by R. Lee Smith
She couldn’t be sick and she refused to be pregnant, but she felt like shit all the same. It was purely psychological. She knew that. She’d undergone a traumatic event—hell, a whole chain of traumatic events—and the only thing she was suffering from was survivor’s shock. She’d suck it up, life would go on, and everyone would know Amber Bierce was the tough one.
So tough she threw up almost every morning. So tough she cried nearly every night after Meoraq didn’t come back. So tough she hid in Meoraq’s tent whenever Scott started in with one of his speeches and sometimes fell asleep, taking naps in the middle of the day like an old lady.
Like now.
Amber woke up, thought about it for several minutes, and decided she had successfully slept away the vague nausea that had plagued her all morning only to replace it with a headache. She was probably dehydrated. As soon as she’d dredged up the energy, she’d go out there and make tea. Maybe even brew the stuff Meoraq called nai, just because he liked it, even though Amber herself thought it tasted exactly like burnt roots in a cup. And if today was the day he came back and he found a hot cup of nai waiting for him…
“Please come home,” she whispered. “Please.”
No answer, not even from her mother’s drunk ghost.
She got up, crawling stiffly out of the tent into the stark grey light of another alien afternoon. The first thing she noticed, when she had it in her to notice anything, was the quiet. Nicci sat by the fire, drawing in the ashes with the blackened end of a stick. Crandall was stretched out nearby, one arm crooked over his eyes. Apart from them, the camp was clearly empty.
This was not alarming, not at first. Amber hadn’t been awake long enough to feel very strongly about anything, except maybe how much she wanted Meoraq back.
“Where is everyone?” she mumbled, trying to rub some life into her body face-first.
“Out,” Nicci replied.
“How helpful. Where’d they go? We’re really not supposed to wander around.”
“Doesn’t bother you when you want to sneak off for a skinny-dip in the middle of the night,” Crandall remarked without raising his arm.
Irritation woke her up a little more. “I forgot my swimsuit. And how the hell would you know what I was doing last night? Were you spying on me?”
“I was taking a piss when you barged in and got naked. So technically, you were the rude one.”
“Did you watch, you perv?”
“And whacked off,” he agreed, raising his arm to give her a friendly leer. “Twice. You look pretty good, you know. In spite of…all that.”
Amber managed not to say anything for maybe a whole three seconds. Then, gritting her teeth in self-disgust, she said, “In spite of what?”
He shrugged and dropped his arm over his eyes again. “It ain’t an easy life, that’s all I’m saying. You’re a bit banged up.”
She looked away.
“But you still look pretty damn good to me. Toned, you know? I think muscles can look hot on a chick if she doesn’t overdo it. You’re walking that line, but you’re walking it well.”
“You have no idea how many nights I lay awake worrying about that.”
“Don’t be a bitch, Bierce. I’m trying to pay you a compliment. Like, you’ve always had pretty good tits, but now they really stand out. Best tits on the planet.”
“Fuck you,” said Nicci, scratching out her drawing and beginning a new one.
“Okay, look, I don’t even care. Back to the original question: Where is everyone?”
“Out,” said Nicci again.
“They went hunting. I’m protecting the women,” Crandall added.
“Hunting?” Amber looked over at the mound of kipwe meat Meoraq had left them, but it didn’t appear to have gone anywhere. “What for? And with what?” she asked, ducking back into the tent to make sure Meoraq’s kzung was still where she’d left it. It wasn’t.
“That son of a bitch!” she exploded, and burst back out.
“Don’t get your panties in a knot. He’ll bring it right back.”
“What the hell does he think he’s doing? He can’t walk up and stab something!”
“Chill out, would you? He made spears too.” Crandall pointed without stirring himself, and sure enough, there was a spear stabbed ingloriously into the center of a pile of shavings over by the rock where Scott held court.
Amber went over and pulled it out. It was light in her hand, way too light. “Out of this?”
“Oh let it go, Bierce,” sighed Crandall, at last sitting up. “He’s bored, that’s all. Let him break a couple sticks and run off some steam so people see him being all commanding and forget what he looked like sitting naked in a cage.”
Amber knocked the spear against the ground a few times, not trying to break it, but unable to help hearing the dull sound of dead, brittle wood. She shook her head and turned on Crandall. “How long do we wait?” she demanded.
“He’ll be back. I’m sure he hasn’t gone far. He’s not a complete idiot.”
“Yes, he is! Damn it, does someone have to die before it’s enough to stop him? Is that what it’s going to take?”
“People already have died,” remarked Nicci, utterly absorbed in her drawings. “But they still follow him.”
“If they find anything out there, it’s going to go bad. And honestly, the very best scenario is them getting gored to death by an animal because the most likely thing to bump into is a raider or someone from Praxas. I had a spear,” Amber said furiously. “I had a damned good spear and I knew how to use it and they took me like that.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to them,” said Crandall, but he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Because everything’s gone so well up till now,” murmured Nicci.
Crandall heaved a sigh and got to his feet. “If you’re going to freak out, let’s just go find them. But I want it on record that you’re acting like a—”
And then, reedy as a birdcall behind the ever-present wind, the scream.
Amber froze. After all that tough talk, after all that stomping around and swearing and what Scott would surely call her Bierce-knows-best bullshit, Amber froze. It was Crandall who jumped up, Crandall who started running, and if that was all he’d done, things might have gone very differently, but Crandall was there to ‘protect the women’ and so his parting words as he bolted around the leather wall were, “Stay here.”
What toughness failed to provoke, defiance finally did: Clutching the spear, she ran after him, but Crandall ran ahead of her the whole way and he’d been in a cage all winter so what did that say? She’d recognized that it was a human scream, a man’s scream, even if she couldn’t tell who’d made it. The fact that it was not repeated only made things worse. Something had found them. Something had maybe taken them. And was she really going to let herself be taken too? For Scott?
‘Just go back,’ Bo Peep suggested. ‘Nicci needs you, right? Nicci always needs you. You can say it was for Nicci while you hide.’
Shame became anger and anger, as it so often did, became strength. “God damn it,” she snarled, running faster, passing Crandall at last. It became her mantra: “God damn it, God damn it, God fucking damn it!”
She reached the bottom of a rocky hill just as the first Manifestors spilled over the top. They didn’t see her, didn’t see each other, didn’t see the trees. When two of them inevitably collided and went sprawling, the others trampled right over them. It was Dag, badly out of breath, who lurched over to help them up.
“Run!” he shouted. Gasped, really. “It’s coming!”
Eric appeared, pulling Scott along with him. “I think we lost it,” Scott was babbling, hugging onto Meoraq’s sword with both hands. His eyes were eating up his face. “I really think we did. I don’t think it’s still—hey! That’s mine!”
Amber had snatched the kzung out of his grip and now shook it at him. “It’s not yours, it’s Meoraq’s! And if he caught you with it, he’d kill you!” But the rest of tha
t promising fight was forgotten when the kipwe came crashing through the trees.
It was a big one, a male in its prime, and it was breathing almost as hard as Dag after its run. There were a few broken spears still stuck in its side, quivering along with the rest of its quills as it raked a paw over the ground, tearing up roots and winter-hard earth with ridiculous ease. It stared them down and in its eyes, she could see the ponderous weight of its animal thought: People running was one thing. People standing, challenging…that was something else.
Amber’s instinct was to run, but she made herself stand her ground. This wasn’t a hungry predator, just a big, mean animal that handled being startled and stabbed at badly. It was dangerous, yes; it would chase whatever ran and kill whatever it could, but it wouldn’t die trying. If the odds weren’t in its favor, it would go.
“Get up,” said Amber, moving closer to Dag and the Manifestors. “Everybody, come together. Don’t r—”
“Run!” Scott shouted and the two Manifestors with Dag immediately bolted for camp.
The kipwe roared and charged them.
There wasn’t time to think about it and if there had been time, she’d have only thought what a stupid thing she was about to do. She dropped the useless spear and ran to meet it, screaming in perfectly mingled fear and frustration as she swung the heavy kzung and hit the kipwe square in the throat. Her moment of surprised triumph was damned short; the blade skated harmlessly over the creature’s quills and drove itself in somewhere in the chest. Suddenly the hilt in her hands was shoving back at her. Amber flew back, hit the ground, caught a glimpse of half a kzung with two tons of kipwe behind it coming right at her, and rolled. The hilt hit the ground where she’d been and the rest of the blade vanished into the beast’s body. The kipwe bellowed, backed up, then saw her on the ground. Amber lunged out to grab the spear, which she knew damned well was nothing but a pointed piece of dead wood. She scrambled up, turned around right as the kipwe stood up on its hind legs, and stabbed as it swung.
She missed its eye, missed its nose, even missed the gaping open target of its mouth, but the stick went in somewhere. She felt it puncture flesh in the split-second before its paw connected with her side. There was no sense of flying, only the second, immediate-seeming impact as she hit the ground and slid across it. Damp earth sluiced up over her arms and into her face, clogging her nose, filling her mouth with the taste of the grave she wouldn’t even get. She rolled over, spitting and swiping at herself with one hand and digging frantically for another weapon—a stick, a rock, one of the Ancients’ plasma cannons, anything!—before climbing to her feet again. She had nothing but her bare hands, but she ran at it again, because it was just a kipwe for God’s sake, and maybe it would turn around if she charged it, maybe it would run.
The kipwe reared again…then listed, swatted drunkenly at its face. It bellowed, shook its head hard, grunted, and then toppled over.
Amber slowed her run to a stagger and then to a stop. The beast stayed down. It did not appear to be breathing. She stared at it for a while, still breathing hard, alert enough that she knew she was winded, not so much that she knew she was hurt, and finally took the last three steps and gave it a cautious kick.
It did not move.
“No way I killed it,” she said to herself in a remarkably calm and conversational tone.
The kipwe did not reply. It was very dead.
Amber started to bend over for a better look, but pain washed out from her side enough to prevent that. She clapped a hand over the hurt (wet hurt, not a great indicator of things to come) and knelt instead, prodding at the beast’s body.
She found fragments of her spear imbedded harmlessly in its cheek, beneath the spiky tuft of its hilarious muttonchops where it had done no good at all. It took a little longer to find the kzung, buried to its hilt in the thick, prickly quills. Getting it out meant tugging, shaking, and finally planting a foot on its head and heaving back in spite of the hell in her side. The kipwe’s wound wheezed at her, blowing a foul slip of air in her face with a wet, farting sound. Swimmer’s air, they called that. She’d stabbed the kipwe through the lung.
And it had still taken it that long to die.
“Jesus,” said Crandall behind her.
She turned around, holding Meoraq’s sword limply in one hand, trying to think of what to do next. People saved, check. Dead kipwe, double check. Moving on.
“I’m going to need your help cutting it up,” she announced. “There’s no reason it should go to waste, you know? Oh. And I may have a few splinters.” She held a hand up and sure enough, there were half a dozen kipwe quills sticking out of her arm at various points. “So if you think you can grow up just long enough to take them out without masturbating all over me…”
The rest of that bitchy comment lost itself in Crandall’s silence. He was still staring, not at the kipwe, but at her.
Amber looked down, past another half-dozen broken quills all down her side to her left hip. “Goodness, that’s a lot of blood,” she remarked, watching it stream down over her thigh.
And then the world turned white.
* * *
She came around slowly, not to the pain, which was tremendous, but to the relatively innocuous sound of laughter. She’d been tucked beneath a blanket, which was hot and scratchy and unbelievably heavy on her right side, where the pain lived. Her skin felt far too tight over the swollen, throbbing hell of her side, threatening to split whatever bandage had been tied over her. It hurt to breathe, it hurt not to breathe, and she was reasonably certain it would hurt to open her eyes, so she just lay there and concentrated on not embarrassing herself with a lot of loud moaning. The laughter came and went, curiously high-pitched for a camp mostly filled with men…and slightly crazed.
Actually, a lot crazed. Less laughter than full-on lunatic gibbering. She wasn’t the only one who seemed to be concerned; she could hear Scott holding court close by in a tone of deep concern. He was using all his old familiar catch-phrases, too. Explore our options. Make decisions. Take command. The only thing he didn’t do was tell the people laughing at him to shut up and she kind of wished he would.
‘No one’s laughing, little girl,’ Bo Peep told her.
Beneath the heavy blanket and the heavier pain, Amber pulled the scattered pieces of her brain together and listened.
That sound…that high, chattering, lunatic sound.
Her eyes heaved themselves open. She tried to bolt upright and managed only a slightly deeper, choking breath. Her cry of, “Those are ghets!” came out as little more than a hoarse gasp and a rusty groan. The world went briefly grey on her and came very slowly back.
“She’s awake,” Crandall said in the distance.
A blurry shadow grew over her—Scott, looking down. “I don’t think so,” he said after a moment’s study.
Amber tried again to speak and again could only push air around. She was beginning to think she might be seriously hurt this time.
A second blur appeared, bringing with it a cool hand that wiped the sweaty hair out of Amber’s face. A woman’s hand, although not a soft one. Her mother’s hand, she thought, and it was her mother’s face leaning over her now, looking haggard and bitter and way too solid for a dead lady. “Amber?”
Nicci? Impossible. Nicci was half this woman’s age. But no, it was Nicci, and as soon as she realized it, much of the woman’s hard edges seemed to soften until she could see her baby sister above her instead of their mother’s ghost.
“You look like Mama,” Amber tried to say, but of course, all that made it into the world was a whispered, “…mama.”
“She’s delirious,” Scott declared, sounding annoyed and she couldn’t really blame him. He hated it when his speeches were interrupted.
“Guys?” That was Dag, looking back over his shoulder at the leather walls that surrounded the camp, beyond which the ghet-song had suddenly degenerated into snarling and screaming.
“They’ll be back,” Scott said grim
ly as the sounds receded. He folded his arms. One of them was distorted, stretched long and broken at odd angles; he had Meoraq’s kzung in one hand like a scepter. “And they’re coming right in here…unless we can give them a reason not to.”
All around the camp, Scott’s surviving Manifestors looked at Amber.
‘Oh please,’ she thought at them irritably. ‘What do you want me to do about it? I can’t even move!’
…oh.
Amber put all her strength into sitting up and managed to lift her head a few trembling centimeters before it dropped meatily back onto her mat. Had she ever thought waking up from her snake-bite or whatever that had been was the weakest a living person could feel? At least she’d been able to hold her head up! This…This was really bad.
And Meoraq wasn’t here this time.
“You can’t, man,” said Eric, coming out of the shadows to stand between her and Scott. “Whatever you’re thinking, you just can’t.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, Mr. Lassiter. Look at her! She’s dying! It’s a miracle she’s lasted this long, she can’t possibly live out the night! All she’s doing is stinking like blood and telling every predator in miles to come and get us! Now we can rally around her and get everyone killed or…”
“You’re not leaving her again!” Nicci leapt up to stand at Eric’s side, her hands balled into fists.
Scott stepped right up to meet her, putting his face too close to hers and cocking his head to one side. He’d picked up some dumaqi habits, it seemed, living in that cage. “I made a command decision,” he said tightly. “We couldn’t take her with us and we couldn’t wait around for her to get better or die, so yeah, I made that call. You want to stand here now and tell me I did the wrong thing, you go ahead because you are absolutely right. If I’d done what I should have done and she’d died like she should have done, we’d have had the lizard with us the whole time. How would that have changed things, huh?” Scott swung around, raising both arms over his head and shouting out to his Manifestors like they were a cheering throng that filled a stadium instead of a handful of men a few meters away. “He stayed with her when he should have been with us! Instead of blaming me for everything that went wrong, put the credit where it’s due! On Amber-fucking-Bierce!”