The Crisis

by David Poyer

  He valved another hit of bad coffee, and headed back to his terminal. Eighteen messages glowed on his screen, and Henrickson and two other staffers waited, looking impatient.

  FORTY miles west of Ashaara City, in the dead dark of night, Dr. Gráinne O’Shea lay facedown in a ditch, digging her fingernails into dry earth as above her diesels roared and steel treads earthquaked down clods and dust as if to bury her alive. She’d forgotten her bloody toes inside her boots, her thirst, the fear that had hiked beside her since the afternoon before. Her mind felt like a bucket of dirty water.

  The longest day and night of her life had begun the morning before, at the compound, when she’d answered her cell’s chime to find her administrator from the Hydrological Programme on the line. “Tell me you’re not still at Fenteni” were his first words.

  “Ah—I am. Why?”

  “Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

  “Down since yesterday, Derek.”

  “You’ve not seen the news? Right . . . there’s been a coup.”

  “Oh God.”

  “At least that’s what it sounds like. You haven’t heard?”

  She bent to look out the dusty window at the ravine, where nothing had changed for several million years. “Hinterlands here, Derek. If we don’t hear it from the villagers, we don’t hear. But a coup—”

  “New York pulled its people out three days ago. We thought you’d gone with them.”

  “Never got that. Sorry.” She bent again, catching a figure outside, looking toward the road. Her assistant had acted strangely since Major Assad’s visit. Outside for long periods, or when he was in, keeping a lookout at the window. Once he’d asked where she kept her passport.

  So when she said thanks for the warning, she’d act on it right away, and went outside, she didn’t like his evasive glance. “Abdiwali, I just had a disturbing call. The president’s fled. There’s rioting. You knew?”

  A tight smile, averted eyes. “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Were you going to tell me? Or just let me find out on my own?”

  “You always know what to do, Dr. O’Shea.”

  Sodding hell, it was like talking to some sly boyfriend. She pushed damp hair off her face—even newly risen, the sun was a torch—and tried for calm. An Irish temper didn’t help with Ashaarans. “Stockholm says we should leave. The other agencies have already pulled out. Should we call the police compound? For an escort?”

  “They have already gone.”

  “The police?”

  He only looked toward the horizon. She huffed. “All right, we’re leaving. The truck’s fueled?”

  “We have three-quarters of a tank.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “To go where?”

  “Well . . . the evac plan’s always been the International Airport. If it’s closed or occupied, then south toward Malakat. The Quarleses; we can stay with Howard and Michele.”

  “Will they still be there?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to ring but no one answers. If they’re gone we can carry on south to Eritrea.”

  Her assistant grimaced. “Then you shall go. But what will happen to me?”

  “What d’you mean? If I pull out, you go too.”

  He looked more hopeful, and followed her inside to pack.

  Every INGO in Africa planned against this very situation. She stuffed the latest tomograms into a briefcase, jimmied the hard drive out of her machine, and found the padlock for the trailer door. She looked at the water-versus-population graph on the wall. Take it? She decided to leave it.

  They loaded the seismograph and her luggage, then hitched up the trailer with the sound source and geophones. With one Blunnie planted in the Rover, she stopped to gaze at the compound. Her office was locked, but she doubted it’d be intact when she returned.

  If she ever did. Everyone knew researchers who’d been exiled from the lands they studied, some for decades, others forever. For a moment the dusty bare earth, the muddle of sheds and prefabs against the backdrop of mountains, seemed unimaginably dear. Then, squalid as a vacant lot in Derry. She got in and twisted the key.

  . . .

  THE hitch groaned as the trailer twisted on the uneven roads. They’d never been good, but over the past few years they’d really degenerated. Since the famine began, the government had become invisible, except for the police. Now they’d vanished too. She and Abdiwali rocked and grated over gravel and sand and broken stone, seldom at over twenty kilometers per hour; breaking an axle in Africa could be a death sentence. Here and there the tracks of previous vehicles left the road entirely to travel on flat desert. She always followed. The rebels were known to mine the roads. Staying on them when others didn’t wasn’t a smart move.

  A dry dusty breeze made it hard to see, made progress even slower. They reached the first village around noon. At first she thought it deserted. Then people crept out of the shadows.

  She caught her breath. Dusty skeletons, feebly lifting begging hands as the Rover ground past. She’d decided to take the back roads south of the river, rather than crossing to the highway. The river was dry now, of course, but she’d reasoned that if there was rioting when they reached the city, they might not be able to get through. The southern route would let her bypass it if she had to. The terrain was rougher, but it was the best chance of making it to the home of the Quarleses, who ran a school for AIDS-orphaned girls. But now she realized she’d immured herself too long. It’d been a fortnight since she’d left the compound, months since she’d come this way.

  So when she saw the roadblock ahead she did the worst possible thing: simply drove up, halted, and lowered the window, smiling at ragged men who stared at her with disbelief, then at each other with glee.

  It cost her two hundred pounds, all the cash she carried. They’d eyed Abdiwali as he sat rigid, but hadn’t spoken to him, only her.

  As soon as she was past the village she pulled off, bumped over a shallow ditch into a cracked-open field, and snapped, “Dump the bloody Bison. Pull the pin and leave it. I could have turned off and bypassed that village if I hadn’t been pulling the fucking thing.”

  They could replace computers and trailers, but without the sound source—the only one in Ashaara—her days as a hydrologist were over. She watched it shrink in the rearview with a sharper pang than she’d felt leaving the compound.

  Lightened, the Rover rattled more but went faster. This part of the country looked featureless to an eye new to it, but gradually revealed folds and slants. What she didn’t like was the bodies. Some lay along the road, beside burned-out cars; others were just bright cloth in the dead fields. Abdiwali sat as if mummified in the passenger seat, staring through the sand-dulled windscreen, gripping a worn gray bag he carried his kit in.

  They killed him that afternoon. There wasn’t any way around the second roadblock, in a broken region furrowed by pebble-strewn gullies that had been a side channel of the Durmani back in the middle Holocene. The gullies made the road, never paved or even graded since colonial times, twist and writhe so that spare parts and jerricans in back slid and banged from one side to the other. This time when she stopped two men stood by her door pointing guns while six others went to the passenger side. Abdiwali threw her one terrified glance before they pulled him out. They questioned him briefly—two, three sentences—then the machetes rose and fell.

  “Why thee travel with that northerner?” a gaunt man said in broken French, leaning into her side and looking around.

  Her tongue and jaw felt as if injected with novocaine. “He was my assistant.”

  “And what are thee?”

  “A water expert. With the UN.”

  This brought bitter laughter and jokes in a dialect she couldn’t follow. “Thee came to the wrong place for water,” the gaunt one said, leaning in again so his smell, like that of some carrion-eating bird, pushed into the vehicle. “But the right one for men.”

  As they laughed again her toe felt for the accelerator, ready to stamp it
and hurl through the overturned carts and iron bedsteads; but they stepped back and waved her on lazily, as if whatever energy they owned had been expended on the killing.

  At the next roadblock they took her car. She raged at them but they simply pulled her out and got in. She stood shaking, cupping her elbows in her palms. The sun stacked white cubes of radiant heat between her and them. They drove off, abandoning the roadblock as if it had served its purpose.

  Leaving her standing in vibrating heat, in the middle of a planate wasteland strewn with baking rocks, baking rocks, and yet more baking rocks. And here and there, down any fissure or furrow, a few dusty thorn plants so sere and juiceless the starving goats of desperate nomads had turned their beards aside. She felt like a robot, though what robot would shake with terror? And turned and stumbled away, knowing instinctively now she had to leave the road. Without a car, that colored shell of steel, technology, and culture, she was nothing more than a pale grub of tasty prey.

  She picked up a sharp stone and stuffed it into her jeans pocket.

  She left not only the road but the Durmani Valley, stumbling cross-country as the sun blazed. She’d lost her bush hat with the car but had a kerchief as a sweat rag. She tied it over the back of her neck, rolled her shirtsleeves down, oriented by the sun, and marched.

  Having no water felt like trudging naked across the desert. She was instantly thirsty, and after two hours began having walking dreams. At first of Ireland, a tumbling stream she’d played in as a child. Then the fountains in Cork, then a glassy lake where birds like none on earth stared at her, repeating nonsense phrases in the Gaelic she’d learned in grade school, with maddening repetition she knew even as she dreamed was tinged with delirium.

  Sweat flaked from her skin, drying the moment it left her pores. She stumbled on scree, breaking the fall with palms that burned on the sun-heated ground. Got up, went on.

  Then fell again, so heavily she lay full length, panting and moaning as the stones burned her face. She might not make it out. Too used to reaching for water whenever she wanted it. She was on her own now, in a land that tormented, then consumed whatever alien creature ventured out on it. She sat up and searched her pockets. Pens, coins, keys. She slipped a key off and put it in her mouth.

  She lay down again, knees huddled to her chest, eyelids drooping like a lizard’s. Conserving whatever moisture she had left.

  With agonizing slowness the blazing sphere that tormented all life below it declined. It touched the mountains and ignited them like phosphorus. Then slipped into the evening’s pocket, and the stars swung up out of the east. When the mountains glowed with backlight, far and intangible as a dream, she woke. “You must keep moving,” she muttered. She forced herself erect and staggered on.

  The desert was empty but not lifeless. With the cooling of dusk, creatures emerged from where they sheltered from the merciless radiation. Small leathery things scurried away from her bootscuffs. Geckos. A large spider, rearing crablike as she towered above it. She blinked at it as the light faded. A flash of yellow drew her eye. A thin plastic bag, the omnipresent detritus of Man. She plucked it up and stuffed it into a pocket.

  A faint flapping lured her off her easterly course. A nomad tent of blackened skins, fly fluttering in the evening wind. She approached trembling and called out, clutching the rock-weapon in her pocket. No answer. She called again a stone’s throw away. When she thrust the flap aside she saw the desiccated bodies.

  Of course there was no water, though she tore the tatty rugs and stinking cloths aside, scrabbling down to the bare ground.

  She walked and walked, feeling as if chicken wire were pressed against her toes and heels. Then they went numb as the skin wore away. She stood on a rise and from somewhere reason resurfaced. She looked left, then right, like a Muslim at prayer. Tens of thousands of years back this dry bed must’ve been yet another eastward-flowing stream. Stumbling on, she sensed a depression. Her boots clattered over rounded rocks.

  A gully drew her eye, blacker than the surrounding dim. The blacknesses were low brush. Thornbushes, young tamarinds. Her feet drifted to where they clustered.

  She fell to her knees and dug and dug as the light faded, breaking nails, scraping off skin, panting between clenched teeth. About a foot down she fell to her face and put her lips to the ground.

  Dusty, powdery, millions-of-years-old dry. She gagged, then sobbed, losing it for a duration filled with agony and terror.

  Then she got up again, and went on.

  SOMETIME past midnight, lurching toward one particular bright star two hand-breadths above the horizon, she heard a waterfall. It faded as she staggered on, then returned. She was away with the fairies, surely, but where there was a waterfall there must be water, so she tottered on.

  She went over a lip in the darkness and crashed into rocks and what felt like broken glass at the bottom. She lay dazed, drifting, as images wandered before her open eyes.

  The sound came again, closer. Accompanied by a vanishingly brief flash.

  Not a waterfall. Something more ominous.

  Suddenly it was on her. She pressed herself like a filling into the cavity of the gully, clawing dry earth as the roar of diesels and the ground-shaking grating of steel treads broke loose dry clods and tried to bury her. She forgot thirst, the pain in her feet, even her terror, as the roaring thing reared, then clattered directly overhead while she crouched like a hunted fawn. The hot breath of a dragon blew down on her. Then it was past, gone. After hugging the ground against its return she wiped dirt from her face and raised her eyes over the edge of the depression.

  Outlined by flames from their backs, the black monsters were rolling into a rough line. She stared unblinking as an insect must, neither comprehending nor trying to, only registering sensation.

  The monsters were aligning themselves, three, four, six, when a lance of white fire burst from her right. It beamed with perfect impossible straightness across the black ground, sucking up dust and sand. The sound was like the tearing of the bedsheets of the gods. The flame impacted one of the monsters with a clang that shivered the night. By far the loudest sound she’d ever heard, and she clapped palms over agonized ears as more fireballs whipped across the desert, each lighting it like a fiery chunk of the sun launched in a perfect horizontal at supersonic speed. With each fireball a tremendous crack tolled over sand and rock, followed by a clang like a cathedral bell dropped from its tower onto granite pavement. Each clang made her teeth vibrate and sent a strange tingle through her legs. Which were, she barely noticed, suddenly and warmly wet.

  A movement behind her, accompanied by a staccato clatter and whining growl even more threatening than that of the first monsters.

  Surrounded by fire and machines, she dropped to her face like a desert eremite in the awesome presence of God. Her body felt enormous and not really hers, but she tried to hide it anyway, feeling distantly responsible, writhing wormlike into the soil. The clanging and brightness went on, perhaps for only seconds yet endless. Then at last, drew away.

  When she lifted her head again intense fires blowtorched a mile away, white-hot, speckled by explosive pops and bangs.

  She crouched, shaking, peering into the night. Then picked out her star once more, scrambled up from the ditch, and set out again.

  SHE lay unseeing, face to the sky, until a vaporous iridescence gradually dawned. Then rose, knowing only she must move on or die. Staggering over stones amid which gleamed hundreds of small, bright metal cylinders, slightly sooted at their open mouths.

  A mile on she stumbled over two men lying full length atop a rise. They were camouflaged so perfectly she hadn’t seen them a pace away. They stared up, startled. One reached for a weapon, then stayed his hand. “Who’s this?” he murmured.

  The other, face scarred with radiating lines, said, “Hell, Sumo. Just one of them desert mirages. But I bet she’d say yes if you offered her a drink of water.”

  THE ramps of the landing craft of the second prong of the o
ffensive had been supposed to drop on Red Beach, two miles east of the marine terminal, precisely one minute after sunrise, when the rising sun, glaring over the heads of the men crouched in the wells, would dazzle any defenders. But they didn’t fall until fifteen minutes later, due to coral heads in the shallow water. An LCM hit one so hard it bent a shaft. The wave leader ordered them to slow, and to post bow lookouts to steer between them on the way in.

  This landing had the look of old newsreels: sluglike amtracs waddling out of the surf, then tipping upward to roll over the dunes; the slanted bows of landing craft, creaming wakes as they circled offshore. One by one they beached as helicopters passed overhead. Loudspeakers explained in recorded Asahaaran (unfortunately, the dialect of the former ruling clan) that the troops were there to help and feed the population.

  In the midst of the noise LCM-25’s ramp slammed down. The leader of the first fire team off—“Team,” in Marine parlance—was a twenty-three-year-old lance corporal from Michigan.

  Crunching on a homebrew mix of MRE powdered coffee, Copenhagen, and ephedrine-laced energy supplement, Caxi Spayer jumped down, relieved to find the water only a couple feet deep. “Follow me,” he bellowed at the three others in his fire team, and waddled for the shore, the men so burdened with ruck and rations, armor vest, ceramic plate overvest, grenades, radio, rifle, and ammunition that they looked inhuman, inflated bulks capped by Kevlar.

  Facing him was a white beach backed with villas. The tumbled granite of a breakwater. The square tower and the minaret, lined up, meant they were in position. In the distance, the blue cranes of the container port, their objective for the day.

  Turning to check Ready, Fire, and Assist were still with him, he led them toward a two-story red house that dominated the beach. A helicopter scissored overhead, its gunner scanning the beach. He and Spayer exchanged thumbs-ups. The fire team on Spayer’s flank was making for the same house, but he was ahead. He picked up the pace until his boots sank deep into soft sand above the high-tide mark. He lost his balance, toppled and fell. Trying to keep his rifle clear, he turned his head to spit sand and the gritty residue of powdered coffee.