Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  A reminiscent smile, and he rubbed the knuckles of his right fist into his left palm. "About the time I finally gave up on Shirley, I broke the little pissant's nose out behind the school gym—caught hell from the principal, but it was worth it, and I planned on enlisting anyway."

  Soberly: "Anyway, give you odds the Protector was his clone when he was a kid and always played a, what the hell was the name … yeah, a dwerg or a draug or a Dark Elf or magical assassin or something."

  "Now he's trying to do it for real?"

  "Yeah, and it won't work in the end, I'd bet. We may have had a change in the laws of nature, but I don't think even the Change could make the world that much like a D and D game. Plus I think he's got this thing about the history he used to study, the feudalism thing, and that won't work either, at least not right away, although it's a better bet long-term than the Evil Overlord stuff. We may have had all our toys taken away, but the people he's dealing with weren't born back then."

  "I don't know, Mike," Eric said. "He has taken over around here, and he looks like he's getting things organized. People will put up with a lot, for that and for food."

  "Yeah," Josh said. "And he's also operating on a pretty big scale. What was that Russian saying Eric's dad quoted?"

  "Quantity has a quality all its own," Havel said. "Yup. I'm not saying the Protector would be a pushover. Even if he goes down, he could do a lot of damage first; in fact, he certainly will do a lot of damage whether he wins or loses."

  A glance over his shoulder, and he continued meditatively: "If he weren't such a looney-tooner, I'd actually give that proposition of his serious consideration. Even though he is … "

  Eric made a disgusted noise. Havel went on: "I said if, kid. The other problem is that he's got big eyes. I think it's going to be a join-him-or-fight-him thing everywhere in the Columbia basin, eventually. Damn."

  Eric nodded. "We're still not committed," he pointed out. "I mean, we could head southeast, try the Snake River country, or even get out across the Rockies over the summer. Try the High Plains, or find somewhere to winter and then a chunk of good farming country we could claim."

  Josh tapped the fingers of his left hand on his sword hilt; the brass strips of the guard rang a little.

  "Problem with that is, first, good country isn't going to be all that easy to find without we drive off someone else. And second, we could walk straight into something just as bad as this Protector guy. I got this ugly feelin' ambitious men are going to be right common for a good long while now."

  "We'll see," Havel said. A grin: "I mean, hell, I'm ambitious. And tomorrow, we ride out of here—south. He admitted he doesn't control the Willamette. I'd like to see if anyone does, and what the prospects are, before we go back and start making decisions."

  * * * *

  Kenneth Larsson wept with the jerking sobs of a man unaccustomed to tears.

  "Shhh," Pamela said, holding his head against her shoulder in the cool canvas-smelling dimness of the tent. "Shhh. It's all right, Ken."

  The tears subsided. "I'm so fucking useless," he said. "I'm sorry, Pam."

  "For what?" she said. "Hey, Ken, I've been having a fine old time tonight. Young men don't make love to a woman; they use the woman to make love to Mr. Dickie. Give it time."

  He relaxed, probably amazed she didn't want to kick him out of her bedroll and never see him again. Pamela's lips quirked in the darkness.

  I meant what I said, she thought. And besides, Ken—we can't walk out on each other, not anymore. We're all stuck with each other unless we want to leave the outfit.

  Ken took a shuddering breath. "I haven't been much use to any woman, since Mary … died. I couldn't protect her or my daughters—yeeeeow!"

  Pamela poised her fingers to give his chest hair another painful tweak.

  "What was that for?" he gasped.

  "For being stupid, is what. It isn't like you. Will Hutton couldn't protect his family, and he's as tough as anyone in the outfit. And Mike couldn't have alone, either—what's the old saying, even Hercules can't fight two?"

  "He rescued us."

  "With Eric and Will helping! We protect each other. You didn't protect your family before the Change, either: the law did, and the police did, and the military did, and the State of Oregon did, and the U-S of A did. Now the outfit does. And you're our engineer, and you know a hell of a lot of history. You're at least as useful to everyone as I am, or Will is."

  Softly: "I played at Renaissance fencing because it was fun, Ken; I'm a middle-class Jewish veterinarian from southern California! I never thought I'd have to kill with it. Hold me, will you?"

  A few minutes later: "Yeeeow! What was that for!"

  "To drive the lesson home." Her hand strayed.

  "Thanks, but—"

  "Hey, I'm doing that 'cause I like it, buddy! Doesn't feel bad, does it?"

  "No, but—"

  "There's no prize for making the finish line here," she said. "Just two codgers having fun … "

  A moment later: "Well, well!" She rolled over and straddled him. "That does feel nice!"

  Chapter

  Seventeen

  "Lord and Lady, I don't think I can stand this much longer," Judy Barstow said, her olive Mediterranean skin gray.

  Juniper nodded. They were ten miles north of Salem, and …

  She wiped at the flies crawling over her face, spat, and pulled the bandana up over her face again, which let her breathe through her mouth without inhaling any of them— even after many days' exposure, she hadn't gotten used to the stink. Her eyes skipped over the bodies lying by the road, and the rats that crawled bloated and insolent among them. Rags and tatters of flesh were left; the crows were at them too, but the rats were so numerous that they could drive the birds off in chittering hordes. Inside an SUV windows pullulated with heaving gray bodies …

  "It's almost as bad here as it was along I-5," she said. "I don't think we should try to get any closer to Portland."

  "No," Judy said. "I don't either. My grandfather got out of Lithuania in World War Two … I never really understood what he was talking about before."

  Almost compulsively she opened the economy-sized bottle of sanitizer again, and handed it around. Juniper's face and hands were already raw and chapped from the desiccating effect of the alcohol-based solution, but she obediently scrubbed down all the exposed parts of her body. Steve and Vince followed suit.

  None of them had much skin exposed, despite the mild heat. When you thought of where the flies had been …

  "No, we shouldn't be here," the nurse-midwife went on. "We're endangering the whole clan as well as ourselves. I never thought it could be as bad as this! If someone designed an environment to spread disease, this would be it."

  She swallowed and went on: "How … how can They let this happen?"

  Juniper pushed her bicycle over beside her friend's and put her arm around her shoulders; that was more symbolic than anything, when the person you hugged was wearing an armored jack, but symbols counted.

  "How could They let the Holocaust happen, or the Black Death, or the Burning Times? We're not People of the Book; everything's connected, but we don't have to imagine that everything happens according to a Divine Plan. It could be our fault, something humans did through carelessness or malice. It could be aliens doing the same. Or … it could be something the Otherworld did for our own good."

  "Our good?" Judy asked, looking around.

  "We might have killed the planet, if this hadn't happened. Killed the whole human race, and the plants and the animals too. I don't know, but it's possible."

  Judy drew a breath, coughed, and nodded. "All right. Thanks. But let's get out of here!"

  Juniper nodded and pulled out the map. "All right," she said. "We had to know … but oh, how I wish we didn't!" Her finger traced a road west and then south. "We'll cross here, near Wheatland, and turn south towards Corvallis, then slant across to home the way I did right after the Change."

  Vince To
relli had put an arrow to his bow as soon as they stopped. He left it there as he put the weapon back in its frame across the handlebars, held by the nock's grip on the string and the angle of the arrow-shelf. Then he stepped on the pedals and darted out ahead of them, keeping a careful hundred yards in advance. The two women followed; it took them a little more time to build up speed, as their bicycles were towing little baggage carts that held their modest supplies. Steve Matucheck followed behind, looking over his shoulder regularly.

  The stink died down as they moved west—away from the produce truck that had probably attracted the group of people who stayed around it and died, and into open country. They wove down the two-lane blacktop, eyes busy keeping watch on the empty fields to either side—and not ignoring the abandoned cars and trucks that sat as they had since 6:15 p.m., March 17th.

  Back at her cabin, she could go hours without thinking about the Change; days, sometimes, in the scramble to get the fields planted. Out here, not a minute went by when you could forget.

  Once they were out from strip-mall development the fields were eerily silent; grass tall and shaggy, but not a cow to be seen; now and then a field of beets gone tangled with weeds, or wheat beginning to head out, or an orchard with fruits or nuts starting to swell. There were still occasional bodies by the road—people had stuck to those lines of travel, mostly trudging back and forth until they dropped, as far as she could see. The sun was cruelly bright, and she swallowed as a brace of crows launched themselves off a telephone wire.

  Another hour, and they stopped for a drink from their canteens; Judy restrained herself from checking the water, since she'd made sure they brought it to a rolling boil for twenty minutes that morning.

  "Anyone seen those dogs?" Juniper asked; a feral pack had shadowed them.

  "Not since about ten," Steve Matucheck said.

  "Odd. We haven't seen a living soul since yesterday, and yet so many stayed by the roads until they died," Juniper said.

  Surprisingly, Vince Torelli spoke up. "Lady Juniper, I think it's part of the same thing. The ones that stayed at home, or walked back and forth on the roads, they died. The ones with sense enough to get away, they stood a better chance—but we won't be seeing them, much. Not around here."

  Juniper nodded, trying not to let the young man see how much being called Lady Juniper annoyed her. Yes, you called a High Priestess Lady in the Circle, but it didn't apply in day-to-day life and Vince wasn't even a member of the coven. Dennis had started doing it, and she suspected it was as much to irritate her as anything else; his sense of humor had been easier to take when she only had to do it occasionally, instead of 24/7.

  But I'll be glad to get back to it; and Eilir; and the others … even Cuchulain.

  A little of that eagerness was sheer hunger. There hadn't been much to spare for them to take along on this trip; the Eternal Soup was a fond memory.

  Judy nodded. "Just being away from a big city is the biggest survival factor," she said. "But a close second would be sense enough to realize that the Change was here to stay, and not sit around waiting for rescue or go wandering aimlessly. Chuck and I managed to talk our people into getting right out. You made for the hills right away too."

  Some truth in that, Juniper thought, bending to massage a kink out of one calf. Judy had a core of hard common sense, probably from her years as a nurse.

  On the other hand, how could anyone know that the Change was here to stay, or that it was everywhere?

  For that matter, she still didn't know that the Change was worldwide. She was morally certain, but that wasn't proof. If you were a garden-variety common-sense sort of person, staying put probably looked better … until it was too late.

  "Plus we're just too close to Salem," she said, looking back a little east of south. "The requisitioning parties probably got everything around here."

  They could still see the black columns of smoke around the city as a smudge on the horizon; luckily the wind was from the west, and bent them towards the distant line of the Cascades—she could still see the peaks of the Three Sisters from here.

  "Are you sure?" she asked Judy.

  The other woman nodded. "I'd never seen it before, but the black patches of skin and the swellings in the armpits and groin are unmistakable."

  A long breath. "It's been three days now. We'd be showing symptoms, if we'd caught it, but my skin still crawls."

  And mine, at the memory, Juniper thought. Those pits, where the bodies still smouldered …

  The truck stop a little way up the road had a gas station with attached convenience store, and a long low-slung board building advertising the fact that Bill's BBQ had the best dry ribs in the Willamette; a graveled country lane crossed the blacktop there, and the parking lot was dirt. They swerved in, coming to rest in a rough line and looking the windows over.

  Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper—newspaper left stains, they'd-discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days. Sometimes there was even instant coffee or diet sweetener, occasionally salt. Nothing with any calories, but it made bland boring food taste better, and they were all worth the effort of lugging along. Sometimes they spotted something useful enough and bulky enough that it was worth marking down for a foraging party to come fetch with a wagon and escort, although they were getting too far from home for that.

  "Wait a second," Juniper said, as she heeled down the kickstand of her bicycle. "I smell something cooking!"

  It's meat, too. Her mouth watered and her swallow was painful. Meat and a trace of woodsmoke, or charcoal. Could someone have found a last strayed cow in this wilderness of death? Could they be talked or traded out of some?

  Something moved behind a Subaru a few yards away. Juniper tensed slightly, then relaxed as she saw it was a girl in a stained white dress; about twelve, she thought, with stringy brown hair.

  The girl waved and walked over towards them, smiling; a couple of her teeth were missing. As she got closer, Juniper wrinkled her nose.

  I'm not a blooming rose myself, but that's awful, she thought.

  The girl looked bad, too. Not emaciated like so many they'd seen; if anything, a little overweight, which was something she hadn't seen much lately. But her hair was thin on top, showing patches of scalp, and there were odd-looking lumps on her arms; she walked like someone much younger, holding her hands behind her back and half skipping. There was a small sore beside her left eye, trailing yellow matter.

  "You're sick!" Juniper said, and looked over at her friend.

  "Not the plague," Judy muttered. "Where have I seen— must have been a textbook—"

  "It's all right!" Juniper called. "We don't want any of your food. Maybe we can help, if you're ill."

  The girl giggled, coming closer. "It's all right," she said back, her tone singsong. "We've got plenty to eat. You can come for dinner!"

  We? Juniper thought.

  Perhaps that was what made Juniper start to jerk backward as the hand came out from behind the girl's back with a glint of steel. The long kitchen knife missed her throat; it would still have killed her as it stabbed into her chest, but the plates of her jack turned it, breaking the point.

  "Oooof!" Juniper said, struggling for wind.

  The girl screeched, puffing the smell of rotten meat in Juniper's face, stabbing again and again with the sharp broken stump of the knife. She'd probably never met body armor before. Long detested hours of instruction from Chuck and Aylward took over; made Juniper duck a shoulder forward to body-check and knock the enemy back on her heels, reach down and grab the hilt with the right hand, rip it out and swing with the same motion.

  The point scored across the girl's body, and the cloth parted—skin beneath, too, blood leaking as she turned and fled clutching at herself and screaming in shrill squeals.

  Juniper fought shock. I just cut at a child! she thought.

  More figures popped up from among t
he cars and trucks and poured out of the buildings. One burst right out of the rear doors of a van not fifteen feet away, roaring and holding an ax above his head in both hands. He was naked to the waist, his torso covered in boils. Vince drew to the ear and waited until the axman was five feet away before shooting; the arrow struck full in the throat, splitting the neckbone with an audible crack. The shouting cut off with knife finality, and the man toppled backward like a cut-through tree.

  A woman with a butcher's cleaver ran at Matucheck. "Night of the fucking living dead!" he screamed, eyes wild.

  He punched the blow aside with his buckler in an iron clang of metal on metal and stabbed, as much in revulsion as anger. The point slid home.

  Judy was grappling with a teenage boy who tried to gnaw at her face as they danced in clumsy circles. Juniper bared her own teeth and struck with her buckler, using it like a two-pound set of brass knuckles. The crumbling feeling as the steel disk struck just below the base of his skull made the hair bristle up along her spine even then.

  "It's a nest of Eaters!" Juniper shouted.

  Most people would rather die than turn cannibal, but when you were talking about millions, a small minority was far too large. And they were starting to get hungry, as their food became scarce in turn.

  "Get back in here!" she called. "Stand them off!"

  Three cars made a loose triangle; too loose, but the Eaters were all around them. The Mackenzies retreated, Vince shooting as fast as he could knock and draw, then turned at bay. But the gaps between the cars were too big, and the Eaters swarmed over the hoods and trunks as well. For a minute the four of them pushed and shoved, hit and stabbed and chopped; their jacks were a huge advantage, and health and sanity and real weapons they had some idea of how to use.

  But there were too many; it was like trying to fight in a nightmare where nothing worked and more and more came at you. Juniper knew with some dim distant part of her mind that the horror would come back to her if she lived, but most of her was a reflex that shouted and swung and struck.