Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

by Orson Scott Card

  It took Bingwen fifteen minutes to corner the animal and catch the lead rope again. By then he had taken strips of fabric from the makeshift bandana around his face and wrapped the strips around his hand to form a sort of bandage and glove for holding the rope. The animal began to resist again, but Bingwen gave it a violent tug and reminded it who was leading whom. Then he took one of the harvesting bags from the pouch and made a sort of face mask for the animal, like a giant feed bag that covered most of its head.

  The water buffalo calmed after that, smelling only the scent of the barn in the bag’s fabric.

  Bingwen guided it back down into the valley. He wasn’t turning around, he had decided. He had come this far; he would see it through. He wouldn’t give up as quickly as the water buffalo had.

  They moved toward the nearest patch of healthy crop. If they crossed the valley by sticking to the green shoots, maybe they could pass through without contaminating themselves.

  Bingwen took the first few tentative steps into the tall shoots and waited to see if he felt sick or light-headed.

  Nothing happened.

  He pushed on, pulling the water buffalo behind him.

  The healthy green shoots crumpled and broke under their feet. Damaging the crop like that went against everything both of them had ever been taught, but they walked on nonetheless.

  They passed dozens of bodies. The first few faces were strangers: men and women from other villages. Then Bingwen began to see people he knew: neighbors and friends of Grandfather. Yi Yi Guangon, one of the elders from the village council. Shashoo, the only woman in the village who owned a washing machine. Bexi, the nurse who made herbal remedies for Bingwen whenever he got sick. All of them were lifeless and lying in unnatural positions, their skin red and blistered, as if they had worked for days in the sun without a hat.

  A suffocating fear gripped at Bingwen’s chest whenever he saw someone new: What if the next person’s face was Mother’s or Father’s? What would he do then?

  Once he was sure he had found Mother. The dead woman lay in the mud with her back to him and her face turned away. She had hair like Mother’s and a shape like Mother’s and the same plain, faded clothes like Mother’s.

  But when Bingwen walked around her and saw her face, he realized it wasn’t Mother. The relief was so sudden and overwhelming that Bingwen broke down and sobbed. His chest heaved, and his body shook, and it took several minutes to compose himself again. By then the water buffalo was growing restless and pulling on the lead rope again. Bingwen wiped at his eyes and nose with the sleeve of his good arm. He had been crying for everything: his arm, Hopper, Meilin, the dead woman who looked like Mother, Mazer’s ship. Everything. When he finished, he felt better, braver even. I’ve had my cry, he thought. My final one.

  He kept walking.

  There were dead children as well, though Bingwen couldn’t force himself to look at them. He made his eyes defocus whenever one came into view, always looking above the body, never directly at it … until a bright shirt caught his attention. A shirt he recognized. A shirt he had seen up close when the person wearing it had put him in a headlock once.

  Zihao.

  Alive, Zihao had always worn a bullish, condescending sneer. But here, lying on his back in the mud, he looked afraid: wide eyes, rigid body, a dirty face streaked with tears. He seemed younger, too. Like a child. Bingwen looked away.

  A faint hiss from behind caused Bingwen to turn around suddenly. Back at the end of the access road, a few hundred meters behind him, four aliens were spraying the healthy grass and moving in his direction. They seemed unaware of Bingwen, but he knew that wouldn’t last.

  Bingwen yanked on the lead rope and got the water buffalo moving. He didn’t stop to look at faces. He didn’t step carefully. He ran.

  The water buffalo sensed his urgency and ran as well, big lumbering strides that weren’t fast enough for Bingwen, who kept yanking and pulling on the rope. The animal stumbled once, but quickly regained its footing. They ran for fifteen minutes, never slowing until the valley turned south and the aliens were long out of view. They stopped, both of them wheezing and breathing heavily, the water buffalo moaning and mooing. Bingwen’s broken arm felt as if it were on fire; all the jostling and running had aggravated the break. A stitch in his side burned so hot Bingwen was convinced he had torn something inside.

  The water buffalo wavered, and for a moment Bingwen thought it might keel over. Then it shook its head and gathered itself.

  Bingwen looked to his left and saw that they had arrived. There was wreckage a hundred meters away. Mazer’s aircraft. Bingwen was sure of it. A fire had consumed it and burned it black, but the flames had long since died out, and the familiar shape of the aircraft was still intact. The only new feature was the four rotor blades on the top of the aircraft, which must have snapped open as the aircraft fell.

  Bingwen’s heart sank at the sight. There couldn’t possibly be any survivors. The aircraft had exploded, sending shrapnel and debris in every direction. Even if someone had survived the impact, they couldn’t have gotten clear of the explosion in time. Nor could they have ejected before impact, not with the rotor blades, not in a dead drop.

  Bingwen felt ashamed. He should have listened to Grandfather. He was foolish to have come out here.

  Something near the wreckage caught his eye. A rifle perhaps? That would be useful. And where there was one, there might be others; and if not other weapons, then perhaps other tools. He pulled on the rope. The water buffalo didn’t want to move; it still wheezed and whined from their run. Bingwen pulled anyway with his good arm, and eventually the animal walked.

  The wreck smelled like ashes and burning things and what might be the scent of charred human remains. Smoke still hung thick in the air and stung Bingwen’s eyes. He didn’t want to look inside the cabin or cockpit. He knew what he would find there.

  The ground was littered with shrapnel and debris, some pieces as big as Bingwen, all folded up and bent in odd shapes with torn edges that looked dangerously sharp.

  Bingwen’s eyes were locked on the rifle ahead of him, but as he approached it, moving through the smoke, something else near the weapon caught his eye. A body.

  Bingwen ran forward, frantic, the lead rope dropping from his hand.

  It was Mazer. There was blood and mud all over him. His arms, his head, his side. His side was the worst. A bloody bandage lay draped across his abdomen, soaked through and deep red. The contents of a med kit lay scattered around him. Someone had administered first aid. Someone was alive and helping. Bingwen looked around.

  “Hello?”

  No one answered.

  To his left was another body. The female soldier. Bingwen instantly knew she was dead, even without seeing her face, which was turned away from him. She had too many wounds. Her skin was white and lifeless. Her clothes were burned. Her arm was twisted behind her.

  In the fields, the corpses had looked asleep, peaceful even in some instances. Not so here. This had been a hard death. Quick most likely, instantaneous even, but it terrified Bingwen more than anything he had seen thus far.

  There were lines in the dirt from the aircraft to the woman’s body where her boots had dragged across the soil. Mazer had pulled her from the fire, Bingwen realized. Wounded as he was, Mazer had pulled her from the flames. Bingwen could think of no other explanation. And then somehow Mazer had tried to treat his own wounds. Bingwen knelt beside him. Yes, one of the packets from the kit was still in Mazer’s hand. Bingwen should have noticed that instantly.

  “Mazer.”

  No answer.

  Should he try shaking him awake? No, that might tear something inside him. Instead, Bingwen reached out a tentative finger and poked Mazer in the arm. The skin was warm. The tip of Bingwen’s finger came back bloody. Mazer didn’t respond.

  Then Mazer’s chest rose, just slightly, almost imperceptibly. A shallow intake of breath. Then an exhale. He was alive. Barely maybe, but he was breathing.

>   Bingwen had to get him back to the farmhouse, back to Grandfather. But how? He had hoped to find the soldiers awake and able to walk. And if they couldn’t walk, Bingwen would build a travois for the water buffalo to pull and then ask the wounded soldier to climb up onto it. But Mazer couldn’t even do that; he couldn’t move at all. Bingwen would have to lift him somehow onto the stretcher.

  Bingwen ran back to the water buffalo, tied it to a tree, and came back with all the supplies from the tool pouches. He found a grove of bamboo nearby and chopped down three large stalks with the hatchet. It took him forever because he had to do it one-handed, using only his good arm. He then chopped one of the three stalks into shorter lengths and built the travois, lashing the bamboo together with the rope. The shorter pieces went between the longer two, making a ladderlike surface for Mazer to lie on. Bingwen then cut out the bottoms of a few of the harvesting bags and pulled those up over the two shafts, creating a flat surface like the bed of a cot.

  The travois was heavy when Bingwen finished, almost too heavy for him to drag with one hand, but he heaved and strained and pulled it across the dirt until he had it on the ground beside Mazer. He had hoped to pull Mazer’s body up onto it, but after a few tentative tugs it became obvious that wouldn’t work. There was too much dead weight, and he couldn’t pull with his broken arm. He’d have to lift the body, suspend it in the air, slide the travois underneath, and then lower Mazer carefully onto it.

  By now Bingwen was sweating and thirsty and tired. He hadn’t brought any water; he hadn’t wanted to take any from the little supply the group at the farmhouse had. Now he wished he had. There wasn’t any drinkable water nearby, and even if there had been, he wouldn’t have drunk it, not with the mist in the air and the threat of contamination.

  He ignored the thirst and got back to work. He had built pulley systems out of bamboo before—he and Father had made a small towerlike structure to lift the bags of harvested rice up onto the load trucks last season. But this would be different. Mazer was twice as long as a bag of rice and far more floppy and collapsible. Nor did Bingwen have Father helping him or two good working arms.

  It took him hours to prepare everything, chopping down the bamboo, cutting the proper lengths, separating the threads of the rope into twine because he needed more rope than he had. He used scrap from the wreckage as well. There was a winch in the cockpit with cable and D-rings and fasteners. He was aware of charred human remains in the seats, but Bingwen held his breath, averted his eyes, and retrieved the equipment quickly.

  Then he started building. He made a series of A-frame structures with a long shaft between them, then slid several thinner bamboo shafts underneath Mazer at his shoulders, lower back, buttocks, and bend of the knee. He made a special pouch for Mazer’s head so that it wouldn’t loll back sharply when Bingwen lifted him. He lashed both ends of the bamboo shafts underneath Mazer to a lifting pole that hovered above Mazer, running the length of his body. Then Bingwen threaded the rope through the three pulleys he had made from narrow cuts of bamboo.

  The sun was far in the western part of the sky, dipping toward the horizon, when he finished. He was hungry. His arm ached. His whole body was slick with sweat and covered in dirt and soot.

  The structure was elaborate; it looked like a giant bamboo spider standing over Mazer, ready to seize him and wrap him in its webbing.

  Bingwen pulled on the ropes, and Mazer’s body lifted gently off the ground, his head holding steady. All that work for so little movement, he thought.

  Bingwen tied off the line, slid the travois underneath Mazer, and lowered Mazer onto the stretcher. Then he moved the pulleys up the crossbeam toward Mazer’s head and lifted the front end of the travois high enough to tie it to a harness he had made for the water buffalo. The hardest part proved to be getting the water buffalo to stay still long enough for Bingwen to do the lashings. Finally, though, everything was set.

  Bingwen gathered all the supplies from the med kit, including the small, flat digital device that Mazer had used to scan Bingwen’s broken arm. Bingwen examined it, brushing off the mud and grime from the screen. There was a crack across the glass, but the device turned on at Bingwen’s touch. The home screen was bright and colorful and gave him a variety of options: SURFACE TISSUE SCAN, ULTRASOUND, BLOOD EXAM, SURGERY TUTORIALS, PHARMACY. Bingwen put it in his saddle pouch then did a final scan of the wreckage for more supplies. He didn’t see anything else worth taking until he spotted the combat vest the female soldier was wearing. It held several cartridges of ammunition like the one currently snapped into the rifle.

  Ammunition they could use. Without it the rifle would be useless. But retrieving the cartridges wouldn’t be easy; Bingwen would have to turn the woman more onto her side in order to undo the straps that held the cartridges. And that meant touching a dead person. The idea made Bingwen sick to his stomach; he couldn’t bear to look at the woman, much less touch her.

  He was being ridiculous, he told himself. Selfish even. They were dead without a weapon, dead without ammunition.

  He ran to the woman, his eyes half shut, his lips pressed together tight, and pushed the woman’s shoulder to rotate her body. She was stiff and bloody and didn’t roll easily with her arm bent back behind her. But Bingwen dug in his heels, and finally the woman’s torso moved enough for him to reach in and pull the cartridges free. They clattered to the ground in front of him, and Bingwen scrambled back a heartbeat later, scurrying away on all fours and hating himself for being such a coward.

  His eyes were wet with tears, he realized, and he wiped at them quickly. He got to his feet, collected the cartridges, and dropped them into the tool pouch. Next he tied a rope around Mazer’s chest, securing him to the stretcher; then, after one final look back at the wreckage, he took the lead rope and pulled hard. The water buffalo moaned in opposition and resisted, but after another hard jerk from Bingwen, the animal followed.

  Bingwen had heard aircraft all day, most of it far away, but now the skies were quiet. It was dusk, and he figured he wouldn’t reach the farmhouse until well after dark.

  They arrived at the valley of corpses and found that the aliens had killed all the remaining crops. Without any healthy grass to walk on, Bingwen cut north, looking for another place to cut back toward the mountain. He found one a kilometer later, another wide field of crop without much standing water.

  There were more bodies here: people and animals. A family of pigs. Three water buffalo. A group of children.

  And Mother and Father.

  Bingwen saw them from fifty meters away and stopped dead. They were lying facedown in the mud, Father’s arm draped across Mother’s shoulder, as if comforting her.

  Bingwen didn’t move. He couldn’t see their faces, but that was Mother’s shirt and Mother’s back and Mother’s shape. And that was Father’s clothes. And Father’s boots and Father’s hair. And the glint of sunlight was off Father’s watch on his left wrist where he wore it.

  Bingwen felt as if his body were made of air. His eyes couldn’t focus. His knees felt flimsy and unstable. He stood there, staring at them, him upright and alive and breathing and them not. Their hearts weren’t beating, their lungs weren’t taking in air, their mouths weren’t moving, telling him how much they loved him and that they would protect him and that he would be safe with them. Their arms weren’t wrapping around him and pulling him close to their chests. Their bodies weren’t doing anything except lying there in the mud and misted grass.

  Bingwen stood there for a long time, how long he did not know. An hour perhaps, maybe double that. The water buffalo mooed and pawed at the ground, impatient. Bingwen ignored it. He ignored everything. If aliens were coming, he wouldn’t run from them.

  He breathed in and out. No tears came. No wails. No cries of anguish. Everything was broken inside. Everything was empty. He wouldn’t make tears anymore, couldn’t make them. He wasn’t going to allow that. Tears belonged to the old, dead version of himself, the previous Bingwen, the boy w
ho sneaked into the library and who worried about tests and going to school and who had a friend with a twisted foot and parents who loved him and sat him by the fire when he was wet and cold. That Bingwen was gone. That Bingwen was lying there in the mud with Mother and Father, his arm draped across Mother’s shoulder just like Father’s was.

  He would make Mazer well. Yes, he would make Mazer well, and then Mazer would stop everything. Mazer would end the mists and the fires and the bodies in the fields. And Bingwen would help him. He’d give Mazer the cartridges, and he’d carry Mazer’s water, and he’d do anything to put an end to it, to make it all go away. Then he would allow himself to cry.

  It was full dark when he reached the farmhouse. Grandfather ran out to greet him, embracing him, kissing him on the cheek, cursing himself for letting Bingwen go. Only then did Grandfather see that the water buffalo was dragging someone behind it.

  The others came outside as well. They saw Mazer and the travois and they stared at it all, as if they couldn’t understand what they were looking at, as if the rational part of their brain were telling them it wasn’t possible. The old woman turned to Bingwen and regarded him with an expression Bingwen couldn’t read. Confusion? Awe?

  No one moved. No one jumped to help.

  They didn’t know how to respond, Bingwen realized. They didn’t know what to do. “He’s alive,” Bingwen said. “We need to help him.”

  Grandfather took charge. “Untie the stretcher. Pull him inside. Quickly now. But gently, do it gently.”

  Bingwen stood there and watched as they untied the travois and pulled Mazer into the farmhouse still on it. They laid the whole structure on the floor and surrounded the body.

  “I need light,” said the old woman.

  “She’s a nurse of sorts,” Grandfather said to Bingwen. “A midwife. Do you know what that means?”