EarthBlood

by neetha Napew

  "We don't know if there is an 'anyone else' to get here," he replied.

  "I reckon that Mac'll pull through," said Carrie. '"Specially with Pete to help him."

  "I think that the old woman'll turn up to haunt us all," Heather said, running a finger around the inside of the empty can and licking it.

  "Wouldn't bet against her," agreed Jim. "Guess we'll just have to wait and see."

  "What me doing now, Captain Jim?" asked Sly, smiling eagerly, knowing that Jim would come up with a good idea, knowing he always did.

  "Walk down toward the sea, Sly."

  "See the sea… Me see the sea and the sea see me."

  Heather laughed. "Hope you're still in good spirits after a long walk, Sly."

  "Me like walk, kitten."

  Jim waited for his daughter to snap angrily at the lad for using the endearment that she hated so much. But she said nothing to Sly.

  Carrie stood up and kicked the can over the edge of the highway, down into a barren field. "Doesn't seem much point in taking trash home with us these days."

  "Reckon we could come close to Eureka before the day's done," said Jim.

  "Cold and clammy kind of day." Carrie shuddered and hugged herself.

  "This part of the coast gets a lot of fog and rain." Jim glanced at his chron. "High noon, people. Packs on backs and guns ready to hand. Let's move on."

  The weather deteriorated as the afternoon wore on, making it necessary to keep referring to the compass that Jim carried. The land was folded and tilted by the quakes and every now and again it would twitch in the memory of an aftershock. Each time that happened, Sly would sidle in closer to Heather, occasionally and hesitantly taking her hand.

  The fog thickened, swirling around them, distorting perspectives and bringing a greater caution, along with the fear of what might be lingering in the farther gray edge of the coils of mist, waiting to snap them up.

  The taste of salt was on everybody's lips.

  "Me tired, Captain Jim," said Sly suddenly. He stopped and sat himself down in the middle of the blacktop.

  "Yeah, me too, son. Think you can go a little farther? Get off the highway and find us a good place to camp for the night. Then we can move on fresh into Eureka in the morning. Can't be more than two miles now."

  "Nearer five, friend."

  "Who the—" Jim swung around at the creaking voice that had seemed to waft from the banks of fog. He drew the Ruger in midmotion, realizing as he did how useless a gesture that was if the speaker already had a weapon trained on him.

  "Now, don't go popping off with that cannon you got there, friend. Might just hurt someone means you no harm."

  "You got a name, mister?" Jim holstered the revolver but kept his hand hovering above it.

  "Sure. Dorian Langford. Retired editor. Textbooks. School stuff. Widower."

  "I'm Jim Hilton. Got my daughter here and a couple of other friends."

  "Good to meet you."

  "Come on ahead out of the fog, Mr. Langford."

  There was a chuckle. "If I was a gambling man, Jim, which I might tell you I used to be, I'd probably lay odds of around seven to two that you're a decent man."

  "Fair odds. Prefer two to one."

  Again the chuckle. Now Jim could just make the man out, standing on a rise in the ground about thirty yards away, like a half-glimpsed statue in a misty park.

  "Since that bloody plant cancer tipped everything downside up, I've been mainly on the move. Got a cabin a few miles away, but I don't live there. Stay in one place in this benighted land, and you get to be dead, Jim. You noticed that?"

  "Sure have, Mr. Langford. You know these parts well, then? We're aiming to head northward."

  "On foot? As much chance as me becoming Pope. That big trembler did some serious harm. Sea broke in a way north of Eureka. Backed up rivers. Flooded thousands of miles of lowland."

  "How do we get around it, then?" asked Carrie Princip. "Are there boats in Eureka?"

  "Sure. And food. Gas. Drugs. Women. Men. Little children. These days you can find most anything you might want in Eureka. And a lot of firearms, lady."

  Jim looked at the others. It seemed as if their hopeful plans for a meeting at the nearby town were in ruins.

  "How do they greet strangers, Mr. Langford?"

  "Name's Dorian, Jim. How do they greet strangers? Like this." He imitated the click of a gun being cocked, followed by the sound of the explosion and the whistle of a ricochet. "Just like that."

  "Sure you won't come in for the night, Dorian? We don't have much, but what we got you're welcome to share."

  "Perhaps two to one would be better odds, Jim." The voice was friendly and warm. "But I'll go on a spell."

  "Sure. Good luck, Dorian."

  "Thanks." Something that could have been a hand waved at them from out of the darkening mist. "Hey, one other thing."

  "What's that?"

  "Been hearing about a place up toward Seattle way. Called Aurora."

  Sly opened his mouth, then closed it again as Heather hastily put her finger to her lips.

  "Think I've heard the name," replied Jim after a moment's hesitation.

  Another warm, friendly chuckle drifted toward them. "You aren't so hot when it comes to being economical with the truth. But I'm a nosy old bugger, and your business is your business."

  "You hear where it was?"

  "No, Jim. Sorry. But I hear enough to make me think it could be a good place." A coughing fit interrupted his words. "Might seek it out myself some time."

  "Sure."

  "Oh, and I heard some other folks asking around for Aurora. Way I hear it, the odds against them being nice folks might be in the region of a thousand to one. Or even longer than that. So, y'all take care."

  "Will do, You, too."

  The figure was gone, and all they could hear was the fading sound of boots striding away toward the east.

  The rest was silence.

  THE BLIZZARD'S CENTER was less than forty miles away from where Jim Hilton camped for that night before making the last push through toward Eureka.

  But it trapped the McGills, Nanci and Jeff in its whiteout heart.

  They were there for the evening and night of the eighteenth, right through the nineteenth into the twentieth. Almost the only good thing that had come out of the Earthblood plague was the astounding amount of dead wood that lay everywhere. At times it seemed as if the whole land was one gigantic tangle of brittle, broken branches, perfect for burning.

  "Normal times and we could have found ourselves in a rather parlous situation." Nanci sat close to the fire, her boots tucked behind her to avoid the heat damaging them. "At least we shall not be required to pay attendance at the deathly court of King Hypothermia."

  "Huh?" said Jocelyn. "Sometimes sounds like you swallowed a whole word-teaching vid, Nanci."

  "It used to be called 'educated,' young ignoramus," the old woman replied tartly.

  "Now don't get calling names to my children, Nanci, or you and I'll fall out." Jeanne warmed her hands at the blaze, careful not to meet the other woman's eyes so that Nanci couldn't see how frightened she was of her.

  "Wouldn't want that, Jeanne. Not at all. Good thing about this weather is that it means the Hunters of the Sun can't hope to track us down. Longer we keep away and the farther north we get, the safer we can feel."

  "Think they'll chase me, Nanci?" asked Jeff Thomas. The heat brought out the livid scar from right eye to the corner of his mouth, making it flush crimson. He was conscious of it and kept tracing the weal with his finger.

  "Possibly. Depends on what the Chief might think that you know. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes if she believed you'd held back information."

  He winced at the threat, even though Nanci had softened it by stroking a finger down his cheek.

  The tumbling flakes of snow fell into the flames with a gentle hissing sound. Mac leaned back and smiled. "I guess things could be worse. Least we're all together and safe—for the tim
e being. Warm. Enough gas to get us a way farther. Food. And a fine scene like a Christmas card."

  "God bless us, one and all," said Pamela McGill. "That's out of a book by Dickens about Christmas."

  There was a sound like a pistol shot, making everyone jump. But it had been one of the logs exploding in the fierce heat of the fire, spitting sparks out. One landed on Paul McGill's leg, and he brushed it away.

  "Think that there'll be anyone off the Aquila in the town, Dad?" he asked.

  "If Jim Hilton says a place and a time, then there's only one thing'll stop him being there."

  "What stops him, Daddy?" said Sukie, frowning with the effort of trying to follow the strange convolutions of the grown-ups' conversation.

  "Big man in a black cloak, honey, with a sharp scythe over his shoulder."

  Nanci laughed. "How about a gang of paramilitaries with a golden arrow and silver sun on their uniforms? How about the Hunters of the Sun, Mac?"

  "Comes to about the same thing as the man with the scythe, doesn't it?"

  She nodded. "Guess that's right, Mac."

  IT TOOK three days for the underground message from Dorian Langford to reach the desk of General Zelig. At last he had a real clue to the possible location of some of the missing crew of the USSV Aquila, but by then events had moved on at such a rate that the information was obsolete. However, it enabled him to shift the location of one of his white pins. He stuck it carefully into the coast of California, near where there'd been several reports of serious earthquake activity. Close to the town of Eureka.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the cold, misty weather that prevailed, with flurries of snow riding in off the sullen rollers of the Pacific, Heather Hilton looked like any other child in Eureka. Huddled inside a quilted anorak, the hood pulled over her face, she found it easy to slip through the indifferent guards. The rusting roadblocks had been there for far too long, the handful of men on duty lazy and careless. Heather simply walked a hundred yards or so into the flat fields, climbed over a single fence, and was inside the suburbs of the township.

  It had been her own idea to go in.

  Jim had opposed it from the start, though Carrie had taken the girl's side.

  "Nobody'll notice one more kid," she said. "You or me… we'd stand out like a mag flare at midnight. We need to know if there are boats and what their security is like. Heather's best fitted to do that, Jim."

  Reluctantly he'd agreed.

  She was back about two hours later, in the middle of the morning of the twentieth day of December, scrambling noisily between the dead elm trees in the small grove on the southwestern outskirts of Eureka, the place they'd picked for their camp. She called out of the mist in a low, breathless voice.

  "It's me, Dad. Heather."

  Sly rushed toward her and gave her an enormous hug, almost crushing her as he swung her clean off her feet. The boy had been frightened when she'd disappeared earlier in the day, unable to understand where she'd gone or what she was doing. His disturbance added to Jim Hilton's own doubts.

  "All right, Sly, I'm back safe. You can put me down on the ground now."

  It was the first time that any of them had actually been inside a reasonably large township since Earthblood, and the girl's report was profoundly depressing.

  "Just a shambles, Dad," she said.

  The effects of the virulent plant cancer had been almost as catastrophic for the oceans as on the land, killing off the various algae and seaweeds that provided the basic nutrients for the food chains to function.

  For a community like Eureka, based on the water, mere survival was almost too much.

  "All look like they're starving, raggedy, thin. Saw a man dying in the street and folks walking over him like he wasn't there. Been a real big fire some time back. Whole section's blackened and gone. Everybody carries a gun of some sort."

  "How about the boats, Heather?"

  "Oh, yeah, the boats."

  IT WAS just as Heather had described it.

  There had been another fall of snow after noon, leaving a clean layer across the drab, dead land.

  Sly had been stamping around and around, treading a circle in the mud, humming to himself. Jim had explained to him that they were going to go and find a boat and then sail away or row away, knowing that the chances of finding a powered vessel were negligible. And that they must all keep very quiet. Like a hiding game.

  Sly had nodded, showing he understood.

  Now, as he tramped around the grove, Jim could hear the little song that the boy was chanting.

  "Boat on sea won't see me. Boat on sea won't see me. Boat on sea won't see me."

  "We going to wait for dark, Jim?" asked Carrie.

  "I reckon the guards might be more careful then. That's the time you'd expect some sort of trouble. I figured to make our move late afternoon. Then, if we can get a little way out off the land, it'll soon be dark and they won't have too much chance to get themselves organized and come after us."

  "Will there be killing, Dad?"

  "I hope not."

  Heather smiled at her father. "I can tell. You think there will be, don't you?"

  "Maybe. I truly hope not. Killing's just a craft like any other, honey. You have to learn it. Learn how to kill some father's son, some mother's daughter. If we're lucky we can sneak in and take a boat without anyone spotting us."

  When the time came for them to set off, the skies had cleared, and the temperature had dropped way below freezing. Far off to the west, the sun was already dipping its brazen head beneath the horizon of the Pacific. The air was filled with the scent of cooking fires. The long shadows stretched eastward. A frost dusted the narrow path that Jim had selected for their cautious advance toward the cluster of small boats on the seaward flank of Eureka.

  Most of them were less than twelve feet long and seemed frail to take out onto the sea. A few of them were much bigger, with tall masts and furled sails. Jim was tempted by them, but he knew little about working boats and guessed that the larger vessels would take longer to get under way and might present terminal problems for two adults and the two teenagers to manage. Once they were irrevocably committed to stealing one of the boats, failure would undoubtedly mean death.

  Also he suspected that the smaller ones might be less well guarded.

  They walked in single file, their breath hazing the darkening air about them. Jim led, with Sly on his heels, closely followed by Heather. Carrie brought up the rear.

  It had been agreed by Jim and the young woman that this was a make-or-break situation.

  "No hesitating or turning back," he said.

  "Kill or be killed," she agreed.

  Then they said nothing further until Jim stopped, peering around the corner of a long, single-story warehouse. The town seemed quiet. The sun was halfway down, and the water was calm, with small wavelets lapping at the crusted wood of the piers.

  There were three men on watch.

  Two stood together, smoking on the main quayside. The third was walking slowly up and down on one of the maze of narrow jetties, closer to the open Pacific.

  All had rifles slung over shoulders.

  "Follow close," Jim said, his arms around Sly and Heather, feeling his daughter trembling with either fear or excitement. "We walk straight to that man on his own. Like we have a right. Hoods up and don't look at him. Closer we get before he spots us as strangers, the better chance we got. Soon as he goes down, you two hop into the boat and Carrie'll untie it."

  "What about those other two, Dad? Won't they be able to see what's happening?"

  "While you all get into one of the rowing boats, I'll… deal with them."

  "Me see the sea," whispered Sly as if he were chanting a mantra for good luck.

  NANCI SIMMS held up a hand, stopping the others from chattering over a small campfire close to a low headland that overlooked the sea. Day was almost done, and they'd decided to wait before venturing down into Eureka.

  "What is it?" asked Jeanne M
cGill. "You heard something, Nanci?"

  "Yeah. Three shots, from a big handgun. Spaced out. One and then two more."

  THINGS DIDN'T QUITE GO how Captain James Hilton had hoped they would.

  They got onto the jetty, feeling the slow surge and swell of the water against the old, creaking timbers. The two men standing together hadn't even looked around. Jim had peered into the first boats they passed, seeing to his relief that all of them seemed to have a couple of sets of oars in them.

  To cut the risks, he wanted to get away from the farthest end of the pier, giving less time for any attack from the land.

  "Hey there, neighbor." A friendly call came from the single man, with no hint of suspicion. "Fine evening, it is."

  Jim nodded then, pitched his voice low to try to disguise it. "Cold, though."

  "Who's that, Jerry?" that voice came from behind them and to their right, where one of the men had suddenly taken an interest in the foursome.

  "Why, it's…" the first speaker said, then hesitated, clearly becoming uncertain. "Why…who the fuck are you, neighbor?"

  He began to unsling the rifle.

  Jim had his hand on the walnut grips of the Ruger, inside his jacket, precisely ready for this moment.

  The range was twenty feet, farther than he'd wanted to open the shooting, but the guard was silhouetted against the fiery light of the sun. The .44 full-metal-jacket round hit him high in the center of the chest. A perfect killing shot, through heart and lungs and spine, knocking him backward, where he tripped over the edge of the pier and plopped into the water.

  "Hey!"

  "In the boat, now," snapped Jim. He'd already dropped to one knee, right arm straight, steadied with his left hand. He sighted on the pair of sentries, around thirty paces away from him.

  They stood with their backs to the whitewashed wall of a warehouse, both reaching for their hunting rifles, fumbling in a panic at the shocking sight of their colleague butchered in front of them.

  Shots two and three were perfect. It was just like being on the shooting range, aiming for inners with a round of drinks depending on it.