Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  But I’ll be glad to get back to it; and Eilir; and the others… even Cuchulain.

  A little of that eagerness was sheer hunger. There hadn’t been much to spare for them to take along on this trip; the Eternal Soup was a fond memory.

  Judy nodded. “Just being away from a big city is the biggest survival factor,” she said. “But a close second would be sense enough to realize that the Change was here to stay, and not sit around waiting for rescue or go wandering aimlessly. Chuck and I managed to talk our people into getting right out. You made for the hills right away too.”

  Some truth in that, Juniper thought, bending to massage a kink out of one calf. Judy had a core of hard common sense, probably from her years as a nurse.

  On the other hand, how could anyone know that the Change was here to stay, or that it was everywhere?

  For that matter, she still didn’t know that the Change was worldwide. She was morally certain, but that wasn’t proof. If you were a garden-variety common-sense sort of person, staying put probably looked better… until it was too late.

  “Plus we’re just too close to Salem,” she said, looking back a little east of south. “The requisitioning parties probably got everything around here.”

  They could still see the black columns of smoke around the city as a smudge on the horizon; luckily the wind was from the west, and bent them towards the distant line of the Cascades-she could still see the peaks of the Three Sisters from here.

  “Are you sure?” she asked Judy.

  The other woman nodded. “I’d never seen it before, but the black patches of skin and the swellings in the armpits and groin are unmistakable.”

  A long breath. “It’s been three days now. We’d be showing symptoms, if we’d caught it, but my skin still crawls.”

  And mine, at the memory, Juniper thought. Those pits, where the bodies still smouldered…

  The truck stop a little way up the road had a gas station with attached convenience store, and a long low-slung board building advertising the fact that Bill’s BBQ had the best dry ribs in the Willamette; a graveled country lane crossed the blacktop there, and the parking lot was dirt. They swerved in, coming to rest in a rough line and looking the windows over.

  Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper-newspaper left stains, they’d-discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days. Sometimes there was even instant coffee or diet sweetener, occasionally salt. Nothing with any calories, but it made bland boring food taste better, and they were all worth the effort of lugging along. Sometimes they spotted something useful enough and bulky enough that it was worth marking down for a foraging party to come fetch with a wagon and escort, although they were getting too far from home for that.

  “Wait a second,” Juniper said, as she heeled down the kickstand of her bicycle. “I smell something cooking!”

  It’s meat, too. Her mouth watered and her swallow was painful. Meat and a trace of woodsmoke, or charcoal. Could someone have found a last strayed cow in this wilderness of death? Could they be talked or traded out of some?

  Something moved behind a Subaru a few yards away. Juniper tensed slightly, then relaxed as she saw it was a girl in a stained white dress; about twelve, she thought, with stringy brown hair.

  The girl waved and walked over towards them, smiling; a couple of her teeth were missing. As she got closer, Juniper wrinkled her nose.

  I’m not a blooming rose myself, but that’s awful, she thought.

  The girl looked bad, too. Not emaciated like so many they’d seen; if anything, a little overweight, which was something she hadn’t seen much lately. But her hair was thin on top, showing patches of scalp, and there were odd-looking lumps on her arms; she walked like someone much younger, holding her hands behind her back and half skipping. There was a small sore beside her left eye, trailing yellow matter.

  “You’re sick!” Juniper said, and looked over at her friend.

  “Not the plague,” Judy muttered. “Where have I seen-must have been a textbook-”

  “It’s all right!” Juniper called. “We don’t want any of your food. Maybe we can help, if you’re ill.”

  The girl giggled, coming closer. “It’s all right,” she said back, her tone singsong. “We’ve got plenty to eat. You can come for dinner!”

  We? Juniper thought.

  Perhaps that was what made Juniper start to jerk backward as the hand came out from behind the girl’s back with a glint of steel. The long kitchen knife missed her throat; it would still have killed her as it stabbed into her chest, but the plates of her jack turned it, breaking the point.

  “Oooof!” Juniper said, struggling for wind.

  The girl screeched, puffing the smell of rotten meat in Juniper’s face, stabbing again and again with the sharp broken stump of the knife. She’d probably never met body armor before. Long detested hours of instruction from Chuck and Aylward took over; made Juniper duck a shoulder forward to bodycheck and knock the enemy back on her heels, reach down and grab the hilt with the right hand, rip it out and swing with the same motion.

  The point scored across the girl’s body, and the cloth parted-skin beneath, too, blood leaking as she turned and fled clutching at herself and screaming in shrill squeals.

  Juniper fought shock. I just cut at a child! she thought.

  More figures popped up from among the cars and trucks and poured out of the buildings. One burst right out of the rear doors of a van not fifteen feet away, roaring and holding an ax above his head in both hands. He was naked to the waist, his torso covered in boils. Vince drew to the ear and waited until the axman was five feet away before shooting; the arrow struck full in the throat, splitting the neckbone with an audible crack. The shouting cut off with knife finality, and the man toppled backward like a cut-through tree.

  A woman with a butcher’s cleaver ran at Matucheck. “Night of the fucking living dead!” he screamed, eyes wild.

  He punched the blow aside with his buckler in an iron clang of metal on metal and stabbed, as much in revulsion as anger. The point slid home.

  Judy was grappling with a teenage boy who tried to gnaw at her face as they danced in clumsy circles. Juniper bared her own teeth and struck with her buckler, using it like a two-pound set of brass knuckles. The crumbling feeling as the steel disk struck just below the base of his skull made the hair bristle up along her spine even then.

  “It’s a nest of Eaters!” Juniper shouted.

  Most people would rather die than turn cannibal, but when you were talking about millions, a small minority was far too large. And they were starting to get hungry, as their food became scarce in turn.

  “Get back in here!” she called. “Stand them off!”

  Three cars made a loose triangle; too loose, but the Eaters were all around them. The Mackenzies retreated, Vince shooting as fast as he could knock and draw, then turned at bay. But the gaps between the cars were too big, and the Eaters swarmed over the hoods and trunks as well. For a minute the four of them pushed and shoved, hit and stabbed and chopped; their jacks were a huge advantage, and health and sanity and real weapons they had some idea of how to use.

  But there were too many; it was like trying to fight in a nightmare where nothing worked and more and more came at you. Juniper knew with some dim distant part of her mind that the horror would come back to her if she lived, but most of her was a reflex that shouted and swung and struck.

  Then something hit her across the shoulders, sending her reeling forward into the press. Two Eaters grabbed at her buckler and dragged it down. Another hugged her sword arm, and a third raised a baseball bat in both hands—

  Thock!

  A broad arrowhead stuck out from the Eater’s chest, barely to the left of the breastbone. Blood gouted from his mouth, and he had just enough time to took surprised before he collapsed, kicking.

  Behind him was a mounted giant with the head of a bear
.

  Juniper had only the blurred glimpse; then she was too busy getting her right arm free from the momentarily slackened grip. She hadn’t lost her sword-the sword Dennie’s gentle brother had made for show and play and the beauty of it, before the Change.

  It was still the weapon of Rome’s legions, the most dreadfully efficient tool of slaughter humankind had invented until Hiram Maxim’s time. A short punching stab in the throat sent the Eater backward gobbling and clutching his throat.

  “Let me go!” she shouted, chopping at the other two as if she were jointing a chicken. “Let me go!”

  They did, running in squalling panic, grabbing at terrible slash-wounds, and then there were no more of their kind left within the space marked out with the three cars; none living, at least. Juniper gasped and leaned her fists on her knees as she tried to suck air in through a mouth gone paper-dry.

  All the rest of her people seemed to be on their feet too, with nothing worse than cuts and scrapes and bruises; she squeezed out a brief, heartfelt wordless thanks. Outside the Eaters were running about the graveled parking lot, squealing and screaming. Three mounted men loped their horses after them, shooting methodically at close range with short powerful recurve bows, turning their mounts as nimbly as rodeo cowboys.

  It’s a headdress on top of a helmet, not a bear’s head, Juniper thought. Gave me a start there!

  Animal-headed god-men were very much a part of her faith, but she hadn’t expected to run into one in the light of common day. It was almost as frightening as the prospect he’d rescued her from, of grisly death and dreadful feasting.

  After a moment the cannibals gathered, clustering around a leader-one with a louder voice, at least. The three armored men dismounted, tied their horses to the chain-link fence, drew long swords. The round shields on their left arms bore a uniform mark, the stylized outline of a snarling bear’s head, red on dark brown.

  The noon sun blazed on the edged metal of their swords, and the man with the bear helmet shouted: “You in there! The party’s not over and the mosh pit is sort of crowded. Pitch in if you can!”

  The shout carried easily across the twenty yards, through the brabble of the Eaters’ lunatic malice; a voice trained to carry, but not a musician’s like hers-more of a crashing bark. Juniper looked with disgust at the blood on her blade and arm and side.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Come on, Mackenzies!”

  The three strangers formed up with their leader as the point of a blunt wedge and charged in a pounding rush with the skirts of their mail hauberks flapping around their knees, armored from shin to helmet. Their great straight-bladed sabers went up in glittering menace.

  “Haakkaa paalle!” they shouted in unison; the words weren’t English or any language she knew, but they prompted a flicker of memory. “Haakkaa paalle!”

  Then they struck the loose crowd of their foemen, and the mass seemed to explode in a spray of blood and screams and swords swinging in arcs that slung trails of red droplets yards into the air. Juniper gritted her teeth and made herself move forward with blade and buckler.

  The Eaters stood and fought-mostly, just died-for a brief moment, then spattered screaming across the parking lot and out into the fields around, running for the shelter of the woods. Steve and Vince retrieved their longbows and shot while any targets were still in range; Juniper stood shuddering and blinking as the tall strangers made sure of the enemy dead.

  Then there was no sound except their own panting and a series of quick are you all right queries. And the sickening knowledge that a single minute’s delay would have seen them all dead and dismembered.

  “Oh, Goddess gentle and strong, I want to go home,” Judy whispered, then straightened. “We ought to check out the buildings. There might be things that… need doing.”

  “Damn right,” one of the strangers said.

  Juniper looked around. She had been controlling the churning in her stomach by main force of will; the movement distracted her, and she swayed backward against a car, sliding sideways. The world swam, narrowing and graying at the edges, and her mouth filled with spit.

  Judy reached for her, but the stranger was quicker, holding her upright until she recovered a little. His grip was firm but not painful, although she could feel the remorseless strength in it, but she swallowed again at the sight and smell of the blood and matter that clotted the mail on the back of his leather gauntlet.

  “Easy,” he said. “Your first sight of combat?”

  He held a water bottle to her lips. She filled her mouth and turned her head to spit, then drank.

  “Not… not quite,” she said, looking around at the bodies.

  And every one of these a child of the Goddess and the God. Hard to remember that, but she must. May they find rest and peace in the Summerlands, and come to forgive themselves!

  Aloud she continued: “But nothing before the Change, and nothing since like… like this.”

  He nodded and stepped back as he felt her strengthen; his friends came up behind him and followed his lead as he took off his helmet.

  Their eyes met. For an instant that stretched green gaze locked with gray; Juniper felt a sudden shock, like a bucket of cold water and a jolt of electricity and all the chakras-power points-of her body flaring at once. She could see very clearly; clearly enough to notice the sudden widening of his pupils as he stared at her with the same fierce focus.

  Then the moment passed, so quickly she wasn’t sure if it had been more than her wooziness; it did blow the horror out of her for a while. Instead she was chiefly conscious of another reaction: My, but he’s pretty.

  Almost beautiful, in a hard masculine way: square-chinned, with high cheekbones and short straight nose and slanted gray eyes, the long chiseled line of his jaw emphasized by the close-cropped black beard. Only a scar running across his forehead and up into the bowl-cut raven hair marred it.

  Oh, my, yes, Juniper thought, surprised she could notice at a moment like this; and even then she thought she caught a flicker of kindred interest on his face.

  Then: They’re not giants, either.

  She’d had a confused impression that they were all huge men; but on second glance the leader, the one with the bear’s head… let’s mentally subtract all that gear… was tall but not towering, and not even thick-built; broad-shouldered and long-limbed, rather, narrow in the waist and hips. He moved easily under the weight of cloth and leather and metal, light and graceful as a leopard.

  The youngest was an inch or two over six feet, a fresh-faced freckled blond no more than twenty at the most, already heavy in the shoulders-and thick-armed. The other was about halfway between his two companions in build.

  “No disgrace to feel a bit woozy after something like this,” the gray-eyed leader said. “I was, first time. You get used to it.”

  “Goddess, I hope not,” she said.

  He raised a brow at that-observant of him-and looked at the four Mackenzies, quickly taking note of their gear and the antlers-and-moon blazon on the breast of their jacks.

  “Well, your Goddess must have been looking after you; we’ve met bunches like this before and decided to pile in and help on general principles. Ah… I’m-”

  The blond boy grinned. “Lord Bear, war chief of the Bearkillers! At least according to my sister, Princess Astrid Legolamb.”

  The older man-about my age, give or take a year-grimaced at him, and the other one smiled.

  “I’m Mike Havel.” He jerked a thumb at the youngster. “This is Eric Larsson, and his family are all humorists-in their own opinion, if nobody else’s. The sensible one here is named Josh Sanders.”

  The other man had brown hair and blue eyes and a narrow planes-and-angles Scots-Irish face that reminded Juniper of her own father; he pulled off a gauntlet and extended his hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “Mike is the bossman of our outfit, right enough.”

  Eric went on: “The rest of us are a long ways east of here; we’re sc
outing,” and the other two scowled at him.

  She noticed with amusement how Vince and Steve bristled just a little as she made her own introductions; and her trained ears pricked up at the strangers’ accents. The mix was odd, and she could usually tag someone within a hundred miles of their birthplace.

  The blond boy, Eric, he’s a native Oregonian, she thought. From west of the Cascades, at that, like me, but probably raised in metro Portland rather than the valley. Hmmm. is that just a wee tinge of New England? Mr. Sanders. Midwestern flat vowels for sure; but there’s something harsher there too, hill-country Southern; born not far north of the Ohio and on a farm, or some little crossroads town. Our Lord Bear is interesting; Midwestern too, I’d say, but from a lot farther north. And there’s just a hint underneath of something else, not English. Singsong, but very faint.

  “Your friend was right,” Havel said. “We should check out those buildings-together, and cautiously.”

  “You think there might be more Eaters?” she said.

  “Eaters? That’s what you call them around here? Possibly, or more likely prisoners, alive so they’d stay fresh. Like I said, we’ve done this before.”

  He looked down at one of the dead; his expression was clinical, and the other two looked matter-of-fact as well; the youngest was a little green around the gills, but only slightly.

  Havel and Sanders were calmer still; not exhilarated or excited either, their breath slowing gradually from the brutal exertion of fighting in armor far heavier than hers, but calm. The bodies seemed to disturb them no more than the blood that clotted on their mail, the way a farmer would ignore muck-covered boots when he shoveled out a stall.

  Hard men, she thought, with a tinge of distaste and then a rush of shame; they’d saved her life and that of her friends at the risk of their own, doing the deeds for nothing but the deeds’ own sake.

  Not wicked, I don’t think they’re bad, but hard. This Havel, he probably was that way before the Change, too.