After some time, to break the silence, Sam said, “I had no idea the camp was so organized. Guards and all.”
“I guess you didn’t,” Flinch said. “The way you’ve kept away from everybody and all.”
Sam made no response, afraid she would blurt out that she did not want to have more contact with her followers. She could not imagine their reaction if they discovered how they frightened and disgusted her.
Something small thrashed about in the underbrush, startlingly loud, and Sam clutched Flinch’s arm in fear. He reassuringly patted her on the back and, embarrassed, she released him.
She concentrated then on not humiliating herself any further by showing alarm. Still, she almost jumped out of her skin when a voice from the darkness calmly said, “Password or die.”
“Oh hell, Lem, I guess you know me,” Flinch whispered back. Sam could make out the dark outline of the man now, atwinkle with bright radioisotopes. He nodded.
“Who’s that with you?” he whispered back.
“Step forward and see.”
When the man recognized Sam, he knelt in the earth before her. In a flurry of confusion, she touched his head lightly, and whispered, “Oh, get up out of the dirt.”
“She wants to hear what’s going on, without anybody finding her out,” Flinch explained, quietly emphasizing the she. “Can you do?”
The man nodded again. “Follow me real quiet. Got to lead you around the Greenstate guards. They’re not worth diddly-squat, but maybe you shouldn’t do any talking.”
He led them into darkness, up a slope, over a ruined wall. Sam noticed he had a kind of rollng walk, one knee half collapsing with each step.
A single window glowed orange with lanternlight in the back of an isolated brick building. Standing under it, they could hear a mumble of words, some few audible, but not enough to make any sense of the conversation. Flinch gestured to the guard, and they both joined hands to boost Sam up.
Clinging with both hands to the sill of the glassless window, and terrified almost to death, Sam peered within. The light came not from the room she was staring into but one adjacent to it. Through a doorway, she could see a table and two sets of hands on it. A lantern hung from the ceiling. Two men were sitting opposite each other at the table, but their hands were all she could see of them.
“—is not a well man,” an unfamiliar voice said. “In his indisposition, I have been empowered to act as his agent.”
There was a brief laugh, and a second voice—Keith’s—said, “That’s a very old ploy, you know. If you had the power you wouldn’t be out here in the middle of nowhere, trying to trick me into giving it to you. Let’s not kid each other.”
“Well, it was worth a try,” the stranger said urbanely. “Now explain to me once again why I shouldn’t simply let my men round up your gang of rabble.”
“There are over a hundred people in my encampment,” Keith said in a patient voice. “Many of them are in reasonable health, some few have skills, and all of them are armed. You can come and take them, and I predict you’ll lose a dozen of your Militia, and waste a good number of potential miners. Or you can let me walk them into Honkeytonk, and you’ll have them all, with no violence at all.”
“Interesting.” The man mused for a while. “Still, I have to tell you, this improbable romance about Colonel Laing’s daughter …”
“What’s so improbable about it?” Keith snapped.
“Well … it seems so great a coincidence that just when you happen to need a bargaining chip, the daughter of the single most important man in the Drift should happen to wander into your arms.”
“There are no coincidences,” Keith said.
“Exactly my point.”
After a moment’s annoyed silence, Keith said, “Perhaps you’ve heard of a marvelous new invention called the telegraph. It operates by the principle of—”
“Oh, no need to explain the marvels of science to me!” the man said with exaggerated irony. “We are quite up to date in Boston, let me assure you.”
“Then you understand how I could communicate with the capital in Atlanta, and even the authorities in Richmond, without having to actually travel to either place? You understand how I could ask the National Police to open their files on foreign nationals staying within the United States, and how I could then—”
“Enough,” the stranger said. “Your point is taken.”
Sam closed her eyes tight and tears did not come. She opened them again, and they were as dry as wood. She let go of the sill.
Flinch and his friend had to move fast to catch her, because she made no effort to break her fall. But catch her they did, and silently too. She let them lead her away, back to the guard’s post, where Flinch asked, “Get what you wanted?”
She realized that neither of the others had heard a word of the exchange. She shook her head, no. “Let’s go home,” she said.
It was a long walk to the camp, and she walked it blind. Flinch made sure she didn’t stumble into anything, but all Sam’s attention was focused on the words she had overheard. Silently, she repeated them over and over, looking for some interpretation—any interpretation—of them other than the obvious one.
But there was no evading it. Keith had turned her over to the NIGH. Even before she had met him, he had betrayed her.
Back at the camp, she let Flinch lead her to Esterhaszy’s tent, and then sent him away. She couldn’t possibly go back to her own tent, alone. She needed somebody’s sympathy.
“Bob?” she said. He was bent over his medical tests as she walked in, working over a low, makeshift table.
“Well,” he said, not turning around, “you insisted on screwing around without taking any precautions, and now you’ve got to pay the price.”
“What?” she said, bewildered.
“You’re pregnant,” he said sternly. He turned around and the disapproving expression on his face disappeared at the sight of her. His mouth fell open, and he hurried to her side to take her elbow. “Good lord, what’s happened to you?
“Pregnant?” she said wonderingly. She let him sit her down on a crate of books. She sat with her legs wide, forearms laid loosely across her knees. “Pregnant!” She began to laugh.
The laughter grew, slowly at first, but irresistably. She threw back her head and howled. The laughter filled her up and overflowed out her mouth. Gasps turned into sobs and wracked her body in wave after shuddering wave. Her lungs hurt with it. She rocked and convulsed with it.
Esterhaszy slapped her twice in the face, hard, but she didn’t feel a thing. She waved her head back and forth, shrieking with laughter.
It went on and on, and at some point she stopped paying attention to it, and became aware of nothing at all until morning.
It was hot. Sam looked around and realized she was in a covered wagon. It was nowhere near as glamorous a vehicle as the history books made it out to be—just a wagon with wooden hoops and canvas stretched overtop. The air inside was still, almost breathless.
“I can’t feel a thing,” Sam said dully. It felt like she was hollow.
“I’m not surprised,” Esterhaszy said from the buckboard. “After that laughing jag last night.”
They were near the lead of the procession, a relatively dustless position. Keith was at the very front. “Did I make a fool of myself?” Sam asked.
“Well,” Esterhaszy said. “Yeah. But what the hell—we all do sooner or later, right?” He clucked at the horses, twitching the team back to the road’s center. “Care to tell me about it?”
So Sam told him, word for word, all she had overheard the night before. She recited it flatly, without intonation; she felt as though all emotion had died in her forever.
“Jesus,” Esterhaszy muttered. He drove in silence for a time. “God damn.” He slammed his fist into his knee, repeated the gesture several times. “You realize what he’s planning on doing? He’s going to send”—he waved an arm—“all these people—over a hundred of them!—into slavery!�
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Sam shrugged. “I guess.”
“You guess?” Esterhaszy swung around to face her. “What kind of cold, heartless—?” He broke off suddenly. “I’m sorry, kid. I guess you haven’t been given much reason to feel altruistic toward anyone.”
Sam shrugged again.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked at last. “Sit there and take it?”
“I—”
“Planning on being a victim all your life?” He was sneering now. “Going to pass it on to your child, let him be a victim all his life too?”
“Hey, now wait a minute!”
He turned again to speak directly at her in a low and earnest voice. The horses wandered to the side of the road, stopped to munch some stunted elm saplings. “Or are you going to do the socially responsible thing and break up this pilgrimage? Think about it. Scatter these people to the hills again and the People’s Militia will never catch them. Take them and you away, and Piotrowicz doesn’t have any bargaining chips for his Machiavellian little schemes. If you want revenge, you couldn’t pick a better means. What do you say?”
“No,” she mumbled.
“No what?” He began muscling the horses back into the procession.
“No, I’m not doing anything anymore. I hurt and I’m tired. Keith can do what he wants—I’m not going to get in the way.”
“Still love him, eh?”
“No—yes, but what does that matter?” she said irritably. “I’m just tired.”
But the thought of revenge would not go away. The long morning stretched on, and the sun grew hotter, and the thought kept returning and growing. Dust caked up on Sam’s face; she clawed some of it from her forehead, and it felt heavy and clayish under her nails.
Hours passed, and the shadows did not shift. The morning was hot, breathless, eternal. The Drifters trudged along, heads down and eyes slitted. Their order did not change.
They were crossing a long valley, and however long they marched, they came no nearer to the hills. The sun hung two handsbreadths over the horizon and did not move.
Something was wrong, something was missing. Sam tried to track it down, for she needed something to distract her from the idea of revenge, which kept returning, burdensome and difficult and intimidating. Determinedly she puzzled over it and then finally—with a start—realized that the Reactor was no longer pulsing. Its steady, unvarying beat had been with her so long that she had forgotten its presence. Now … it was gone.
She could still feel the Reactor’s presence, beyond the horizon, and still see the radiation lines on her own skin. She waited for the pulse—ten minutes went by. Fifteen. The Reactor did not pulse.
The people trudged forward in the same order they had begun the morning in. Bob clucked at the horses as he had a hundred times that day. The sun floated motionless in the sky. They were caught, all of them, trudging through timless waste, while the air grew hotter, and the hills remained distant.
And finally, just to get Time started again, Sam asked, “What did you have in mind?”
Esterhaszy turned around to face her. “Actually, I don’t really have what you’d call an actual plan yet,” he admitted. “Maybe a notion, is all. But the day is long; give me time to think.”
The Reactor pulsed. They began to climb out of the long valley.
The Drifters were already beginning to gather around Sam’s tent, keeping carefully back of the line Esterhaszy had drawn about it. The procession was within a day’s march of Honkeytonk. Tonight’s would be the last healing ceremony.
“I’ve used up half my medicines on this God damned trek,” Bob grumbled. “They’re supposed to be my pay too.” He set his bags by the pile of bedding in the center of the tent. These and two camp stools were all the items in the tent—the others were already packed. “Sit down, rub your arm. Like I’ve just given you an injection. I can hear him coming.”
The tent flap opened, and Keith walked in. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Sit down,” Esterhaszy said. “You’re next.” He prepped a cotton alcohol swab.
“Sure.” Keith rolled up one sleeve. “What’s it for?”
Sam had felt confident that her expression would not give the scheme away; it seemed she had been hiding her emotions forever, and she was not sure she would ever return to expressing them openly. But watching Keith now, she was struck by the sudden insight that it didn’t really matter, because unless Keith was looking for someone’s reaction, he didn’t see people at all.
“Sleeping sickness,” Esterhaszy said, expertly sliding in the needle. “Yeah, stings a little, doesn’t it? Now unclench your fist.” He undid the band around Keith’s arm. “Good stuff. Now just to be sure, I want you to count backwards from twenty.”
“Twenty,” Keith said. “Nineteen. Just what is this sleeping sickness stuff anyway? Sixteen.” He yawned. “Hey, maybe I’ve caught it.”
“I’m sure of it.” Esterhaszy caught the man as he slumped. “Give me a hand here, will you, Sam?”
They laid Keith down across the mound of blankets, head up and one arm thrown to the side. Bob undid his top three shirt buttons, examined the effect critically, and tilted the chin a bit higher. “There,” he said. “The swooning victim.”
He bent over Keith’s neck with a scalpel.
“Oh, be careful!” Sam cried involuntarily.
The blade flashed, and Sam flinched away. Blood spurted. Esterhaszy rocked the head from side to side, spreading the bloodstain. He examined the wound.
“Won’t lose much,” he decided. He began staining Sam with mercurochrome: two thin lines from the corners of her mouth, a drop off-center on her chin. A large, dark splotch on the front of her dress, just over one breast. He hummed tunelessly as he worked.
Finally, he nodded. “That’ll scatter them! Once they see their goddess incarnate revealed as a—forgive the expression—creature of the night, we’ll have destroyed any reason they might have for hanging around.”
Sam knelt by Keith. She felt dizzy. Esterhaszy came and went, removing the chairs and bags, emptying the tent. Sam half cradled Keith in her arms. She could have cried at how pale and vulnerable he looked.
“They’re still gathering—almost all here.” Esterhaszy patted her shoulder. “Watch out for the tent pole, okay? It should fall forward, but don’t forget that it’s heavy.”
The Reactor pulsed twice while Sam waited. She stared at Keith’s throat, at the red blood glistening on it. Daintily, she dabbed a finger into the blood, held the tip before her eyes. Slowly, deliberately, she stuck the finger in her mouth, and sucked on it. It was the first time in her life she had ever tasted human blood.
Her gorge rose at the taste, and she almost gagged. She wanted to vomit, but she did not. And at last she was able to remove her finger from her mouth, and calmly await what was to come.
An internal combustion engine snarled to life, grew to a bass growl. That would be Flinch, who was not in on the plan but could be relied on to do what he was told.
West. Samantha oriented herself by the Reactor, which she could feel over the horizon, a little off south.
The engine sound changed as Flinch kicked the transport vehicle into gear and floored the accelerator. There was a whistling slash of air as the rope tautened, and the tent was suddenly jerked away. The canvas went whomph and was gone.
The semicircle of devotees gaped in horror. Some few were watching the tent fly away. But the others were staring at Sam and the tableau she formed with Keith. She raised her head from him and stared at them, frightened half to death. They in turn stood paralyzed by the trickle of mercurochrome from her lips.
Clumsily, Sam started to her feet, and ran due west. Esterhaszy was waiting for her just beyond the camp, with transportation and their belongings. He swore he could get them away safely.
She ran, but she was no longer sure she cared.
Honkeytonk was built up against the mountainside, where the old mine shafts opened to the surface. It was a brig
ht Mecca of human accomplishment in the Drift. Not a tree or weed, not a shred of green grew within its boundaries. All was gleaming storage tank and soaring cracking towers. The roads between barracks were of packed slag, and the brick buildings were darkened by the fumes of industry.
Standing to the side and above, on the mountain slope, Sam said, “I’m afraid.” She stared down at the town and the single track railroad that was being built from it, a brown gash north through the wilderness.
“Don’t lose your nerve now, kid,” Esterhaszy said. “We’ve been through the worst of it, you and me.”
They walked down to the bare-earth security zone surrounding the city, moving slowly and with empty hands. There were guards patrolling everywhere, People’s Militia in smart blues and pith helmets, their nucleopores a gleaming white.
At the perimeter, they were stopped and asked their business.
“I’m here to see my father,” Sam began.
“Oh yes,” the guard said. “We were told.” He snapped his fingers, and two lower-ranking militia stood to attention. “Your escort.”
“Who told—?” Sam started to ask, but thought better of it. They were guided into the town, over sparsely populated streets.
Then Keith breezed by in the open passenger seat of a Cambridge electric steamer. He waved cheerily as the driver took him by, a fistful of papers in one hand.
“What the hell?” Bob said. Sam stood motionless as the car dwindled down the road, into the Drift. She felt stricken and deserted. “Well,” Bob said, “at least he’s not holding any grudges, eh?”
They arrived at a restored Federal building near the town’s center. There, after passing through an airlock and into a filtered set of rooms, their escort surrendered them to another military type, a tall, thin man with a small mustache. He smiled.
“So you are our beloved commander’s daughter?” He offered his hand. “Of course you are. Take off your masks, make yourselves at home. Would you like to freshen up?”
“This young lady hasn’t seen her father for some time,” Esterhaszy said.
“This way then,” the man said. “Colonel Laing’s quarters are upstairs.”
In the Drift Page 13