Desert Angels

by George P. Saunders

  Case closed.

  Very nice – except it simply wasn't true.

  Rebecca was different; she was the last one, the last child in Eden. And she did matter. When she would go (and Jack was sure she would go very soon now) a little bit of Eden would die with her. A big part of Jack Calisto, he thought, would also buy the farm, thank you much. And again, the unrelenting futility of all he had tried to prevent, tried to rectify, tried to heal descended on him in full, black force. He could not save Rebecca, nor her people; death and more death was ahead, fully booked for the hideous land of tomorrow.

  There on the floor, Jack sat, finally just curling up in a ball and falling asleep. Walter transformed, and Angela proceeded to tend to the cut on Jack’s hand; it took over an hour to work around Jack's relatively light sleep. One wrong move and he would have awakened, thus delivering her back into feathered form again. Luck had sided with her (for now) and she finished just as he awoke.

  Walter flapped up to her ledge, eyeing her nursing attempts in the form of a gauze pad and rubbing alcohol. She need not have worried, for Jack was still semi-catatonic. Like a bird trying to free itself from the bondage of an egg, he pulled himself off the floor and stared at the mess around him. Jack didn't notice Walter's paraphernalia. Dazed, he stood there and licked his chops like a dehydrated dog; the inside of his mouth was like sandpaper and he suddenly thought: so this is what three day old puppy turds taste like.

  My, My. Just like momma used to –

  He shut his mind up fast and closed his eyes.

  He had dreamed.

  Laura was in the dream, for his haggard brain had conjured up a picture of her from sheer hope and imagination. In the dream, Laura was reaching out for him, smiling, her black hair waving behind her. Laura's face threatened to transform into that of his dead wife's, but Jack curtailed this assault on his sanity with all the power his subconscious could muster. Walter was on her shoulder, cooing. It was night and behind them Jack could see a thousand eyes, all red, all angry, all inhuman. The eyes turned to fireballs; mushrooms of light, blasting outward, vaporizing, Laura, Walter, and for all Jack knew, the dreamer himself.

  And then it was over and he was back.

  He needed a drink. Badly. Walter flapped down to his shoulder and nibbled his ear. Jack grunted, poking the bird gently with his finger.

  "Sorry about that, buddy," he wrestled his dry mouth for the words. "One of those days."

  One of those wacky, zany, fucked up days in Dante's playground, he thought, regarding the extensive damage he had created in the lab.

  Screw it, he decided after a moment of uncertainty; it could wait a week. Or a month.

  Because by then Rebecca would be dead anyway, right, Jack?

  Right, Blackie, he fenced mentally with the Black Hound. Eat shit and leave me alone.

  Jack rubbed his eyes and sighed.

  Laura. He would have to think of Laura. Imagine what she was like, see the color of her eyes, dream of her smile. These things would have to keep him going. Laura.

  Rebecca.

  Laura.

  Angela –

  He walked out of the lab fast, only barely keeping Black Hound at slobbering bay.

  Suddenly, there was a commotion from outside that Jack heard only as he approached the entrance to the Dome, which he had left open.

  The Growler and the Maddogs were charging the barbed wire gate. Some vehicles plowed over the barbed mesh and headed straight for the Eden encampment.

  Gleeson screamed out to men all around him.

  “Arm up. Fire at will!”

  Jack ran to his garage, and climbed aboard the Humvee. Walter flapped after him and launched himself into the passenger section of the vehicle.

  Jack started the armed car, and sped out of the garage, disengaging the main gate of power.

  Jack leaped out of the Humvee, and climbed on top of it, assuming a sitting position behind the M134 Minigun, the Mk 19 grenade launcher, and a secondary M2 heavy machine gun. He began to fire into the hoard of the attacking Maddogs.

  Cars, motorcycles and men and women, armed with guns or knives, screamed and died, as they fell – no match against Jack’s sophisticated armory of fiery death.

  Far beyond, on the horizon, Jack could see the figure of Mathias, next to the huge behemoth, the Growler.

  The battle lasted all of five minutes. Those among the Maddog survivors broke and ran back toward the barbed wire defenses they had initially breached, only to be electrocuted while trying to climb over it and escape the barrage of gunfire.

  At the end of this particular conflict, only a dozen Maddogs escaped death.

  Gleeson turned to Jack and gave him a thumbs up.

  Jack merely nodded, weary to the bone.

  This is what I have become.

  See, I am Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.

  The ancient Hindu text burned in his brain.

  * * *

  The Maddogs did not appear the following afternoon, and because this was an odd relief following the aftermath of the battle the day before, Jack decided to postpone his departure in search of Laura for twelve hours. As attractive as the idea was that the Growler and his fiendish cohorts had grown tired of attacking the beleaguered Eden encampment, Jack couldn't quite buy it. The losses the mutants had suffered yesterday were only average; sometimes the Growler had lost dozens, and still come back for more the following day. Gleeson received the news ecstatically, and for a second, Jack thought the scarred little man would break out in delighted laughter. Instead, Gleeson just smiled broadly, and limped off to pass the word.

  Jack, meanwhile, loaded the Humvee with food and ammunition – enough to last him for a month, if necessary. He only planned to be gone for a few days, but Jack was not one to take chances. The desert beyond the virtually impenetrable perimeter of Eden was a death zone, harboring worse things than just Maddogs and Stiffers. There were some horrors in this new world he was confident had yet to make their presence known, and though he hoped he would not encounter them, he would be prepared to do so nevertheless.

  As he packed, he watched the horizon continuously, expecting at any moment to see the screaming, gibbering hoard of the Growler's army. But no army came, and soon the land grew dark

  with the coming of night. Jack instructed Gleeson to assign a double guard this evening, with frequent shift changes, to ensure alertness. If the Maddogs had not adhered to a predictable schedule, perhaps they had something else up their collective sleeves. Jack would take no chances.

  Alone again in his Dome, Jack took out a map of the immediate desert and studied the route he would follow in the morning. If the Angel's scant directions were to be adhered to strictly, he would have to pass over some parts of the sands he knew for a fact were still highly irradiated. Long ago, he had triangulated those regions most likely to be contaminated, based on projected missile impacts, proximity to large civilian centers and wind direction. Las Vegas was only 80 miles west of Eden; fallout from that city's destruction a few years earlier was minimal, passing Jack's Dome-house only glancingly. Ten miles further north, however, and the rad dosage per square foot was tripled, due to a freak low pressure system produced by an underground spring not far from Eden. The resulting convection bullied the poison air from Vegas away from Jack's home and sent it speeding west, where it would mingle with the equally fetid atmosphere of northern Arizona and southern Utah, and finally continue its accursed progress eastward. If Jack would pass through this area, and remain for more than a few hours, his chances of returning to Eden in the same condition as its inhabitants were excellent.

  Jack was not planning on lingering in one place for too long. He would seek out cleaner pastures as quickly as possible. As he studied the map further, he speculated on Laura's exact position. There were few places in the world, Jack knew, that the blind winds of nature neglected to spew their poison; that part of the United States between the Nevada and California borders, a hundred miles in either direction from E
den's location, was one of the cleaner areas, radioactively speaking. There would be, Jack conceded, an excellent chance however that Laura was familiar with the less than enchanting company of Stiffers, and possibly, mutants, like Maddogs or the more benevolent strain of monsterdom like the Edenites. If the Angel's promise of Laura's existence was to be taken seriously, however, it would be safe to assume that the girl had developed some method of either dealing with these problems – or eliminating them accordingly.

  Walter flapped onto the map and fought for balance. Jack took the hint.

  "Yeah, I know you're here," Jack chuckled, then offered a finger or two for battle. The fight was half-hearted, though, as Jack stared off into the room and sighed.

  His thoughts turned abruptly to Angela. He had not been with a woman since his wife's death four years earlier. Nor did he feel especially deprived; the divine art of staying alive demanded most of his energy and was not an especially effective aphrodisiac. The implications of the Angel's discovery had not sunk in for Jack until now; the shock value in finding someone who was, like himself, perfectly healthy and uncontaminated was extraordinary, but it was magnified all the more by the gender of the survivor. After Angela, Jack had divorced himself completely from the outside world and such a separation did not allow for an occasional encounter with intimate female companionship. And, of course, with the War's arrival and the festivities begun in earnest, what little libido had heretofore loyally clung to Jack took an immediate leave of absence, perhaps never to return. Haunted then and still by the ghost of Angela's memory, he had never entertained plans for the future with another mate in mind.

  Until now. Against his will.

  For now, there was Laura.

  Jack fought with Walter and ruminated. For a moment, he felt childish. School boyish thoughts (even now, he laughed inwardly!) flashed into his head.

  Laura, Laura, Laura.

  I've just met a girl named ...

  Will she be pretty?

  Will she like him?

  How will she feel about being Eve?

  "Ouch," Jack barked, as Walter successfully pecked a chunk of skin away from his finger. Such contests between Man and Bird were not always without pain. Walter, Jack noticed, took the finger-fights to heart and was obviously unaware of his own strength.

  Or was he? Jack looked into Walter's eyes. Walter returned the stare. Every now and again, Jack thought he could see something almost – human. He shuddered a little and shook his head. Walter, he affirmed for the hundredth time, was a remarkable little mystery indeed.

  "You win, partner," Jack said, tossing Walter into the air and getting up.

  Walter flapped, circled Jack, then took a firm purchase on the man's shoulder as Jack marched for the door, maps in hand, his thoughts returning to Laura.

  She was out there. . .somewhere.

  And he was going to find her.

  Since Blast Day, he had entertained no compulsion to explore past a perimeter of three miles from the Dome and Eden. What lay beyond could only be speculated on – and surmised as hellish. Yet beyond, Jack now conceded, held hope; hope for himself and for humanity. He felt a little presumptuous, assuming already that he was, perhaps, the only uncontaminated man left in the world – and that she, Laura, was the only woman remaining; the only woman for him. But the presumption was not quickly dispelled.

  Because perhaps there was nothing left; perhaps Eden was it. In two years, he had found no one like himself. Granted, he occupied a pitifully small patch of earth on the planet and he had insulated himself from as much outside contact as possible; to assume so easily that out of five billion souls, only he (and Laura) had emerged unscathed, was preposterous if not unrealistic.

  But how many had prepared as carefully as he? How many would have that kind of paranoid foresight and discipline?

  How many had had a wife like Angela? A clairvoyant whose talent for predicting the future had been one hundred percent accurate?

  Perhaps no one, except the extraordinary scientist, Victor Talbot, and his daughter.

  Jack stared into the ferocious darkness, spotting one of the Edenite sentries waving to him. He waved back then loaded up the remainder of his supplies into the Humvee.

  How many, indeed?

  He could not even begin to guess how extensive the bombings had been, which countries had been affected, or effectively wiped out, what the scope of devastation to the planet had been and what the long term projection promised regarding the viability of life, in any form at all.

  How many?

  With sudden insight, Jack realized that Laura or no Laura – sooner or later, he would have had to chance the exploratory voyage he had so long been dreading into the land beyond Eden's valley. Such a voyage might kill him; but he would have had to make it nevertheless. The Angel and Laura had simply given him a starting impetus.

  Jack closed the door, clucked to Walter and thought of sleep.

  Tomorrow began the adventure.

  Jack grabbed at Walter suddenly, holding the bird so that it could not hope to escape or flap. Jack stared at the pigeon, as it struggled ineffectually.

  "I'd be doing you a favor by keeping you here. But I guess you wouldn't forgive me if I did that," he said, frowning.

  Walter made a noise of disapproval that vaguely sounded like a growl.

  "I didn't think so," Jack muttered, then put the bird on its favorite shelf, overlooking Jack's sofa and bunk.

  Jack fell into his bed, then stared up at the ceiling.

  Despite his very best efforts, he did not fall asleep for a long time. Walter quieted down and crouched on the ledge, blinking a tired eye or two at Jack. Jack couldn't help but smile.

  On second thought, he would have hated to make the journey without Walter. At least Walter was something he understood; a thing from his old world that had not somehow been hideously transformed into something strange and horrible. Walter, at least, represented some kind of normalcy.

  It was this last comforting, if completely inaccurate, thought that finally allowed Jack to sleep.

  * * *

  Like mourners at a funeral, the small populace of Eden gathered solemnly around Jack's fortified Humvee, awaiting the dreadful moment of his departure.

  Jack exited the Dome, bags slung over his shoulder and an extra .45 automatic buckled to his side, in addition to his AK-47 already placed and strapped to the passenger seat. Walter fluttered behind him, then winged on ahead to light on the Humvee windshield.

  Rebecca, the little girl whom Jack had taken blood from a day earlier, forced her way through the forest of adults and stood in front of Jack.

  "You be careful, Dr. Jack," she said firmly, pointing a finger at him like a little mother.

  Jack stopped, stooped down and looked into the girl's eyes. He then stared at Gleeson and the Edenites. He hugged Rebecca gently.

  "Promise," he whispered, so only she could hear.

  "Happy birthday," Rebecca whispered back. "I forgot to tell you that yesterday."

  Jack paled as he felt the girl's fragile torso, devoured from within by bone and blood cancer. He pulled himself away from her and stood. He burned the thought out of his brain that she would be dead before he returned.

  "I'll be back in a week. Remember the rules. Stay sharp and listen to Gleeson."

  Brandon, Jim Rosen, Denise, Mimi and Aunt Sheila stood together. Aunt Sheila was waving happily. Except for her mad good wishes, the eyes that came his way all said the same thing, the tacit accusation that Jack had read in Gleeson's eyes and heard in Brandon's voice the day before:

  You're abandoning us, they said. You – who we need and trust. Probably, you'll die out there. And in turn, we will die. Dr. Calisto. Our savior – and now – our executioner.

  Stop it, Jack pinched himself mentally. Or you will go crazy.

  Gleeson moved forward and took one of Jack's bags. Jack let him, allowed himself one more look at the Eden camp then crawled into the Humvee. Walter flapped his way into the
passenger seat next to him.

  "There's nothing you can't handle, Gleeson," Jack urged. "Even if I don't come back, you have more firepower than the 82nd Airborne. And twice the meanness!"

  "Have a good trip, doc," Gleeson replied tonelessly, keeping whatever reservations he had concerning Jack's impending journey to himself. “I suppose what you’re doing you think you have to.”

  "Yeah," Jack muttered, starting the engine. "If I’m lucky, when I return, you’ll understand why I had to do this. Be good."

  The crowd moved away – reluctantly – from the Humvee. Jack found Rebecca's eyes again; those eyes that said so much with so little. There was no accusation in them this time, real or imagined. There was only concern and worry, for his sake. She stood there now, watching him, doubting, fearing, loving.

  Love.

  Yes, that's what he saw now. Love, selfless and giving.

  Because you're going to save us, Dr. Jack, Rebecca's eyes said. Do what you must now and be careful, but come back soon; to help us. To keep us from dying. Because you love us and we love you. Come back. Promise?

  Prom –

  Jack turned away quickly, gripping the wheel in front of him.

  "Let's find her," he said to Walter in a strange, gravelly voice.

  The Humvee moved forward and slowly out the gate.

  EIGHT – LAURA

  LOG; TALBOT, VICTOR, Personal

  December 26.

  Third day.

  Laura and I, shaken; but holding up. Hot outside. Completely dark. Radio non-functioning. Internet is gone. We play cards and listen to the wind and rain.