“A little bit of the lightfighter candy all right by you, Lee?”
Leona nodded.
“All right. Go hit one of the racks, and we’ll see about bringing you up front in about six hours,” Andrews said.
“Hooah,” Leona responded, and she slowly limped to the rig’s third compartment. Andrews caught a glimpse of Mulligan lying in one of the lowermost bunks, wrapped up in a blanket. Half of his face was covered by an angry mass of black and purple bruises.
He picked up a torque wrench and bent over the differential casing as Laird fitted it back together.
21
The woman’s face is still mostly smooth. The only signs of her true age are an array of laugh lines that crinkle whenever she smiles, which she does quite a bit, finding something humorous in almost every situation. Her hair is a tawny blond, its rich color diminished somewhat by the encroaching grays, the ones she’s just not vain enough to try to hide behind the quick fixes of bottled hair products. The woman—and more importantly, the man who adores her—knows that youth and vitality are more about what’s on the inside than what’s on the outside. The interior is what’s important, and only a precious few intimates get to see that. The exterior? Hell, everyone else on the planet can see that, free of charge.
The girls look like both of them, a mix of her fair skin and honey-colored hair, but with his eyes and nose. He thinks the nose looks much better on them than on him. It confers an impression of quiet, regal strength that makes him wonder how they’ll fare in the coming years when boys begin to circle around them. Would they take the males on head-to-head as he would, or would they instead use the mother’s good nature and occasional guile? He finds he almost can’t wait to find out, but he knows these things will happen sooner than he’ll want. It’s not going to be easy watching them winnow away the list of suitors until they find the right ones. And when that happens, they won’t be his little girls any longer.
He pulls open the screen door on the small house they leased on the plains of Kansas, where the land is flat and seems to go on forever, broken only occasionally by trees or telephone poles that stand a silent vigil in the heat of the midday sun. From somewhere in the humid, sticky distance, a crow caws, and he feels a momentary portent of dread flutter across his heart. But why? The day is perfect, the weather calm, and his family waits for him only a few steps away in the small kitchen. He enters the room, and the girls shriek with delight as they leap toward him with no hesitation, even though he’s been gone for so many years of their lives that he sometimes feels he barely knows them. His wife’s smile is broad and welcoming, and her dark eyes twinkle as she turns from the kitchen counter, forgetting about the lunch she had been about to serve.
“Well, it’s about time, stranger!” she says, laughing, her voice bright and clear.
Behind him, the crow caws again.
The day explodes into bright white light that washes out all the color, turning everything into a hodgepodge of blacks, grays, whites. His daughters shriek, cowering before the brilliant, overpowering flare that scorches their retinas, decimating their vision in an instant. His wife staggers backward, the smile finally wiped from her face as her own eyes are immolated. She crashes against the counter, reaching out with both hands to steady herself.
From behind, a rumble draws near. He likens it to the roar of a subway train closing in on a station, pushing a gust of hot air through the tunnel as it advances. He senses death closing on him, something he’s felt before, but this time it approaches with such surety that he knows there is no warding it off. No tricks to play to sidestep it, no weapon to defeat it, no training to help him prepare. He knows what’s coming, and he knows his might is as insignificant against it as a drop of water holding back the desert.
The shockwave rolls over him, through him, and slams into the house with such force that the structure buckles immediately. The wave of superheated compressed air brings something else with it—burning, potent radiation that causes the house and those inside it to explode in flame. The girls’ screams rise to a tortured keening that is impossibly loud in his ears, then his wife shrieks as well as her clothes disintegrate and her skin reddens and chars before the blistering onslaught. The shockwave does its work, tearing the house away from him before he can take another step, ripping his family away from him as the prairie catches alight—
Mulligan snapped to full consciousness, the ragged scream caught in his throat. The transition from the white-hot world of his nightmare to the semi-darkness of the SCEV’s sleeping compartment jarred him, kept him mentally off-balance as he rocked from side to side in the slightly scooped bunk. He turned his head and found his neck was stiff, the tendons and muscles protesting the sudden action. His entire body was sore, essentially one giant ache. He saw a figure sleeping in the bunk across from him, and he recognized it as Jim Laird, his snores barely audible over the whining drone of the SCEV’s turbine engines and the creaks and rattles of the rig as it bumped across the landscape. Mulligan slowly swung his legs over the side of the bunk and sat up, his movements sluggish. He sensed more than saw other figures in the compartment’s tepid light—Choi, sleeping in the bunk above Laird, and Kelly Jordello, snoozing away in the bunk above his. Kelly murmured something in her sleep and rolled over, but other than that, none of them gave any indication that they had heard the strangled cry that he had tamped down on an instant before it became a full-throated scream.
Mulligan buried his face in hands and softly wept.
***
Leona looked up from her work at the Command Intelligence Station when the aft shield door opened and a disheveled Mulligan stepped into the second compartment. He looked like hell—bruised and battered, eyes bloodshot. He blinked against the compartment’s bright light as he closed the door and moved toward the kitchenette, holding onto the padded rails mounted to the compartment’s overhead. Leona smiled at him wryly, but if he saw it, Mulligan ignored her.
Fat chance of that, big guy.
“Welcome back to the world of the living, Sarmajor,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“Like a rubber-billed woodpecker who’s spent two weeks trying to peck his way through a petrified forest. How long was I out?” Mulligan reached into a cabinet and removed a mug, then slid it into the coffee machine bolted to one wall. He closed the metal fiddle rails around the mug so it wouldn’t go flying as the SCEV trundled across broken ground. He stabbed the brew button on the coffee maker, and a second later, the scent of fresh coffee wafted through the air.
“Two and half days. We just came out of the Rockies a few hours ago,” Leona told him.
He looked shocked. “Two and a half days?”
Leona smiled and shrugged. “Hey, you’re not a young buck anymore, Mulligan.”
Mulligan scowled and took his mug over to the dinette a few feet away. He slowly lowered himself into its confines, wincing in discomfort. Leona rose from her chair and hobbled over to him, grabbing onto one of his beefy arms with one hand while holding onto the overhead rail with the other. Mulligan’s scowl deepened, and he pulled his arm away from her.
“I’m good, Lieutenant,” he said brusquely. “Thanks for the assist.”
Leona smiled and turned to the kitchenette at her back. She pulled out a bottle of water from the refrigerator and slid into the dinette across from him. “No problem. Mind if I join you?”
Mulligan released a world-weary sigh that said he did indeed mind, but he looked too damn beat to fight her. He carefully sipped his coffee instead, and regarded her over the brim of his mug.
“Any signs of pursuit?”
Leona shook her head. “Negative. Looks like you dusted that guy back in San Jose, Sarmajor. Good shooting. None of us would have thought to use a Hellfire in that way.”
Mulligan merely grunted at the compliment and sipped more coffee. “Who’s up front?”
“Andrews and Andrews.”
Mulligan grunted again. “Thought they were going to keep to se
parate shifts.”
“You and I were out of rotation, but I’m due to go take the right seat so Captain Andrews can knock off. Oh—I have these for you.” Leona reached into one of her uniform pockets and pulled out Mulligan’s dog tags and the eagle medallion. She fingered the medallion. “Your tags … and this other thing. Where’d you get it? It’s lovely.”
Mulligan’s bloodshot eyes bugged out when he saw the necklace. He held out one hand, palm up. “What in the hell are you doing with that?” he asked, his voice suddenly tight and constricted.
Leona frowned as she handed the necklace over to him. “I didn’t want you strangling on them while you slept, Sergeant Major.” Her voice was a frosty counterpoint to his.
Mulligan regarded the necklace for an instant, and she saw all of his attention was on the medallion. He looked up at her and nodded curtly. “Thanks for the thought.”
Leona said nothing, just stared at the older man openly as he slipped on the necklace and hid it beneath his uniform blouse. What the hell is it that I see in this guy? Father figure? Protector? Relic? What?
“What the hell are you looking at, Eklund?” Mulligan asked with a sudden ferocity that surprised her. She found herself recoiling at the barbs in his voice, and that pissed her off, though more at herself than at him.
“Nothing much, evidently,” she managed to say.
Mulligan scowled and gulped some coffee, shifting on the dinette’s faux leather wraparound couch. Something crinkled beneath him, and he reached down and pulled out an old comic book. A copy of The Amazing Spider-Man, one of Tony Choi’s most treasured possessions—the kid had brought them into the base when he’d moved in with his family, and he carried them everywhere. Mulligan snorted derisively when he saw it.
“One of Choi’s Asian encyclopedias, I see,” he said, dropping it to the table as he took another swig. He regarded the cover for a long moment, then started trying to smooth out its creases. Why would he care about an old comic book, especially one that didn’t even belong to him?
Because it’s from before, she told herself. It’s like him. A relic.
“What were you like before the war, Mulligan?” she asked suddenly.
Mulligan leafed through the comic book, keeping his eyes rooted on the somewhat faded but still colorful pages between its covers. She knew her question hit him wrong and pushed him into a space he didn’t want to be in, and it was a funny sight watching the hard-bitten Special Forces trooper hide behind a slim edition of The Amazing Spider-Man.
“Lieutenant, I’m seriously in no mood for a game of Twenty Questions right now,” he said, his voice surprisingly even.
“I watched you while you were out, Mulligan. You were having dreams. Nightmares. Things that seemed to terrify you.” She paused to sip from her water. “That guy back in San Jose. Law. He did the same to me, the same thing your nightmares do to you. Break down the wall we’ve been hiding behind. Made me see things I never even wanted to think about …”
“Great, we’ve both been mind-fucked.” Mulligan didn’t look up from the comic. “You think that means we’re finally soul mates or something? Forget it, kid.”
“You were crying. Why?”
Mulligan tossed the comic book onto the table and hauled himself off the dinette couch. If he felt any pain from the movement, it didn’t register on his face as he got to his feet and drained the remains of his coffee mug, then turned and put the empty vessel in the steel sink. Leona rose as well. She knew that pursuing Mulligan like this was akin to cornering a wounded grizzly bear, but she didn’t care. She was aware that of all people, she was incredibly ill-equipped to deal with a man like Mulligan, but she instinctively knew that to understand the man’s pain was to know him, to glimpse his soul as it flitted between light and shadow.
“You lost your family in the war, didn’t you?”
Mulligan froze for an instant, and Leona could almost see something flip inside of him like a circuit breaker. Mulligan whirled upon her like some thundering war god and seized her arms in his big hands. He swung her around as if she were a doll and pinned her against the padded side of the airlock, causing her to gasp in a queer mixture of fear and something bordering on delight. She’d found what made Mulligan tick, or at least found the path to it, but as she saw the uncontained fury break across his face, she suddenly wondered if she might take the discovery to her rapidly approaching grave.
“Yes, they died in the war, along with six billion other people!” Mulligan snarled, and his voice was as tight as a well-tuned snare drum. “And guess what, Eklund? After the missiles dropped, they were still alive for almost four hours! They were in Scott City, some little hick town that was only thirty minutes from Harmony, and I couldn’t get to them because of my own recklessness!”
Leona writhed in his powerful grip, feeling his thick fingers dig into the flesh and muscle of her upper arms, but there was no escaping the towering man’s grip. She would have bruises—if she survived the encounter. Mulligan’s eyes were wild, filled with a mixture of pain and rage and despair that had festered unchecked in him for a decade, and even she knew such a combination was as volatile as unstable nitroglycerin.
Suddenly, Mulligan released her and stepped back, his fingers curled into fists, his feet spread wide apart against the swaying of the vehicle. He glared down at her, his chest rising and falling as he took in great deep, ragged breaths.
“Get what you wanted, Lieutenant?” he asked finally, his voice barely audible over the sounds of the rig’s passage. “Any other action news updates I can provide, now that we’re finally having that warm heart-to-heart you’ve been after?”
“Don’t you ever touch me again,” she said. She tried to put steel in her voice, but it sounded pathetic and weak after his fury.
“Then take the hint, girlie—stay the hell away from me.”
He turned and marched past her, heading for the cockpit.
***
Andrews and Rachel were in the cockpit. The day beyond the viewports was hardly bright and accommodating—it looked like another storm was beginning to brew, coalescing on the horizon. He glanced down at the instruments, paying special attention to the radar display, which showed a deepening wall of clutter that rose almost twenty thousand feet into the air, and it was climbing.
“Mind if I sit in on the last leg, Captain?” Mulligan asked.
“Mulligan! How do you feel?” Andrews asked, looking up at him from the confines of the left seat.
Rachel stiffened when she heard his voice, but he ignored her. “Like shit, sir, but that’s normal.”
“Yeah, well, you should be resting. I hear you’re recovering from one hell of a concussion,” Andrews said, facing forward.
“Concussion, hangover—who can tell the difference, these days?” Mulligan said, trying to adopt a jovial tone and failing miserably.
“I already have Eklund ready to come forward,” Andrews said. “You should rest, Sarmajor.”
“I’ve been out for over two days, Captain. I’ve had more than enough rest, and I’m a hundred percent operational.”
Andrews chuckled. “You said that right before you passed out.”
“Yeah, well, that was then, this is now. How about it, sir?”
Andrews glanced up at Mulligan again, then down at the instruments. After a moment of consideration, he nodded slowly. “All right, Sarmajor. But if you start feeling messed up, you let me know and Eklund will take over. Understood?”
“Roger that, sir.”
“Take the right seat. Just so you know, the number two differential’s blown. It shit the bed about two days ago.” Andrews nodded again, this time to Rachel. Slowly, hesitantly, she unbuckled her safety harness and pushed back the copilot’s seat.
“Can it be fixed?” Mulligan asked, twisting to one side to allow her enough room to leave the cockpit. It hurt like hell, and he could feel Leona Eklund staring daggers into his back. Mulligan came to the wry conclusion that he was caught between two wome
n who probably wanted nothing more than to stab him repeatedly in the heart with dull pencils.
Andrews seemed mostly unaware of his predicament, though he did watch Rachel with a casual expression. “Negative, it’s completely fragged—can’t be repaired without a lift and a hardstand. It’s put us another seventeen hours behind schedule.” He nodded out the viewports. “And there’s another treat: a storm building up to the east. Eklund says it’s a big one.”
Rachel pushed past Mulligan, her eyes downcast. He released a small sigh. At least she didn’t make a dramatic exit, which meant she was either extremely exhausted or her husband had spoken some words of wisdom that she’d taken to heart. Either way, Mulligan was happy to ease himself into the copilot’s seat and close the shield door.
“Well, I can tell you one thing, Captain. This mission wasn’t a bore.”
Andrews rubbed his bristly chin with one hand and nodded. “I’ll give you that, Sergeant Major.” He studied the instruments and made a small noise in his throat. “That storm’s coalescing pretty quickly. The front goes right off the scope.”
Mulligan checked the rig’s position on the moving map display, and he was surprised to discover just how close they were to Harmony Base. “We’re not that far from the signal repeaters. We should have voice contact with the base pretty soon, assuming they have enough power to transmit. No sign of pursuit from California, right?”
“Negative,” Andrews said.
Mulligan put some confidence into his voice. “Then we’re almost there. We’ll make it home without a hitch, Captain. Maybe we should switch on the transponder, so the base’ll know we’re coming. Just in case we can’t make voice contact.”
“Good idea,” Andrews said, and he pressed a button on the panel before him. “You a man of faith, Sarmajor?”
Mulligan bit back his immediate reply and took a moment to actually consider the question. “I don’t know about faith, sir. But the odds look good.”
This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection) Page 67