Withûr We

by Matthew Bruce Alexander

  “I almost stayed. I swear to you I almost stayed. We would never have escaped with her grandparents and baby cousins and nieces… I knew that. But I almost stayed anyway. My parting image of her…” Alistair’s voice faltered, “…was a sobbing, crumpled wreck on the ground as the transport lifted off.”

  “What happened?” Gregory softly asked, in awe.

  “The Goyistas swept through and took the whole continent except for Mar Profundo. We holed up there for a few more months until enough reinforcements were cobbled together to counter attack. I never saw her again. I only had one opportunity to look for her when I got some leave, but her village had been leveled and there was no trace of her. I can’t imagine she survived. Probably her last minutes in life included a violent rape…” Alistair fought for composure, “… and a knife being drawn across her throat.”

  “There was nothing you could do.” Gregory felt like the attempted consolation was pathetic. He tried to cover it by asking, “What was her name?”

  “I will never say her name again,” Alistair replied with force. “But no day goes by I don’t think of her, and sometimes wish I had stayed. Until the last State is obliterated we will never be free from terror. And people like her and countless billions more will die because some of us are evil enough to try and control the rest.”

  Gregory was too in awe, both at the story and the normally taciturn man who told it, to think of any appropriate comment. He laid a hand on Alistair’s shoulder and finally spoke in a gentle, unhurried voice.

  “You were different when you came back. We could tell, but we couldn’t really understand why. I guess… Al, I don’t know what to say.”

  Alistair shrugged. “Listening is enough.”

  Gregory nodded, and his attention was drawn to the clinic some yards distant. “I need to go back inside,” he finally said, feeling awkward. Alistair did not respond.

  Chapter 39

  Once again smoke rose from Arcarius, rising past snowflakes on their way down. The fires which burned during the night now only smoldered, and the snow, which intensified during the darkest hours, relented and merely sprinkled the earth under the tentative light of the morning sun. A makeshift flagpole displaying a limp Aldran flag was erected at the top of the Mayor’s Palace. The great spherical power generator was still standing and, on the outside at least, in good shape. Unharrassed and unhurried, military vehicles roamed the streets of Arcarius, occasionally depositing a load of troops at a doorstep or in a plaza.

  Alistair rubbed his eyes and scratched his itching scalp, trying to wake himself up. Having found a razor, he shaved and the morning breeze felt especially cold on his exposed cheeks. He and Ryan spent the evening taking turns on watch. Henry offered to help but Alistair gruffly told him to go to bed. Now he was dragging under the weight of successive nights with little sleep.

  Ryan saw nothing during his watches, and Alistair had only once gotten a scare. A patrol craft, hovering over the crumbling roads, passed by an intersection about a hundred yards down hill. It paused in the middle, shining a light down the street it was crossing, the street the clinic was on. Then it moved on, only the quiet hum of the engine giving it away once it passed the buildings lining the cross street. After that there was nothing.

  Turning to go back inside and rouse Ryan, Alistair spied Henry’s small form trudging through the once again snowed-over parking lot towards Alistair’s position.

  “Good morning,” Henry greeted. The ex marine nodded without comment. “I uh… I decided I want to come with you.”

  “With me where?” asked Alistair as he moved towards the clinic. Henry reversed his direction to keep up.

  “That’s for you to decide. Oliver should have taken your advice. Let’s head out on our own.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Hmmm, meaning…?”

  “You’re not a hardy physical specimen, Henry.”

  Henry frowned at the comment. “I’m not proposing to wrestle the Civil Guard, Al.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Hmmm, meaning…?”

  “Hmmm, meaning we’re going to be trekking across a lot of countryside, trying to cross the channel, make our way undetected to Rendral and then who knows what from there. All the while, I’m going to have dependents in tow. Is that really what you want?”

  Henry’s voice got testy and higher in pitch. “You just tried to convince me to come with you last night!”

  “Last night plans were different. It’s one thing to hide out in the hills around town, it’s quite another to do what I have in mind.”

  “Well I want to come with you.”

  Having arrived at the door, Alistair paused a moment and turned to face his old friend. “I can’t afford to take you with me, Henry. Honestly, your physique concerns me less than you being a government informer.”

  Henry’s face lost its color. Alistair entered the clinic and left him out in the cold.

  ***

  The rest of the officials were waiting inside a warehouse near the harbor. With the city back under control, it was a matter of waiting for the military to confirm the State buildings were cleared and give the signal to get back to work. While awaiting the imminent go-ahead, a couple warehouses were commandeered, heated, and prepared as lodges for short term use. Gerald, however, did not feel comfortable around his fellows. He chose to prowl around the harbor. With his hands tucked into his coat pockets and his coat collar pulled up around his lips and nose, he watched as snowflake after snowflake fell onto the water’s surface and disappeared.

  Several small naval vessels were anchored in the harbor and beyond, in the open sea, were a couple dozen larger ones. During the night they were abuzz with activity, occasionally firing rockets into the city. Now, other than the tipping back and forth with the waves, they were still. A few lights shone, a sailor occasionally came on deck, nothing more.

  Gerald was startled out of his reverie when a senior official approached and, standing at his side, stared out across the bay with him.

  “It’s hard to imagine, looking at all that, that the traitors could possibly hope to win,” he commented. His unshaven face sported a thin mustache, almost like an outline of the upper lip. The man, whom Gerald recognized from somewhere, used the word traitor, instead of rebel, as directed by the Realist regime.

  “They lost,” Gerald confirmed. “Who knows what they think or why they think it.”

  The official softly smiled, but the softness was a thin cushion on top of something far harder. “I’ve been told your brother worked for a short time at the Transportation Bureau, a job you got for him.”

  Gerald looked darkly out at the waters, deliberately avoiding the gaze of his superior.

  “I also understand he broke into our system with a dead man’s code and, not coincidentally, a train carrying some very important personages was destroyed a short time later. A train whose passengers were to have remained a secret to all but a few.”

  Gerald braced himself. “I was careless to have trusted my brother.”

  “Careless? He is an avowed anarchist. You were a blithering idiot to have trusted him.”

  “May I inquire as to your intentions? Have you come here to fire me?”

  “No, I am not here to fire you. But I think we can both agree you have some making up to do.”

  “I believe I do.”

  “And don’t forget it. Greater men than you have lost their jobs and more over lesser oversights than what you are guilty of.”

  Gerald swallowed once. “How can I be of service?”

  “That’s quite simple. I should very much like to meet this brother of yours in person.”

  Despite an effort to steel himself, Gerald could not stop his knees shaking and the color leaving his skin. He stared at the terrible profile framed by the sea and sky behind it, at the unshakably firm and determined expression on the face. “What should I do?” he finally managed.

  The other turned his slender body towards Gerald. “Every Civil
Guard and soldier you see in this city is now under my command. The mayor has been killed and martial law declared. Find your brother and let me know immediately.”

  The man, the new commander of the Arcarius garrison and, for the time being, its chief political officer, retraced his steps in the snow. As he watched him go, Gerald looked to the door of the warehouse he had come out of. There were two imposing soldiers waiting for the new garrison commander, and with them he saw Stephanie Caldwell. He made no motion to get her attention and she studiously avoided his gaze. At that moment Gerald remembered who the man was and the realization, not the cold, made him shudder.

  ***

  Alistair dared not travel in an auto, and the circuitous route he took around the edge of the city before he found a place where he felt comfortable entering meant he and Ryan did not come to his parents’ street until four hours after they left the clinic. When the two rebels, bundled well against the cold, finally reached the snowy avenue, he came face to face with his worst fear. There had been fighting there. The wall of the building across from his parents’ had been hit with an explosive and a fire still burned. Several bodies, not all of them in one piece, lay strewn about, some with the uniform of the Aldran military, some in a guerrilla’s plain clothing. He stopped and observed the scene for some time, but it was apparent both sides had moved on. Saying nothing, he placed his right hand inside the left side of his coat and gripped the handle of his gun.

  They trudged down the vacated street, past dark and empty windows and bolted doors. They did nothing to the bodies save to confirm they were deceased. Next, Alistair went to the damaged section of wall while Ryan checked the last two bodies still in shape enough to possibly be alive. Flames born of the explosion, though dying, still licked at the debris scattered about. Scanning the inside of the building, Alistair saw the twisted and torn remains of some equipment and he grit his teeth.

  “There was a surveillance team here.”

  “How’s that?” asked his companion as he jogged up beside him.

  With a nod of his head, Alistair indicated the wreckage. “That was surveillance equipment. There was a team here.”

  “You think they were waiting for you?”

  “I can’t imagine what else they were here for. The city isn’t even completely secured yet and they already have a surveillance team in place, right outside the home of the parents of the man who infiltrated their Transportation Bureau.”

  “Do they know it was you?”

  “They suspect it or they’re idiots. Some of our guys must have discovered them.” He looked up at his parents’ building, to the window he knew was theirs. “I’ve got a very bad feeling.”

  Alistair looked down the street the way they had come, and suddenly tensed. Ryan heard nothing but, sensing his friend’s uneasiness, had the sense to remain quiet. For a whole minute Alistair was unmoving, and then there was a faint hum in the air that Ryan finally heard too. A hundred yards or so away, a hovering transport craft pulled out onto the street. Alistair took two steps back into the hole in the wall and Ryan quickly followed. Peering out from behind the bricks, Alistair observed as the transport sat in the middle of the road.

  If it’s a heat detector, he thought, maybe the fire will cover us. Another moment or two of quiet, and then the hovercraft pulled forward, crossing the street and leaving their view. Wellesley exhaled the breath he didn’t realize he was holding.

  “Let’s make this quick,” said Alistair.

  He was just fishing for his key when he saw the gate to the courtyard was bashed in. With a sense of foreboding, he jogged across the relatively warmer courtyard with the glass roof, Wellesley in tow, and came to an entrance to the building itself. This was closed and securely locked, but it was not a solid enough piece to withstand a couple hard kicks from Alistair’s mighty legs. The door cracked on the first blow, swung inward on the second and the two rebels were in the rusty stairwell as the echoes from the break-in died down.

  Alistair stood listening for some time, hearing nothing and uncertain how to proceed. They’ve laid one trap, he thought as he peered up into the darkness. Is another still set? Putting one foot in front of the other with the utmost caution, the two men ascended the stairs at a grandmother’s pace. Each new level, being farther and farther from the window at the bottom, was darker than the previous, a fact which discomfited Wellesley.

  Alistair had never realized just how much noise the stairs made until he wanted them to be silent. With every protesting groan under his weight he expected the doors to burst open and Civil Guard to come pouring out. The door to each story passed was a promise of danger that made the skin tingle and the hairs stand up erect, but each promise went unfulfilled.

  “Anyone left in the building knows we’re here,” Ryan muttered after an especially loud creak.

  When they finally arrived at the right story, the ex marine opened the stairwell door. The hallway into which they emerged was windowless and, still without power, jet-black. Alistair sensed a stiff reluctance from his companion as he passed into the lightless hallway, but Wellesley said nothing. Seconds later Alistair was knocking at his parents’ door. The pounding sent loud thuds through the hallway where the worn carpet was just enough to deaden the echoes. Everything fell silent again and the door remained closed. Upon trying the handle, he found it locked. Producing his key, he opened the door and a faint light from the windows of the living room poured into the hallway.

  “Mom? Dad?” he called out as he entered the apartment with Wellesley close behind.

  He received no answer and a quick search of the place revealed it to be empty.

  “They must have gone somewhere else,” suggested Wellesley.

  “We’ll check the basement.”

  As they made their way down, Alistair stopped to knock on a few other doors but received no response. This gave him some hope that perhaps the entire population was hiding down in the basement, but when they finally arrived at the musty, subterranean level it also proved to be empty. He stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, looking around as if he might pick up something significant he missed before. Finally, a nervous cough from Wellesley, stuck in the pitch black, interrupted his thoughts.

  “I don’t know where they could be,” he conceded and, biting his lower lip, made for the exit. Once again Wellesley, gripping the back of Alistair’s coat for guidance, was eager to follow.

  Emerging from the building into the relative brilliance of the early afternoon sun as it shone off the gray bricks of the sheltered courtyard, it occurred to Alistair that this was the best moment to lay a trap. There was no point in going after them in the building, but the courtyard, with its lack of cover and sunlight painful to eyes used to darkness, was a different matter. When he heard the sound of men in the street on the other side of the building, he thought his fears had been realized.

  Grabbing Wellesley by his coat, he pulled him close to a wall, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Hugging the rough brick, Alistair moved to a large window of the downstairs lobby and peered through it and another window on the other side to the street opposite. They saw three Civil Guard, two peering about, their rifles hefted, while a third examined a body in the street.

  Ryan grabbed for his gun but Alistair dissuaded him.

  “There are more nearby. There’s another group just down the street. Guaranteed.”

  Pulling back from the window, Alistair led Wellesley out the back gate of the courtyard from which point they could circle around the patrolling troops and make their torturous way back to the clinic on the north side.

  Chapter 40

  At the outset of their return trip, Alistair and Ryan were alert, scanning every corner and window they approached. Giving the squad on the street a wide berth, they left without incident and, when they reached the hills to the east, relaxed somewhat and fell into an easy rhythm. Alistair brooded the entire way, his thoughts on his parents. Wellesley, sensing that this time there was something more to the
silence, did not pester him with idle talk.

  By the time they were back on the north side, the sun reached its zenith. There was some discussion about how to get to the clinic, with Wellesley preferring one route and Alistair another, but Alistair was not in the mood for a dispute and he muttered an invitation for Wellesley to take any route he wanted while he started down the road of his choice. Wellesley quickly followed and was glad he did when he realized his large companion was correct. Alistair’s winding road swept around and between a few hills and left them on a main thoroughfare with the clinic in sight.

  They could plainly see as they approached that the parking lot was empty. It had even been cleared of the recent snowfall which still dusted the land with the odd flake. Drawing nearer, they could see the nurses and medical staff through the windows. The clinic had taken in more wounded since they left, and more staff too.

  This made Alistair pause, wondering who exactly had been around to drop off the recent batch of wounded and what that would mean for him. Then it struck him as odd that anyone found the time to plow the parking lot the day after the city was invaded. Coming to a dead stop, he put a hand to Wellesley’s chest as his companion was about to walk by, chin tucked into his scarf and face down. He came out of his reverie with a start.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Alistair said nothing, but turned around and, walking much faster now, headed for the winding road they had just taken.

  “What’s the matter?” Wellesley asked again as he jogged to catch up with Alistair.

  “Something’s not right.”

  It was then he heard the unmistakable sound of a sergeant’s barked orders, the rustle and thumping of hidden troops springing into action and the peel of wheels on pavement. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a platoon of troops pouring out of every nook and cranny. More troops appeared over the top of a nearby hill, and still another squad, complete with two single seat hovercrafts, emerged from the winding road for which they were headed.