Twilight

by Brendan DuBois

  “What others?” he asked.

  “You know, Jean-Paul, Peter, Sanjay … even Miriam.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause they’re too UN-blue, that’s why,” he said. “And you’re not. You showed me that the other day, when you got my grenade launcher for me. Anybody else there, in the dirt, would have rolled over on his or her back and started lecturing me about what they could or couldn’t do. You didn’t pull that crap on me. You did what had to be done. Which is why I’m going to trust you to do the right thing if something happens tonight.”

  “Jean-Paul won’t like it,” I said. “He’ll have to clear it.”

  Charlie grinned. “Jean-Paul’s gonna love it, ’cause he may be true UN-BLUE but he wants to wake up tomorrow morning with his head on his shoulders. Just you see.”

  “OK,” I said. Charlie got up from the picnic table and ambled down to the squabbling group.

  I took another swallow of water.

  IT WAS TIGHT quarters, what with the vehicles parked in a close triangle. Before Peter started our evening meal Charlie walked around and made sure that whatever dim light was shown didn’t make it out from the cover of the three four-by-fours. There was no fire, just a little flame from the gas stove. Peter, usually a grumbling sort when it came to cooking our dinner, managed to cook some sort of fettuccine dish—that, along with water and hard rolls, was our evening meal—without saying more than a fistful of words. There was no wine, no cognac, no pep talk from Jean-Paul. Miriam sat by herself and Karen sat beside Sanjay, shivering and looking out blankly into the darkness around her, while Peter shoveled his food in so quick it was like he had been starved for days. I don’t even think I tasted anything, anything at all.

  When Peter made a move to start cleaning up the dishes, Charlie stopped him with a shake of his head. “No, not at all,” he said. “We’re in bandit country. No more lights tonight, even if you have to go to the bathroom. If that happens, just walk a few yards out beyond the Land Cruisers and do your business in the dark.”

  Karen cleared her throat. “Do you think they know we’re here?”

  Peter said loudly, “Of course, you stupid cow, of course they know we’re here. We’ve practically set up a searchlight, inviting them to come and pay us a visit. We’ve been driving around in circles, and they left a little calling card for us with that school bus. Or did you think they were offering to take us out on a field trip?”

  I think Sanjay was going to say something but Jean-Paul beat him to it. “That’s enough, Peter. Quite enough. I think we’ve all had a long enough day. Let’s try to get some sleep, eh?”

  Miriam said, “I think that’s a good idea.”

  I just kept my mouth shut.

  THERE WAS A little scene later on when Karen said that she was damned if she was going to sleep in a tent, not with all the bad guys out there: she was going to sleep in one of the Land Cruisers. Jean-Paul gently explained to her that there wasn’t enough room, and she said something like “Fuck it, I’ll make the room.” And in her tone of voice I caught a hint of what it must have been like back in California when the lights and the power went away. So she and Sanjay emptied the rear of one of the Land Cruisers and let down the rear seat, and both of them crawled in there together. Peter muttered something about hoping that the bloody thing wouldn’t be rocking later on, waking us all up. Then he put up a tent for himself and Jean-Paul. I got my sleeping gear and one of my duffel bags together and thought about what Karen had said. I inflated my air mattress and took up residence near one of the Land Cruisers which was riding high because of the way it had been parked.

  Jean-Paul came over to me and said, “It might rain tonight.”

  “It might. But I’ll feel better sleeping outside. Besides, when Charlie comes and gets me I’d rather be out in the open.”

  He nodded. “That’s another thing … thank you for volunteering to assist Charlie.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “If you could volunteer another thing …”

  “Sure.”

  “In your official recording of what is going on, it will be appreciated if you don’t let on that you helped Charlie with our defense. It would make trouble for us in Geneva, when we’re done here.”

  I was going to say something about how we might well and truly be done here if a couple of dozen militiamen who hadn’t been disarmed rolled over us during the night. But I kept my mouth shut.

  “We’re in enough of a jam as it is,” I said. “I’ll do my best to minimize any additional trouble.”

  I ASKED CHARLIE to check on something for me, which he did quickly, so I was able to sit up against one of the Land Cruiser’s tires and do a little work on my laptop to ease up my nerves some. Charlie had made sure that I wasn’t letting any light escape but even so Miriam found me. She was carrying her own sleeping bag and mattress pad.

  “You have another reason for being outside, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Which is why I’m here,” she said. “I’d like to know what it is.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I closed the lid of my laptop and Miriam sat down next to me. A breeze was coming up and she said, “You’re not really dressed for sleep, are you?”

  “I take it you’re pointing out that I’m still wearing my flak vest, and that my helmet is right next to me,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Despite the windbreak protection of the parked vehicles, my fingers had already started to chill from the slight breeze. “First of all, I’m doing something tonight that is against my contract with the UN.”

  “Helping out Charlie—I know that,” Miriam said quietly. “But still …”

  “What I’m going to say will sound cowardly,” I said.

  “I doubt that, but go on.”

  I tried to think of what was out there, down the sides of the hills, in the trees and the burned homes and the empty streets of the village we had just driven through. “It’s like this. Karen was just a little bit right when she refused to get inside a tent. I don’t like the idea of people coming up here when I’m in a sleeping bag, zipped up, and inside a tent that’s also still zipped up. I might as well be hanging off a tree branch, strung up by my ankles, waiting for them to do what they want.”

  Miriam said, “Then why are Peter and Jean-Paul in tents, do you think? Are they being stupid?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is what I feel like tonight, which is being outside.”

  “What about Karen and Sanjay?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, they’re still zipped up, if you know what I mean,” I said. “They’re stuck inside a vehicle. They may think they’re protected, but rifle rounds or mortar shrapnel can punch through that kind of metal easily enough.”

  “So you’re outside,” Miriam said.

  “So I am,” I said. “And that’s where the cowardly part comes in. If something happens and there’s bullets and shrapnel flying, then I don’t want to be restricted. I want freedom of movement.”

  “Why is that cowardly?”

  “Obvious, isn’t it? Instead of worrying about my teammates, I’m worried about myself. I should have talked to Jean-Paul, told him what I thought. Instead, here I am.”

  “Correction,” Miriam said, unrolling her mattress and bedding. “Here we are. You do not mind if I spend the night here next to you?”

  “If I did, I’d be an idiot.”

  Miriam laughed, but though it was nice to have her next to me I remembered the last time we’d slept close to each other and how her snoring had kept me awake all night long. I hoped she wasn’t going to repeat her nocturnal noises because I needed some sleep.

  But Miriam wasn’t in the mood for sleeping, not yet. She maneuvered herself up closer to me and said, “I’ve always liked Canadians.”

  “Always?” I asked. “Why’s that?”
>
  I put my laptop down on the ground, moved so that I was closer to her. There were murmuring sounds coming from the tent and the rear of the Toyota Land Cruiser. Charlie was nowhere in sight, but I didn’t care where he was. All I cared about was that he was doing his job.

  Miriam said, “You Canadians played a crucial part in the liberation of my country, that’s why. Oh, there were plenty of other Allied troops who fought the Germans in Holland, but a hell of a lot of the fighting was done by Canadians. Didn’t you say your grandfather was in the army during the Second World War?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He was at the Dieppe landing, in 1942, in France. A total disaster. He was wounded in the leg, mustered out. So I’m sorry to say he wasn’t there to liberate your homeland.”

  “And your father? He was in your army, was he not?”

  “Yep.”

  She said, “You don’t speak much of him, Samuel. I guess you don’t like him.”

  “You guessed right.”

  “Why?”

  Good question. I really didn’t have too many hours to explain to Miriam all the miserable ins and outs of my relationship with my father so I said, “Another reason I’m out here is because of him.”

  “How is that?”

  “I’m afraid of the dark. Have been since I was quite young. Maybe eight or nine.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  “Oh, yes—bad dreams. Night after night. Waking up screaming. Not sure why I got them. Just happened. But my father … he thought he could cure me. So one night he forced me outside in the rear yard, with a pillow and a couple of blankets, and locked the door. Said that once I saw there was nothing out there that could hurt me, then I’d be fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Sat frozen, near a cellar doorway, and practically screamed every time a branch broke or a bird called. Didn’t sleep a bit all through that long night. Next night I was back in the house, but I still had nightmares. But I learned to stay quiet. And that’s that. And years later I’m still afraid of the dark—and I don’t like my father very much.”

  “I can see why. He doesn’t sound very likable.”

  I tried to lighten the mood. “Which, of course, is our proudest Canadian trait. Likability.”

  Miriam laughed and moved even closer to me. “See, I knew there was a reason I still have affection for you Canadians.”

  I turned to her, seeing her very well, even in the darkness. “And I’ve always had affection for the Dutch.”

  “Really? For how long?”

  “For a month or so, that’s how long,” I said.

  She laughed again and I leaned forward and we kissed, and that was that. No fireworks, no tingling expressions, no grappling on the ground. Just a soft, almost chaste kiss. I could sense her smile and she said, “Sleep well, Samuel.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  BUT I COULDN’T, not yet, so I went back to my laptop as Miriam rolled over. I checked the battery power and found that I had at least four hours left before a recharge would be needed and I was almost finished for the night. I checked the news headlines and felt depressed at what was going on in the rest of the world. As I flipped through the different screens on my browser, the screen would sometimes go black for an instant and then recover. I thought that maybe something was wrong with the machine but a quick diagnostics test showed that everything was fine. Which in turn made me wonder if the militias were out there again, jamming incoming signals from the satellite traffic that the UN had leased for this particular mission. I remembered reading somewhere that this type of jamming was impossible, but some of the militia units were smart, had lots of money, and probably derived a great deal of pleasure from making our mission difficult, so I guessed it was possible after all.

  I checked my personal e-mail account—empty, save for a travel agency that wanted to send me on a trip to Bermuda—and then my UN account. There, lined up in little blue icons, were the e-mail receipts from Geneva, stating that all the files I had sent earlier from the farmhouse had been retrieved and documented. Good. At least something was working right.

  Still … I went back and checked the timestamps for my outgoing messages and then the receipts. Less than ten minutes’ gap between the two. Yet there were no receipts from the messages that Jean-Paul had sent for me, the ones containing the photographs of those suspected paramilitaries who had come up the dirt driveway, until they’d spotted Charlie.

  Not a one, though plenty of time had passed.

  Odd.

  Of course, maybe all the receipts had gone straight to Jean-Paul on his own account, since he had sent them on to Geneva on his own laptop. That must have been what had happened. I had made sure that I had cc’d the receipt tool, to make sure I got copies of any receipts sent back, but maybe Jean-Paul had an encryption system on his machine that had stripped my receipt request away even before the files arrived in Geneva.

  I powered down the machine and closed the lid. Whatever. Too little battery time and sleep time to worry about it any more.

  I crawled deeper into my sleeping bag, hearing the soft wheezing from Miriam next to me. I tried to get comfortable, found it hard to do, out on this hilltop. Miriam was slumbering and I thought about Charlie, out there on watch, and that managed to calm me down enough so that eventually I did fall asleep. But not before I gently touched my tongue to my lips and imagined I could taste Miriam there.

  THE SOUND OF footsteps woke me and I rolled over and sat up as Charlie leaned down next to me. “You awake, Samuel?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good,” he said, a large bulk in the darkness. “Come along with me—watch your step.”

  I threw the sleeping bag open, sat up, and immediately started shivering. I put my boots on, wincing as the cold material snapped against my feet. Charlie stood there by the Land Cruiser, patient and waiting. I got up, remembering to grab my helmet, and staggered some. I yawned. It felt like I’d had a glorious ten or fifteen minutes of sleep.

  “Let’s go, OK?”

  Charlie moved out of the triangle of parked vehicles and I followed him as closely as possible as we went up the hill some, to an outcropping of rock that sat on a little knoll. There was a picnic table there and we both sat down on top of it.

  I rubbed at my face and listened to Charlie. “OK, you’ve got a good three-sixty up here. I’ll be down there in that little group of trees. Anything goes on, anybody comes up this way, you just quietly come down and get me. All right? And don’t come up close and shake me awake. You might get hurt. Just come down and gently tap me on the foot.”

  “OK,” I said, still shivering.

  “Here,” he said, handing something over. “Night-vision scope. It’s got a nice long battery life, so I’ve left it on for you. Doesn’t make sense for you to try to learn it all in one night. Hold it up to your eyes, give it a shot.”

  The scopes were lightweight, with a foam eyepiece. I blinked and looked across the landscape, now illuminated in a ghostly shade of green. I could make out the hill and the rocks and the saplings, the distant road we’d driven up and even the small buildings of the nearby village.

  “Pretty slick,” I said.

  “That it is,” Charlie said. “But don’t spend the whole night with the scope up against your eyes. It’s good but it has lousy peripheral vision. You could be staring down at the road, watching something move, while a dozen guys sneak up behind you and take you down. So just pop it up every now and then, keep a view on.”

  I let the night-vision scope drop away from my face. “Ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “These guys who might come up and take me down … just who the hell are they?”

  Charlie grunted. “You serious? Thought you had all those briefings and shit.”

  “Of course, but I want to hear it from you. Who are those guys?”

  Charlie seemed to hesitate, as though he really wanted to get to sleep instead of yapping to his young charge, and he said, “The
y’re just guys, really. I mean … well, look. Towns and cities, they have peace ’cause the cops are around. Right? But lots of cops … they’re in the Guard or Reserve, and they’ve been called up for Iraq and other places. So the cops are stretched tight, and if there’s widespread problems they can’t do their jobs. So, thing is, if the cops get into too much trouble, then the governors, they can call up the National Guard to keep order. But suppose your National Guard unit, instead of being home, is out in Kirkuk or Tehran? What do you do then when the troubles start?”

  “I don’t know. Keep your head down?”

  “Maybe, but this little country of ours … guys with guns know other guys with guns. And if there’s trouble, they’re gonna fight. Maybe they’ll do it singly, maybe in a little group, maybe in a county organization they call a militia. And if they think all the local troubles are due to a bunch of refugees rolling in from the big bad cities, then they’re gonna kill ’em.”

  “Sounds cold.”

  “It is cold, and the problem is that these militia types have always been underestimated. Always. Lots of people forgot, bunch of years ago, it was just a couple of militiamen who took down a government building in Oklahoma City and killed nearly two hundred. Some forgot. Others didn’t.”

  I put the night-vision scope back up to my eyes. Nothing. I brought it down and said, “If you don’t mind … Charlie, where were you during the attacks last spring?”

  “Me?” he said quietly. “At home in South Carolina. Camp Lejeune. Doing some work—checking pallets of ammunition, make sure they were stacked right. Funny, huh? Something as boring and as simple as that. Then we got word of the Manhattan strike … and, hate to tell you, that wasn’t much of a surprise. Poor old New York City has always been target number one. And then the balloon strikes … Jesus, what a mess. Lucky we had pretty secure communications and backup power supplies. Didn’t affect us too much, in the beginning.”

  “Bet the balloon strikes were a surprise, then.”