drink lots of water. There are minerals in the water. They’ll help you see in the night.”
And it was true. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. Everyone’s were. The less light they used, the more they saw. A few men clung to their little penlights as if they were the last embers of the last fire. In a sense, these few who could see best were the most blind. Once the lights went out, they would be the first to go.
Hunter caught her sneaking out of the room. “I wouldn’t get too affectionate,” he said. “He’s not one of us anymore.”
Plainly he meant to kill Clemens. No big surprise there. The only mystery for Rebecca was why he’d kept the man alive this long. Then she realized it. In lieu of a meat locker, they were keeping him alive until they needed him.
That night she cut Clemens free. Hunter left her no choice. “Take me with you,” she said.
“You’re too slow,” he said. “I’ll bring her to you.”
“Promise me.”
“Close your eyes and make a wish,” he said.
Rebecca closed her eyes, and opened them, and he was gone.
She expected the wrath of God when Hunter found out his prisoner had escaped. He only sighed. His rugged face looked a hundred years old. “Did you really love him that much?”
“Love?” It shocked her.
The first assault came after midnight. Rebecca was sleeping when the guns started cracking. A claymore gave a loud cough. Flares lit the marsh. She peeked over the sill, sure there would be thousands of them caught in midstride. Scarcely a dozen lay along the bridge or floating on top of the water.
After that they kept at least one flare in the air at all times. Now that their night vision was blown, they had to depend on the light, and eventually that would die. The men wanted to take the fight to the enemy.
“Screw this fort shit. I’ll live in a coffin, but goddamn if I’ll die in one.”
“Turn us loose,” said another.
Rebecca didn’t say a word. They belonged to Hunter, for one thing. For another, they weren’t going anywhere, no matter what. Because this was the Alamo.
The second assault was more like a rock-climbing competition. “Check this,” someone said. Far below on the back cliffs, they spied a pale stripe, like sea scum, lining the walls above the city. It moved higher.
“Cook them,” said Hunter.
They fired a Willie Pete into the depths. It struck like a comet. Pure white light erupted from the maze of spires and spans. Phosphorous shafts strafed out from the center. On contact with the air, each particle burned at five thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
The superheated shrapnel skinned the walls clean. Rebecca saw miniature white apes flailing at shrapnel wounds as they tumbled backward into the smoke. For the next half hour, like kids with firecrackers, Hunter’s men dropped grenades and rocks on whatever survived, tweaking their t
iming so that the shrapnel bursts had maximum impact. “Like fish in a barrel,” they exulted.
Everyone felt better after that. There was lively conjecture that the siege was broken. Haddie had just taken a maximum hit. Any survivors would slink off into their holes. “We’re almost out of here.”
But Hunter kept them inside. “That was too easy,” he said.
“Come on, we’re the twenty-first century. They’re cavemen. It’s over.”
“It’s just beginning,” he said. “The acropolis is our only chance.”
Grumbling, they settled in behind their weapons. The siege went on.
Staying didn’t mean starving, though. Three men were given permission to drag the closest bodies inside. An hour later, the citadel smelled like a barbecue.
By this point, Rebecca was beyond temptation. Her body had adjusted to the slow starvation, and she had entered a state of clarity. Every object stood absolutely distinct. She felt light as a feather.
Each flare stayed aloft for an average of thirty-five minutes. These latest versions were tiny things that relied on nanotech paint. Instead of parachutes, they dangled prettily from balloons. As the balloons drifted above the marsh and the city with their sparkling, bright cargo, Rebecca hoped Sam and the children could see them, too.
Another day passed.
On the ninth morning of the siege, she woke to find half the garrison bleeding from the eyes and nostrils. Men were staggering around in the hallways, blind and feverish, coughing up blood, smearing it everywhere. Those not ill avoided those who were. They barricaded themselves into their nests and chambers.
“Ebola,” said Hunter. “I saw it once in India. But how come they got it and not us?”
Rebecca saw it in a flash. These bloody-eyed zombies had been the first to eat the hadal meat. The hadal must have infected himself and then delivered his flesh to their very doorstep. Now they were dying of their own appetites.