He nodded. One of the great advantages of the long stretches of memorizing Papa had made him do was that he could remember things much more easily than any other kid his age in school. But a worry remained, “Why Mama?”
“Never mind that. Just remember, you must do that, or thousands of people will die.” The light had passed overhead. It was dark in the alley, but the sounds of steps and the voices drew closer.
She reached in her pocket and pulled out something. It was a burner. Not a burner like they showed on TV, all glossy and pretty, but a short, battered thing, with a rounded butt, that looked as if it had been assembled together from spare parts. “Papa showed you how to fire these, right? You remember?”
Juan remembered. It was hard to forget as it had been only this week. Papa had taken him to the basement, set a burner on lowest, and had him fire at figures painted on the wall.
Mama said, “If someone tries to stop you, shoot them. Don’t stop to see if you hurt them or killed them. Burn center mass, and run on.”
“Papa said never to point it at a person.”
“No, dear,” she spoke very fast. “Never to point it at a person you don’t mean to kill. But everyone is allowed to kill, if the other person would kill them.”
“How do I know—”
“Trust me, Juan. If they try to stop you, if they catch you, they’ll kill you and Angelita. Or worse.” She pushed something into his pocket. He didn’t know what it was, but she said, “There are two scraps of flag there, Papa’s and mine. Papa’s is the one with the stain on the corner. Keep it when you grow up. Give mine to Angelita, when you’re sure she understands. Now go.”
“What about you?”
“Never mind me.” Mama leaned over and kissed him, a brief touch of lips on his hair, and then she pushed him, hard, down the alley.
He ran to keep from falling, and then he kept running, down the alley, at full speed. He was aware of burners firing and of cries. Was Mama shooting people or had she—
He couldn’t imagine Mama hurt, Mama dead, any more than he could imagine the end of the world. And that’s what it would be if Mama died.
Instead, he held on to the idea that she would escape, she would join him.
He ran as fast as he could, the route she said.
He met no opposition, until, running so fast he almost couldn’t see, and sweat trickling into his eyes, making them sting, he almost ran into the Plaza of Peace. There a uniformed soldier turned around and said “You, Kid!”
Juan didn’t think this counted as trying to stop him, and he didn’t want to shoot the man, who was young and looked a lot like the brother of his friend Klaus, back at school. So instead he ignored him, and turned left, into the alley with the dumpsters. Mama hadn’t said it would be this long.
He ran down it as fast as he could, but it wasn’t very hard, because his legs felt as though they were made of water, and his breath was coming in short puffs. He felt like he would collapse, but he remembered what mama said. Could he live with knowing he’d caused the death of thousands of people? Or failed to save them? He tried to picture thousands of people, but he couldn’t. That would be like everyone he knew.
“Hey, Kid, stop,” came from behind him. And as he ignored it, another voice told the first, “It’s just a kid, why are we chasing him.”
“It’s not just a kid. His description and that he’s carrying a baby is on the bulletins. He’s going to alert the other rebels. Those damned Usaians.”
Juan didn’t want to turn. Juan didn’t want to shoot these young men. But Mama’s words rang in his mind, and he could not doubt these people wanted to stop him. And they’d said damned Usaians. These men wanted to kill them. People like him and Mama. Mama had said–
He pulled the safety on the burner, as dad had taught him to do it, by touch. And he set it on high. Papa said it was just like the games, point and click.
Juan wanted to close his eyes, but he knew that if he did he’d miss, so he turned and fired, center mass, only he kept the beam on and cut straight across. He had the impression of cutting two bodies in half, but he didn’t stop to look.
Angelita had started crying and squirming. Papa used to joke she slept through everything, but judging by the smell, she must be dirt. He murmured soothing words he knew wouldn’t help, as he ran and hoped no one looked out the windows to see where the crying baby was.
He came to the dumpster and turned, in the almost blind dark, and ran. This alley was shorter, and it ended in a brick wall. There was ivy growing along the wall, and, fortunately, Juan was light. Fortunately, too, he’d always liked climbing.
Even so, Mama was right, and it was difficult. It was very difficult to hold on and not to squish Angelita against the wall. Particularly, since she was crying.
At the top of the wall, he hesitated. There was a man with the dog in the enclosure. He was old, about Papa’s age, and he had a pipe, and a little yellow puppy playing at his feet.
He looked up, as Juan sat there, and Juan didn’t want to kill him, because he didn’t think he was the authorities, but he had to go up and give the message… He had to.
The man blinked at him, in confusion. “Hello, there. What is wrong?”
The last was said in a tone of concern, as he looked from Juan to the baby.
“I must see my uncle,” Juan said. The idea just came to him. Anyway, at the great fall festival, when people gathered in some secret place to eat and trade stories, the kids called every older man uncle and every older woman aunt, so, it must fit. “James Remy.”
The man’s face froze. There was a long silence. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He looked kindly, with pale hair streaked with white, and grey eyes, and he said, “I see, you must be my nephew, Jimmy.”
“No. Juan,” he said. “Juan Johnson.”
“Of course Juan. Sorry, I got confused with your brother. Here, let me help you down from the wall.”
There was a bad moment, as the man reached up and took Jimmy’s hands, and helped him, till he was holding him and Angelita in his arms, together, and Juan thought he would hold him and not let him go, and then Juan would have to kill him. But the man must have sensed Juan’s discomfort, and put him down. “We can’t talk here,” he said. “We’ll go on up to aunt Mary, shall we.” He whistled for the puppy, “Come on Pie.”
“Pie?” Juan asked, as he noted they were going in through the back door and trotting up the stairs Mama had described.
“Pumpkin pie. My daughter Jane named him. She’s very silly.”
The puppy followed at their heels, as they got to the top of the stairs.
The shock when the door opened was almost too much for Juan. He’d been living a bad dream for the last hour? Eternity? But here was normal life, just like it had been at home before that knock on the door. They had a Winter Holidays tree set up, all decorated and lit with lights, and presents under it, and there was a smell of food, and there were two kids, just older than him, and a baby, and a large blond woman, with a kind face, who looked at the man he’d come in with, and then at Juan, with Angelita, and said, “Now, Jim, what?”
But the man was walking past her, and telling the two children, “I think this is bugout. You know what to do. Go.”
The woman said, “Oh, no. Can’t be. They’ve eased the restrictions on religions. We can even have trees if we don’t call them—”
But the man turned to Juan and said, “Son, what is your message?”
“Paul sent me,” Juan said, feeling like he would cry, and he wasn’t sure why, repeating Mama’s words. “Treason.”
The man said a word. One of those words Papa said when he cut himself with one of his tools. And then took a deep breath. “I’ve been wondering. First the Christians, then us. Anything that might stop the state…” He looked at Juan’s uncomprehending face.
“How do we know?” his wife said. “how do we know it’s not a trap so we reveal ourselves?
The man looked at Juan and sai
d, very softly, “In congress, July four, seventeen seventy six—”
Juan nodded and answered with the remembered words, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires—”
“Enough, son. He’s one of ours. Mary, I’ll pack, you change that baby and give this young man something to drink, and maybe something to eat. I think he’s been through hard times, just now.”
The big blond woman took him by the hand. She felt like Mama, even though she couldn’t be because Mama was small and dark. Presently, she was giving Angelita a bottle while Juan ate a bowl of warm oatmeal with cream and brown sugar and told her what had happened. Her eyes got misty when he talked about Mama being left behind.
Juan had been thinking, he said, “She’s dead now, isn’t she, ma’am?” It seemed impossible, and yet he was sure of it, in a way. “Papa said if you died defending the USA, you’d be born again in a land of freedom, is it true? Do people live more than once?”
The woman’s eyes misted, blue beneath a veil of tears. “Some people think so. Some of our people. But my husband and I we’re Chri– We believe in another religion, too, an older one. We just think there is a better land, and your mama and papa are already there. You should call me mom now. It will make things easier. Your name is Juan? Maybe we should call you John.”
“Juan is the name on my birth certificate,” he said, “But Papa said my real name was John Adams. And Angelita is Martha Washington. Johnson.”
“Let’s forget the Adams and the Washington. We need to be even quieter than we’ve been,” the father of this family said, as he did things around them. Juan wasn’t sure what the things were, but he was bringing small bags from inside, and checking burners, as though to make sure they were okay, then setting them atop the bags. “Your name now is John Remy, can you remember that? And Mary is your mom and I’m your dad. And Angelita is Martha. Just Martha. I think we’ll call her Marty, shall we?”
Juan was too tired to protest. The oatmeal had hit his stomach and somehow made him feel warm and really sleepy.
“You go with your brother Jimmy and mom,” the man he was to call dad said. “You know where to go,” he told his wife. “Take the baby. I’ll take Jane and go the other way after I pass on the alarm. We’re just a normal family, going to visit relatives. If you run into trouble, send me signal. I’ll try to retrieve you. That message – someone gave away our enclaves and we don’t have very long. I’ll pass on the codes, and then I’ll join you.”
“Where are we going, sir—uh—dad?” Juan said.
“Olympus Seacity. We’re not forbidden there.”
“Yet,” his wife said.
“Yet, but we’ll survive this,” her husband said, and kissed her. “You can’t erase the idea of the USA until you kill every one of us. And they can’t. We’ll move on. We’ll be secret. We’ll keep going. And someday, someday, we’ll be free to be and to believe again. The idea of freedom and equality we hold might be small and frail compared to the will to power of the tyrants, and the idea that our betters should always lead. But once it had been kindled in human breasts, it is unquenchable. We’ll go to Olympus. We’ll start again. They always need skilled people. And if we should fail and if we should fall, someone will go on, someone will believe. Maybe one of these children.” He kissed his wife again. “Go on. Jane and I will join you and take Pie with us.. And you too, Johnny, go on. Your Mama and Papa and you saved a lot of people tonight. And you might have saved the hope for a future in freedom.”
Juan didn’t understand it all, but as he went out into the night again, this time held in the arms of his adopted mom, he felt somehow that he’d accomplished something big, something that would be remembered. The young man, Jimmy, was carrying Angelita, who was asleep again.
They walked down the street, in the muted street lights. Above the moon shone with a bright, clear, silvery light.
And it seemed to Juanito that up there, somewhere, Mama was watching and smiling. Perhaps he’d saved many people, but he’d only done what she wanted.
That was enough for him.
She’d believed that the words he’d been taught, the beliefs she held, would one day make the world better.
He didn’t know if she was right, but she was Mama. Dead or alive, he’d follow her beliefs.
“Life, liberty,” he whispered to himself.
“And the pursuit of happiness,” his new mom said. She kissed his forehead. “And we will pursue all three, little one. We will. However long it takes to attain them, There are dreams so big you must keep chasing them, no matter how long it takes.”
Juan only half heard her. He was falling asleep, slipping into a dream where the great summer high holiday was held in the open, in a park with green grass, and there were red blue and white streamers floating in the wind, and fireworks, like what dad had told him about in the old days.
Mama and papa were there, holding hands and looking up at the fireworks. And in their faces was the most radiant happiness he’d ever seen.
It was a terrible and beautiful sight, which he would never forget.
First Blood
HE WAS NOT A MAN.
The knowledge washed over the young Rene D’Herblay as he hid between the wall of the refectory and the side of the lectern, clutching the cross he’d taken from the wall above his bed. That knowledge made him shake more than the sounds coming from the refectory, in the dark: the sounds of bones breaking, the sounds of fighting, the laughter of vampires, the sucking of blood, the gurgles of the dying.
He was not a man. Not a real one, a fighting man, fierce and feared as his father had been. Not even a man like his older brother, the Chevalier D’Herblay, lord of the D’Herblay domains and respected by farmers and tenants who looked to him for protection.
Rene might have whiled away his days in this refectory, while Father read improving texts from the lectern, by drawing swords on his spilled soup and dreaming of commanding armies, but his family had always been right about him: small and slight, he had been made for the safety of the seminary and the protecting arms of the Church, not for the rough and tumble, the strife and blood of the battlefield.
Only now the church itself had been broached, the seminary had been broken into in the middle of the night. First, the Judas goats, the servants of vampires, had come, removing every holy symbol that might disturb their masters, spilling all the holy water and the blessed salt that might have injured the vampires.
Rene had awakened to the sounds of fighting and dying in the room and, instead of finding a sword and fighting the Judas goats, he’d minded only his safety, grabbing the forgotten cross from the wall above his bed and running madly to the chapel where he’d taken the holy blood from the monstrance.
Slim, slight, Rene had always been told by his towering brother that he was more girl than boy, that he didn’t look like the family, that he partook a sickly and weak nature from being born of a sickly and delicate second wife of dubiously noble blood, who’d proven herself unworthy of the D’Herblay name by dying at Rene’s birth. Usually Pons added, in an undertone, that Rene should have died with her and good riddance. But Rene’s build now served to preserve his life. He’d been able to squeeze into a corner where no one would think to look for a seminarian.
Now he clutched the cross and the wine and tried to remember the word of a prayer. Only no prayer would come. And he was shaking so hard that the holy blood spilled on his rough linen shirt: the only thing he was wearing since he’d been in bed when the Judas goats came. And the cross was leaving marks on his hand from being clutched so tightly.
Someone screamed just on the other side of the tall lectern, and Rene clamped his teeth together, afraid their rattling would call attention to him and tried to
form in his mind “Our Father–”
“Our Father–” but he never got past that, because all he could remember of his father, who’d died before Rene was five, was a stern face, a stern voice telling him not to cry when Rene had just injured himself; and a hand on his shoulder while a voice said, “Always remember that you’re a D’Herblay. Always make our name proud, my son. Be a man.”
And now Rene wondered, in a sudden pang of fear if he’d see his father on the other side, and what his father would say. And would God look like his father?
He tried again to form the words in his mind “Our Father–”
But he couldn’t go on. All those years he’d spent dreaming of leaving the seminary; of joining the musketeers under the assumed name of Aramis; of doing great deeds. It had all been for nothing.
He wasn’t a man.
“Oh, what have we here?” a voice sounded from above him. Looking up, Rene saw, looking down on him, two wide staring eyes, a very pale face surrounded by a welter of dark hair, and a cruel grin that displayed two large, sharp fangs.
Rene heard the strangled cry leave his own lips as he tried to knit himself even tighter with the wall, to escape. But there was no escape. Why had he thought there would be? Most people in the seminary, his masters and colleagues, were now dead or dying. He could smell spilled blood everywhere, as well as piss and the sweat of fear – some likely his own, though he was too scared to be sure. Why had he thought he could escape?
The vampire’s large hand plunged behind the lectern, grabbed at the back of Rene’ shirt and lifted him until his feet left the ground. Vampires have unnatural strength, Rene thought, his mind stupefied and amazed, as his body tried to scrabble and bring the cross in front of the vampire’s eyes – easier said than done, since the vampire was grabbing him facing away from the vampire. Vampires have unnatural strength. It had to be, because though Rene was shorter than most men in his family and slimmer and more limber than most men, he was not that small for a nineteen year old. And men shouldn’t be able to lift nineteen year olds as though they were infants.
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 2