by J. M. Snyder
Trin opens his eyes and surveys the room before making any sudden moves. At his feet, the pallet is a mess of sheets, strewn out onto the floor. His dirty clothes and the wet towel are gone, the pants he wore earlier folded neatly on the windowsill. Aissa’s doing, more than likely. Blain probably had her do the wash and she brought them up once they were dry, hoping Trin would be awake to tell her what had happened with the gunner. With slow steps he crosses to the window and shakes the pants before stepping into them. The stains are faded but not entirely washed out. Aissa didn’t scrub them clean, just dunked the pants in soapy water perhaps, eager to rush up here to pester him. She’s a nosy sort. He’s surprised she didn’t kick the pallet on her way as she crossed the room, or pinch his nose until he sputtered awake. Sudden suspicion makes him look around again, sure she’s hiding in a corner somewhere, waiting…
But he’s alone.
He buttons the fly of his pants, glancing warily at the closed door as if he expects it to burst open any minute. That’s when he notices a shirt balled up on the floor, scrunched against the wall. If the door were open, it’d be pushed out of sight. Stepping over his pallet, he scoops up the shirt—it isn’t his, and when he picks it up a tiny twist of paper falls to the floor. A packet of gunpowder. Gerrick’s. Without thinking Trin puts on the shirt, his arms sliding easily into the oversized sleeves. The gunner’s smell envelops him, the fabric on his body like the arms that held him close the past two nights. If the truck dies, he prays it happens soon because God knows he doesn’t want go back to sleeping alone again. I can forgive him, he adds as he buttons the shirt. I can be more next time, I will be enough. I’ve just never wanted another man as much as I do that one so if it’s not asking too much, how about working that tape under his hood loose in a spot or two, eh? Or some sand in his gas tank, maybe a broken windshield, something small like that to get him to turn around and head back this way? What do you say?
The paper he opens to make sure it’s what he thinks it is—gunpowder, Gerrick carries little bursts of fire twirled up like this—then he twists it tight, shoves it down deep into his pocket. Any remembrance, he thinks. If Blain has his way and the gunner never comes through again, at least this proves he was truly here in the first place.
His stomach growls, hungry. Buttoning the shirt over his naked chest, he leaves the room and hurries down the back stairs. It must be nearing on the evening meal, as far as he can tell, from the bustle in the kitchen. Beck mans her post at the grill, another girl works the ovens, two stand side by side at the counter in front of the sandwich bar as they dress hoagies and garnish plates. Someone washes dishes, someone else sweeps lettuce and crumbs from the floor, a third girl balances a tray in both hands as she pushes through the swinging door into the common room, careful not to spill the bowls of soup she carries. A few of the chore girls glance at him as he comes downstairs, then quickly look away. Trin pretends he doesn’t notice.
Aissa isn’t as subtle. On the heels of the waitress, she ducks through the door as it swings into the kitchen and sees him at the foot of the stairs. “Trin!” she cries, worry and amusement mingled on her face. The empty pitchers she carries are foisted onto the girl at the sink, who juggles them into the soapy water before they can fall to the floor. Stray curls have worked themselves free from her bun, and Aissa blows them out of her eyes as she comes up to him. Anyone in her path gets shoved aside. “Don’t tell me you’ve been knocked out this whole time,” she says. “Ten fucking hours—”
“Hello to you, too.” Trin wonders if he really slept that long without realizing it or if Aissa’s exaggerating. If he asks, she’ll tell him to shut up, she doesn’t talk up the truth, he was in that pallet eleven damn hours, anyone else will tell him the same. With a sigh, he swats her hand away as she starts to pick at his shirt. “Didn’t Blain tell you to leave me alone, or something?”
She ignores him. “This his?” Her fingers pluck at the shirt buttons until Trin slaps her wrist. He steps around her but she follows close behind, touching the hem of the shirt like he’s the Christ come to heal her or something. “Did he give it to you like to keep? Or did he just leave it behind? It’s way too big. Did he—”
“Aissa, stop.” Over his shoulder Trin shoots her what he hopes is a withering look but when he turns around, she’s picking at the shirt again. He has to gather the excess material in his hands and pull it taut around his narrow hips to keep her off. “It’s only a shirt.”
Squeezing between the two girls at the sandwich bar, Trin grabs a handful of sliced tomatoes to snack on. He feels light-headed and woozy, from lack of food most likely, and the overripe slices are cool sliding down his throat. “Well?” Aissa wants to know, watching him eat. “What happened between you guys? What’d he say?”
Trin shrugs. “Nothing much,” he hedges. There are too many others around at the moment to tell her more—whatever he says will race through the outpost like a virus, jumping from the chore girls to the customers to the streets. It’d probably even get back to Gerrick eventually, distorted and full of lies, and he doesn’t want that.
But she doesn’t get it. “Like hell,” she says, angry. “Don’t hold out on me, Trini. You know I’ll ask Blain if I have to but I’d rather hear it from you first.”
Trin grabs another handful of the tomato slices. “Blain won’t tell you.” His brother is a private person who doesn’t believe in rumors or gossip and Aissa knows it. If she asked, he’d say it’s none of her concern. And he’d forbid her to ask Trin about it, either. Backing away from the counter, Trin looks for bread or a roll, something to make into a sandwich. Something to distract him, so she won’t see just how much this particular wound still hurts. Absently, he says, “Don’t crowd me, Iss. You don’t have to know.”
“I want to,” she corrects. She sighs, pooching out her lower lip to blow the curls from her face, and tries a different approach. “I heard the truck barely made it through the palisade. Blain said you fucked it up good.”
That his brother might have said. It makes Trin sound stronger than he really is, doesn’t it? It justifies his anger. Fucking up the truck after finding Gerrick in the shower with the bounder takes some of the hurt away and makes him sound like more than just a jilted lover. With an embarrassed grin, Trin shrugs. Aissa sees the color creep into his cheeks and laughs. “I didn’t fuck it up,” he tells her, but his grin says otherwise. Her eyes light up and for a moment he can see exactly what it is his brother must see when he looks at her. “I put it back together when I was through so that doesn’t count…”
Outside the Christ bells begin to ring. So it is late, Trin thinks. “You weren’t lying,” he jokes.
Aissa’s smile is gone in an instant, replaced with a look of distrust. “What do you mean?”
“About the hour—”
The bells cut him off. No longer simply ringing in the dusk, they begin to peal earnestly, their tinkling sound taking on a jangled edge. Trin frowns at Aissa only to find her already glaring back. “What the hell?” she asks. As if he knows.
“Maybe…” He trails off because he has no suggestions. The bells continue to ring, an alarm that sets his blood racing. Horrible images crowd his mind—devlars swarming the palisade walls, or fire ravaging the town, or preybirds boldly diving at children in the streets. “Oh God,” he moans. The bells always ring twice a day, once in the morning to usher in the sun and once in the evening when the light fades. A tug or two on a weathered rope in the belfry, nothing much. But this, this…the bells are still tolling outside, and whatever they mean, Trin suddenly doesn’t want to know.
Grabbing his arm, Aissa steers him towards the door and out into the common. Blain stands behind the bar, a half-empty bottle of amber whiskey in one hand, a shot glass in the other. He looks like a sentinel on alert, his head cocked as he listens to the bells. Without watching his hands, he pours alcohol from the bottle into the glass and stops a centimeter or two from the rim. In control, as always. Just seeing him calms Trin
. “Blain—”
“Shh.” His brother shakes his head and Trin falls silent. Behind him Aissa presses against his back, her hands knots of worry in his shirt. Concentrating on the bells, Blain sets the glass down in front of an older man at the bar who looks around wildly at the other patrons scattered in the common. Every face that looks back is full of fear.
Trin closes the distance between them until he stands at Blain’s side. When his brother bends down to put the bottle away beneath the bar, his elbow brushes Trin’s stomach. “Did you lock down the garage?” he asks in a quiet tone. He could be discussing the weather or what Trin should have for dinner, the way he speaks. There’s no fear in his deep voice, no concern about the unusual carol of bells that fills the air. Not yet, anyway.
“The garage?” Trin asks. He tries to keep his voice steady like Blain’s but can’t. The bells make him nervous, and now he hears other sounds outside, sounds that scare him—the roar of an engine, a throttle choking with the shift of gears, gunfire and angry shouts.
“Trin?” Blain turns, spearing him with the full force of his gaze. Trin’s attention snaps to his brother’s dark eyes. “Did you lock down the doors out there this morning?”
With a nervous shake of his head, Trin whispers, “No. I don’t think so. At least, I don’t remember…”
Annoyance flickers across Blain’s face and is gone. “Get to it then. Be quick.”
Trin hesitates. Outside the tinted windows, the streets are coming alive and the tension inside the waystation winds tighter with each toll of the bells. “Blain, I—”
“Go on, Trini.” His brother nudges him gently but Aissa’s behind him and doesn’t budge. Her hands are like claws in the small of his back. Blain looks from Aissa to Trin and his eyes soften. “It’s not an attack, I can tell you that much. Any devlar worth its weight would’ve put a stop to that infernal racket the moment it cleared the palisade.” The corner of his mouth twitches and it takes Trin a moment to figure out that his brother’s teasing. “Go lock down the garage and get back here double-time, what do you say? I should’ve done it myself earlier but it slipped my mind. Don’t worry none—you’ll be fine.”
Trin nods, but it takes another nudge to get him moving. Aissa follows, her hands caught fast in his shirt. The door to the kitchen stands propped open by chore girls, some wringing their hands in dishtowels as they murmur about the bells. “Can’t someone knock it off already?” one of them says, her words punctuated with the crack of gum. Another nods in agreement. “Jesus but that’s bothersome. What’s it all about anyway?”
The girls still inside the kitchen are gathered around Beck, who stands at the sink with her spatula held like a sword in front of her. “Where are you going?” she wants to know as Trin and Aissa skirt the island in the center of the room. Through the screen door, the air is red, the sky like lava, casting the junked vehicles and stacks of tires with a bronze glow. When she realizes they’re heading for the door, her voice takes on a desperate plea. “You can’t go out there. The bells—”
“Blain said,” Aissa replies. Beck clamps her mouth shut, cutting off any further argument.
Trin pushes through the screen door and almost gags on the heat. Dust and exhaust hang thick in the air. Out here the bells are louder, strident. The rapid fire of guns reverberates through the outpost, sounding for all the world like the cap pistols Trin used to play with as a boy. An engine growls within the palisade walls and a crowd rages somewhere nearby, noise rising from the people like static. Someone screams, a bright ribbon of pain in the falling dusk. On the path around the junkyard, Trin barely feels the gravel bite into his bare feet. The garage has never looked so far away.
As he steps up to the door, the bells stop abruptly. The last peal hangs in the air, suspended, like a meniscus over the outpost, threatening to burst. “What did Blain say?” Aissa whispers. Her nails scratch into his back as she grasps at him in fear. “As long as the bells ring, it’s not a devlar attack—”
Trin cuts her off. “He didn’t say that,” he mutters, taking the door knob in both hands. He expects it to be locked but it isn’t—apparently his brother didn’t bother to close up the garage at all after they left this morning. Which is why I’m out here now, he thinks bitterly. Nevermind the engines gunning down through the streets or the riot that seems to be building. Blain didn’t lock down the garage and Trin surely wasn’t in the mood earlier to do it, but of course since he’s the mech, he’s the one who has to trudge out here now. Nevermind that Blain’s the one with guns.
Inside the garage it’s dark, and though the steps leading to the floor are steeped in shadow, Trin is careful not to slip in the oil he spilled last night, but it seems someone has covered the stains with sand— “I did,” Aissa tells him. He steps gingerly on the gritty floor, the sand already soaking up the excess oil. “Blain said go out and put down dirt so I did, but I swear I totally forgot about the doors. If he had reminded me—”
“If you hadn’t come through the front in the first place,” Trin argues. He jumps over the last step and crosses the garage, trying to put some distance between them. Outside the engines are louder—run-gun trucks, from the sounds, and ridden hard. For a second he wonders if he shouldn’t leave the bay door up anyway, as it’s his job to tinker on the trucks. But Blain said lock down, he reminded himself. Everyone else be damned.
He jumps up for the length of chain hanging from the open door and pulls hard. As the door comes shuddering down, Aissa ducks beneath it for a quick glance out into the street—the trucks are nearer now, the crowds close enough that Trin can make out individual voices in the rush, crying and shouts for a doctor, and a low keening that hurts his ears. “Get back in here, Iss,” he says. “I’ll lock you out.”
“No, wait.”
With an exasperated sigh, he leans forward until his forehead rests on his hands, folded together over the bolt at the bottom of the door. “For what?” he wants to know. “Blain said—”
She talks over him. “It’s the same truck that just rolled out of here this morning.”
Hope surges through him. “Gerrick’s?” He pushes the door up a little, just enough to step outside.
“The one with him,” she corrects. Hands on her hips, she stares down the length of the street that runs in front of the garage. “Not his. Look.”
Smoke clogs the air and in the dying sun, flecks of quartz swirl through the reddening sky like tiny stars. Trin catches a glimpse of a convoy—a familiar truck bearing down through the street, the engine like a swarm of angry wasps. Behind it are the same people who ran out a few days ago to welcome the gunners into Arens, their eyes now vacant or pained, their faces streaked with sweat and dust. Dark shadows cling to their clothes. As they draw nearer, a few run ahead, towards the garage. But instead of stopping to talk to him or gather around the bay doors, they keep going, headed for the waystation. One man turns to look at them as he passes and Trin sees what he thinks is blood smeared across the front of his shirt. “Hey!” Aissa calls out. “What’s going on?”
“An accident,” the man says without stopping. “Sweet God.”
Aissa gives Trin a troubled look. “An accident,” she repeats. The truck is closer now, only that one. Gerrick’s isn’t rolling through the dust behind it, and that scares him. Through the windshield he can see the driver’s rugged face, harsh mouth drawn down in an ugly scowl, and it isn’t Gerrick. Trin’s heart quickens. Shielding her eyes with one hand, Aissa starts, “You don’t think…”
Seeing them for the first time, the driver guns the truck and it leaps forward with a jackrabbit start. People scatter as it jumps up onto the broken concrete curb, the front bumper taking out a thorny bush. With a hard turn of the wheel, the driver angles towards the garage, aiming for them. “Where’s Gerrick?” Trin asks. There is no one else in the cab, and he isn’t with the other gunners standing in the bed of the truck, jostled together with each bump. This isn’t his truck. An image flashes through Trin’s mind, t
he hoses and cables under Gerrick’s hood tenuously taped into place, and he thinks of the blood on the man’s shirt. No.
Aissa shoves him out of the way as the truck jumps the curb again. Brakes squeal and the huge vehicle fishtails, the bed away from them and the hood pointed their way. It spins in a slow circle, impossibly slow—Trin thinks it’ll never stop completely, just keep pulling back, it’s almost turned around now and the gunners in the back have to duck beneath the half-closed bay door as the bed slides inside the garage. No.
The side of the truck hits the doorframe with a sickening crunch of metal. The garage’s corrugated steel siding gives way with a painful squeal, crumpling like tissue paper beneath the truck’s weight. As the truck stalls out Trin pushes Aissa away from him, no. Where’s Gerrick? “Where…”
He throws himself at the front of the truck, the metal hot beneath his hands. He holds onto the sensation to stay grounded, no. The word is a breathless cry, he has to swallow hard to find his voice. “Where’s Gerrick?” he wants to know. Hysteria edges his voice as he shouts over the roar of the engine. “Where’s—”
The driver jerks a thumb at the bed of the truck. Opening the door, he tumbles out, stands on unsteady feet—his pants are soaked with fresh blood. No. “Devlars,” he whispers, his words scratchy and raw. “Whole horde of them, damn things. Overtook us just north of here.”
Pushing past him, Trin grabs the side of the truck bed and jumps up onto the rear wheel housing but he can’t see, the other gunners crowd together. He swings one leg over the side, jumps into the truck, pushes one of the men aside—