by Dan Wells
“We’ll never be able to move it,” said Marcus. Kira slithered down next to it, leaning in close.
“Andrew Turner!” shouted Marcus, but Kira shushed him.
“Quiet, I’m going to try something.”
The dust settled, and the air was still. Kira opened her medkit and pulled out the stethoscope — one of the digital models with sound amplification. She thumbed the switch, silently praying that the battery hadn’t degraded, and pressed the scope to the rubble.
Pom, pom, pom, pom…
“It’s his heartbeat,” Kira called out. “He’s right under the fallen chimney.”
“Those stones are propping up half the house,” said Marcus. “We’re not moving them.”
“As long as his heart’s beating, we are,” said Jayden. “Out of the way, Walker.” He slid down next to Kira and called for help from the others. “Yoon, get me rope, and tie the other end to one of the horses.” A moment later the soldier dropped a stiff nylon cord in between them, and Jayden huffed, reaching out to loop the rope around the rock. Kira pressed the scope to the stone again.
Pom, pom, pom.
“I can still hear the heartbeat.” She turned, looking for beams of wood. “Marcus is right, though — if we move this now, the whole first floor will come down on him. Here, brace it with this.” She pulled on a long joist, still attached to shards of wooden flooring, and Jayden shoved it into place, propping up the rubble.
“All set.” Jayden called out orders to the wagon driver. “Take her forward, Yoon! More … more … okay, the line’s taut, now just an inch at a time.”
The rope stretched tight; Kira couldn’t see the stone move, but she could hear it scraping loudly against the stone floor below. “It’s working!” she shouted.
Jayden called more orders to Yoon. “Keep going — nice and slow, that’s perfect. Now ready on the line.” The stone dislodged from its hole, and Jayden grunted as he helped shove it to the side.
Kira turned to the open hole, eyeing the makeshift support beam nervously, when a shape in the darkness stopped her cold. She hadn’t seen it before — it had been behind the stone.
It was a human leg, severed just above the knee.
“No,” she murmured. She reached forward cautiously, probing the jagged edge where the bone had broken. Crushed, she thought, feeling the damage. The chimney fell and snapped his leg right off. How can he still be alive? She pressed her scope against the next stone.
Pom, pom, pom.
“Bloody hell,” said Jayden, crouching behind her, “is that his leg?”
“It means we’re close.”
“It means he’s dead,” said Jayden. “That chimney would have pulverized him.”
“I told you I can hear his heartbeat,” Kira hissed. “Give me the rope.”
The rubble shifted, and Kira closed her mouth and eyes tightly against a hail of rocks and dust. The rafter above her groaned, and she heard shouts of alarm from the soldiers above.
“Get her out of there!” called Marcus.
“He’s right,” said Jayden. “This is coming down around us any second. One dead man isn’t worth losing a medic.”
“I’m telling you, he’s alive.”
“Get out,” Jayden snapped. “If we can’t dig him out of here, we definitely can’t dig you out.”
“This is a human life,” said Kira. “We don’t have any of those to spare right now.”
“Get out!”
Kira gritted her teeth and inched forward; Jayden swore behind her, reaching for her feet, but she kicked him away.
Pom, pom, pom.
She felt the next stone in front of her, testing for handholds, probing its stability. I think I can move this one, she thought. He’s got to be right on the other side of it, and then they’ll see. I know he’s alive.
“Hey, Mr. Turner,” she shouted, “can you hear me? I’m coming to get you — we’re not leaving you behind.” She braced herself on the basement floor, praying she didn’t dislodge anything vital, and pushed on the largest stone, feeling it rotate slightly against a stiff, off-center axis. She pushed again, straining at the weight, then shoved the stone to the side. There was another shape in the darkness, too twisted for her to recognize the outline. She thumbed the scope again, reaching forward desperately.
Dit, dit, dit, dit…
Wait, thought Kira, that’s not right, and then her fingers brushed against slick, wet flesh. She caught a piece of fabric between two fingers and pulled it closer, hearing the dit grow louder in the tiny cavern. She felt the bloody limb with both hands, refusing to believe it; she inched back toward the light and held it up, confirming it with her eyes.
“It’s his arm,” she said softly. “He’s gone.”
Jayden stared. “And the heartbeat?”
She held up the arm, the wrist glinting metallically. Dit, dit, dit. “His wristwatch.” She felt drained and lifeless. “He’s gone.”
Jayden pulled the arm away from her, steadying her with his hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We have to take him back,” said Kira.
“This was not an accident,” said Jayden. “Someone came through here and set this bomb — someone who knew we were coming. They’re probably still nearby.”
Kira frowned. “Why would someone blow up a weather station?”
“It was a radio,” said Gianna. “We didn’t see it all before it blew, but I know that much for certain. This was the biggest communications hub I’ve ever seen.”
“Voice,” said Kira.
Jayden’s voice was low and grim. “And after that noise, they definitely know we’re here.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Jayden gathered the survivors in the shadow of the smoking wagon. “There’s no way we’re getting home in this thing, which puts us at least two days out from civilization. Our radio’s been destroyed as well. We’re on our own.”
“We’ll have to rig a stretcher for Private Lanier,” said Marcus. “He has a compound fracture in his shin. I’ve set it as best I can, but he’s not walking anywhere.”
Kira scanned the trees and ruins around them, tensing at every movement. She’d been in the hospital once when the Voice attacked; she’d seen the wounded soldiers they brought in, moaning and screaming in pain as the triage medics wheeled them into surgery. It still shocked her to think that any human would harm another one.
“Build a stretcher,” said Jayden. “We have two horses left: Patterson and Yoon will ride ahead and send backup as soon as they can reach the Defense Grid perimeter. The rest of us follow on foot.”
“It’s nearly thirty miles,” said Yoon, “and the horses are already tired. They can’t do it in one shot.”
“They can go for at least another hour,” said Jayden. “You’ll run out of light by then anyway. Go as far as you can, then let the horses rest till first light.”
“We don’t have to go all the way back to East Meadow,” said Gianna. “There’s a farm community west of here, and several more to the east. They’re a whole lot closer than thirty miles, and Lanier can get help sooner.”
“Our map was in the side of the wagon that blew up,” said Jayden. “I’m not in the mood to just wander around the island looking for rednecks.”
“They’re not rednecks,” said Gianna. “Most of them have more education than you do—”
“Their amazing educations aren’t much good to us without a map to find them,” said Kira. Why was Gianna arguing at a time like this? “East Meadow’s our best bet — we can follow major roads the whole way.”
“Lanier’s not going to make it back,” said Gianna, “not with that fracture. The farms have hospitals just like we do.”
“Not ‘just like we do,’” said Kira, “and no, Lanier’s not going to die on the road. Do you have some kind of medical background you forgot to mention?”
“Anyone can see—”
“Anyone can see that he’s bad,” said Marcus, speaking calmly, “but we’ve splinted
it, we’ve wrapped it, and I can drug him so hard he’ll think he’s flying home on a magical gumdrop rainbow. You could get high on his farts.”
“Patterson and Yoon, go south to East Meadow,” said Jayden firmly. “The rest of us follow with the same goal, but”—he looked at Gianna—“if we run across a farm or an outpost or anything like that, we can try to commandeer another wagon.”
“You don’t have the authority to commandeer a wagon,” Gianna snapped.
“And you don’t have the authority to disobey my orders,” said Jayden. “This is a military operation, in a state of emergency, and I will take you home the way I think is best if I have to drug you as much as Lanier to do it. Am I clear?”
“Is this what we have to look forward to?” asked Gianna. “Is this our brave new world when you plague babies grow up and start running things?”
Jayden didn’t waver. “I asked you if I was clear.”
“Perfectly,” said Gianna. “Let’s get back to paradise.”
Jayden stood up and the group dispersed, gathering their equipment and preparing for the journey. Kira took Jayden’s arm and pulled him back.
“We can’t just leave them,” she said. “The dead horses, sure, but there’s three dead people in that house. How are we going to get them home?”
“We can come back for them.”
“I counted six feral house cats walking past us just during your little planning meeting, and that clinic you had us in was home to a pretty big pack of dogs. If we leave three bodies here, there won’t be anything left to come back to.”
Jayden’s eyes were cold. “What do you want me to do, Walker? We can’t carry them, and we don’t have time to bury them. We’ll come back in force to investigate the site and recover the generators, but right now ten live people are more important than three dead ones.”
“Ten minutes,” said Kira. “We can spare that.”
“You think you can bury them in ten minutes?”
“They’re half-buried already.”
Kira watched him consider, then shrug and nod. “You’ve got a point. I’ll help.”
In addition to Andrew Turner, the explosion had killed two soldiers, and their bodies were laid out carefully by the house. A man and a woman — a boy and girl, really, probably no more than sixteen years old each. The girl might have been even younger, but Kira couldn’t tell. She stood over them solemnly, wondering who they had been: what they had done for fun, who they had lived with, how they had come to be here. She didn’t even know their names. Jayden took the girl by the arms, Kira grabbed her legs, and they picked their way carefully through the ruins. The deepest hole was the one they’d dug trying to save Turner, and they lowered the girl’s body down into it as gently as they could, pushing her back into the recess behind the chimney stones. By now some of the other soldiers had finished their tasks and came to help, carefully carrying the boy and sliding his body into the hole as well. Kira watched numbly as Jayden and Private Brown destabilized the last remaining wall and knocked it over onto the hole, covering the bodies.
Kira felt her heart break as the wall came down. This wasn’t enough — it was good to bury them, but they deserved more. She tried to speak, but the lazy clouds of dust from the rubble were too much to look at, and she couldn’t speak.
Marcus watched her, his eyes aching and tender. He looked at Jayden. “We should say something.”
Jayden shrugged. “Good-bye?”
“Okay,” said Marcus, stepping forward. “I guess I can do it. Anyone know what god they worshipped?”
“Not a very good one,” muttered Gianna.
“Maija was a Christian,” said Sparks. “I’m not sure what kind. Rob was Buddhist. I have no idea about the civvie.”
Marcus looked around for more clarification, but nobody knew any more. “Not the easiest mix to work with,” said Marcus. “How about this, then. I think I can remember some of the old poetry they taught us in school.” He straightened up, fixing his eyes in the distance, and the soldiers dropped their heads. Kira kept her eyes on the pile of fallen bricks, dust still hovering over it.
“‘Death be not proud,’” said Marcus, “‘though some have called thee mighty and dreadful.’” He paused, thinking. “I’m totally butchering this. ‘Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, but thou canst … not kill me. One short sleep and then we wake eternally, and death shall be no more.’”
Jayden glanced at Marcus. “You think they’re going to wake up? Just like that?”
“It’s just an old poem,” said Marcus.
“Wherever they’re waking up,” said Jayden, “it’s getting pretty damn crowded.” He turned and stalked back to the wagon.
Kira held Marcus’s hand and watched as the dust settled slowly on the fallen bricks.
The rain pooled in the mud, filling the fat rubber tire tracks with jumping drops of water. Kira pulled her hood forward, trying again to shield her eyes, but as the storm grew fiercer it almost felt as if the rain was pouring in from all sides, leaping up from the puddles and seeping down through every seam in her clothing.
Jayden stopped again, halting the line with a raised fist. The tire tracks hadn’t come from Asharoken and the rigged bomb, but any presence could be dangerous out here in the wild. This part of the island had been wealthier than most, back in the day, so instead of close-packed houses and overgrown lawns, they walked through dense, dripping forest, dotted here and there with a lonely mansion looming out of the darkness. Kira cocked her head to the side, listening, hoping to catch a trace of whatever tiny noise Jayden kept sensing through the downpour; she could see Marcus doing the same. She heard the rain, the splashes, the squelch of mud as someone shifted their weight in the street. Jayden dropped his fist and pointed forward, and the group started walking again.
“I think he’s just making it up,” whispered Marcus. “He just likes making that little fist signal thingy and watching us all obey him.”
“I’ve never been this wet in my life,” said Kira. “Even immersed in a bathtub I swear I was dryer than I am now.”
“Look on the bright side,” said Marcus.
Kira waited.
“This is the point,” she said, “at which you would traditionally suggest a bright side.”
“I’ve never been a real traditional guy,” said Marcus. “Besides, I’m not saying I know a bright side, I just think this would be a great time to look at one.”
Jayden raised his fist, and the group stopped walking.
“Jayden just heard a bright side,” whispered Marcus. “There’s an uplifting metaphor creeping through those bushes.”
Kira snorted, and Jayden turned to glare at them. He turned back, flicked his fingers toward the side of the road, and walked toward a break in the trees.
Kira followed, surprised; even she could tell that the tracks continued straight ahead through the saplings on the ruined road. The trees on either side were dark and ominous — what did Jayden hear in them?
The group picked their way carefully through a narrow gap that used to be a driveway, now cracked and broken by a decade of weeds. A large house loomed dark ahead, nearly as black as the night around it. Marcus crept forward to reach her, walking quietly beside her in a crouch. Kira leaned toward him to ask a question, then stopped abruptly as a flash of color caught her eye: orange light in the window, a tiny gleam here and gone in an instant. Fire. She froze in place, grabbing Marcus’s arm and pulling his ear up to her lips.
“There’s someone in there.”
Kira gripped her shotgun tightly, hoping it hadn’t grown so wet in the storm that it wouldn’t fire properly. Even with five armed soldiers around them, she felt exposed. She lowered her body slowly to a crouch, pulling Marcus with her. Jayden stopped abruptly, raising his rifle to his cheek, and a voice called out from the darkened house.
“That’s far enough.”
The voice was thin and raw, a wraith in the darkness. Rain drummed on Kira’s hood and
back; she readied the safety on the rifle — a tiny button that turned it from a thick plastic club into a magic wand of death. Point and click, and watch the target explode. Water seeped down her collar, into her eyes, through the fabric of her gloves.
“My name is Jayden Van Rijn,” said Jayden, “sergeant second class, Long Island Defense Grid.” He kept his rifle trained on the same invisible target; he must have seen the man before he spoke. Kira still couldn’t see anything. “Identify yourself.”
“I’m nobody you need to have a problem with,” said the voice. “And nobody who has a problem with you.”
“Identify yourself,” Jayden repeated.
Kira imagined the trees around them full of Voices — men in dark shadows, formless under rain ponchos, gripping their weapons as tightly as Kira was gripping hers. It was pitch-black under the trees, the moon and stars lost behind a thick layer of storm clouds. If anyone started shooting, she wondered if she’d even dare to shoot back — how could she tell which shapes in the darkness were enemies, and which were friends?
“They might not be from the Voice,” Marcus whispered. His voice was nearly inaudible, his lips practically touching her ear. “They could be merchants, drifters, even farmers. Just stay low.”
“You have a very pretty name,” said the voice in the darkness. “You can take it with you when you go.”
“We’re on our way to East Meadow,” said Jayden, “just making sure the area’s safe before we make camp. How many you got in there?”
The voice laughed hoarsely. “That’s a mighty dumb piece of intel for me to give you, not knowing your intentions. What if you’re Voices?”
“We’re from the Defense Grid,” said Jayden. “I told you already.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time someone lied to me.”
Kira heard a noise in the trees — a rustle of leaves, a snap that could have been a twig or a cocking gun. She sank lower to the ground, hoping it was one of their own people.
“There’s ten of us,” said Jayden. “The Voice is a lot more subtle than that … like maybe one old man hiding out in a ruined house.”