by Brian Yansky
The Hunter is where I knew he’d be, though. He’s attacking with the main group, at the point of the wedge. As we practiced, we form two squads. Those in back face the hunters from that direction, and the rest of us face the Hunter and the main force.
Sam’s shooters are quickly up into the woods, both north and south, and they fire as the rest of us attack with kicks, punches, and blocks — most of them physical but some of them mental.
We’re still outpowered, but our preparedness seems to catch the aliens by surprise. The shooters do exactly what they’re supposed to do. They draw the aliens’ attention, weakening their focus.
Sensing the weakness, we attack harder. I send my wave of whatever at them, which disrupts their defense long enough for a few bullets to get through. One of the aliens is hit and spins back into others. But more of our people die.
I’m sorry for your loss.
The Hunter gets close to me then. He lets the others worry about the bullets. He thinks that I am the key. I think that he is. He does something that knocks me to the ground and that I have no defense for. That’s when I see it again. The future. One of a thousand moments when we are all dead. A million. Me first. He says, Sorry for your loss.
I see it. I’m in it.
I try to push him away, break his hold, but it’s like I’m being strangled. I can’t break the grip of his hands. This is the moment of my death. Deathgiver. He was right.
Sorry for your loss.
Catlin joins with me. I try to break from her because if she joins, then she’ll fall, too. She will die, too. Even together, we aren’t strong enough to break his hold. All she’s done is made it easier for him to kill us both.
Then I feel something else. Something on the Hunter. I’m able to move my head enough to see. It’s Running Bird. He’s jumped on the Hunter’s back. “No!” I cry, because I know what happens next; I’ve seen it. Wile E. Coyote blows up the Road Runner. That TNT in the road finally gets him.
I see Running Bird explode, see the Hunter make him split apart.
Catlin’s screams are echoing in my head, and it’s all happening just as I’ve seen it. The Hunter is reaching out to split Catlin apart, like he’s done a thousand times, and as she falls, I do to him what I did to that rock Running Bird threw at me what seems like a century ago: I split him. He’s split into pieces. They fly off in all directions.
That stupid nursery rhyme comes to my mind: “All the kings horses and all the king’s men . . .”
But I’m wrong.
He’s so powerful that he pulls the pieces back together; they rejoin. He’s so powerful that the life flows back into him. He even begins to smile. But then he looks down. Catlin stands before him, and she’s holding one small piece of him in her hand. She crushes it.
His smile fades. It’s been a long time since he’s been surprised. That’s what he thinks. Then he crumbles, and the pieces of him shatter on the ground.
And he dies, his body next to Running Bird’s.
When the other hunters feel their leader die, they can’t believe it at first. Then I feel it in them. Fear. Confusion and fear. This time, they’re the ones who run. This time we hold our ground. There’s cheering, but I don’t cheer. I kneel by Running Bird. Catlin kneels and tries something, but she knows it’s useless. We saw him break inside.
She pulls on my arm. “There’ll be more of them coming.”
“Probably,” I say, still kneeling by his body.
“We’ve got to go.”
Zack and Zelda tell Catlin a girl’s hurt over by the trees. Catlin goes into my mind and takes the tracking device out of me and then runs. Zack stays behind me and looks down at Running Bird.
“He’s old,” Zack says. “You wouldn’t think he’d be so strong.”
“No.”
“He was, though.”
“Yeah, he was.”
“I killed one of them,” Zack says. “With a gun.”
“You did good,” I say.
“It doesn’t feel good,” Zack says. “I thought it would.”
“No,” I say.
“I really thought it would.”
“I know,” I say, still looking at Running Bird. And then I say, “We don’t have any choice, Zack. They haven’t left us any choice.”
It’s a soldier’s thing to say, I guess. I never wanted to be a soldier. Doesn’t matter.
“I know,” he says, and looks embarrassed. He starts walking off.
“Zack,” I say, and he stops and looks back at me. “It’s good that it doesn’t feel good.”
He stares at me for a second, then says, “Yeah,” and walks on.
Sam comes over and says we need to go. We need to move on and find a place to sleep. So we move on — just like we’ve had to do and have to do, leaving the dead behind.
We walk back into the forest. We stumble along for a couple of hours, the chill of the night taking hold of the air, and then we sleep on a damp hillside beneath thick pines. There’s a lot of troubled dreaming and the sounds that come from it, and I wake once to one child crying and another screaming from a nightmare. I get up and walk around because of the noise and the sense that we’re being watched, but all I find is a raccoon. I lie back down, and before long I’ve fallen asleep. Running Bird comes to me in my dream.
“Guess you were right,” he says. “The Road Runner was killed after all.”
“I wasn’t right. Remember? You’re still alive in plenty of moments.”
“True,” he says. “I talked to the wind.”
“What did it say?”
“Said it wouldn’t let me look at the Big Book.”
“Sorry. That book is pretty amazing.”
“I like books with pictures anyway,” he says. “Find your way back from the future. No one can do that but you.”
“The Hunter is dead. We’ve sent a message,” I say, but I know from the nightmares, from the number of dead, that we’re limping along, the walking wounded.
Running Bird’s expression is inscrutable. “It is not enough, Warrior Boy.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“You have to do more.”
“What? What do I need to do?”
“You’re the Warrior Boy, got the Warrior Spirit directing you. Best listen.”
I wake up listening, trying to hear something in the wind. There are no answers, just the rustle of leaves in the trees, the stirring of tired and dispirited people, the grieving whispers. And something else; the slightest of satisfactions. We’re still alive.
We move on toward Santa Fe before the sun’s up. We have people with rifles ahead of us, to the side, and behind. We have scouts farther out. We walk all day and into the night, the last part out in wide-open spaces with hills and mountains that glow almost pink as the sun sets. Then, once it’s night, billions of stars fill the big sky. We stop when it seems like we can’t go on anymore and make camp.
Sam, who’s been out ahead of the group, reports that there are houses in the next canyon. She’s going to take some scouts and see if she can find a working phone. She wants to try calling some of the other houses. In particular, she wants to try Albuquerque, which had a large Clan of the Wind, House of Jupiter, before the invasion. I think we both know that we need others, though neither of us is willing to admit it.
Michael says he’s going with her. She stares him down.
“Why are you so eager to get killed?”
“I’m your man, Sam. It’s written in Jesse’s Big Book.”
Sam turns to me. I shake my head.
“I don’t need lovers,” she says. “I need fighters.”
“I can’t be both?” Michael says.
She shakes her head but tells him he can come.
“What should I tell Albuquerque if I reach them?” she asks me, her gaze steady and penetrating.
“We’re here,” I say. “Tell them we’re here. You know what to ask them.”
When everyone is settled and the sentries are posted, Cat
lin and I climb away from the others. I tell her about my dream with Running Bird in it.
“That old man is still messing with me,” I say.
“You think it’s true?” she says. “About death, I mean. We’re still living in some moments even after we die?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“I’d like to think so,” she says.
We talk about the dead. Her father. My mother and father. Friends. Lindsey. Lauren. Running Bird. Doc. In the shadow of this talk, we join. I lose sight of what is me and what is her. We’re like one person. One person who is bigger and more powerful than either of us alone. We’re two who are also one.
Later that night, I have a dream that is a moment on the time line — the line that leads to our daughter, Cat. Catlin and I are in a room without windows, a room with stone walls. There’s a big screen, like a movie screen, taking up most of a wall.
“I have to reset the codes,” a voice says. I turn and see the voice belongs to a man with salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache. His uniform shows he’s a colonel, like my dad was.
In the next instant, I have the colonel in a choke hold, a good one with my forearm tight against his neck.
I skip ahead a few moments. The colonel is on the floor, his eyes fixed on the giant screen on the wall.
“You’ve destroyed us,” the colonel chokes out. “You’ve signed our death warrant!”
I don’t understand. There’s always so much I don’t understand.
In the morning, Sam tells me that she was able to make contact with the Albuquerque House of Jupiter.
“Their house has grown in size, combining with the survivors of other houses and a few New Bloods. They have three hundred talented ones now. And their leader has been in contact with some talented in Los Angeles — New Bloods and a mix of several houses, nearly a thousand survivors. There are more of us alive than we thought or than they let us think. The group in Albuquerque is organized differently from New America. They separate military and civilians.”
I let this news sink in. It’s good news. There are more of us. I’m unsure about the division between military and civilian, but I understand it. Our nonfighters, the children and elderly and those who can’t fight, should be somewhere safer. We should be able to protect them better.
“I’ve told the colonel about the potential alien landing,” Sam continues. “And I filled him in on New America’s plan to send a clear message to those thirty million would-be settlers. He agrees that this should be the objective of all missions. He’s sending out the word as best he can: attack targets now.”
“That’s good,” I say, and I feel a rush of hope. An army. Okay, not much of an army from the sound of it, but an army fighting back. We aren’t alone. “That’s very good.”
“He’s willing to let us join him, join his camp, which he’s calling the Fourth Infantry of the Southwest. He has two conditions: he commands, and we divide into military and civilians.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“By reputation,” she says. “He’s a good man. Not an easy man, maybe. Career military.”
“What do you think?”
“This is war,” she says. ”We’ve fought well and we’ve survived, but a lot of it’s luck. We have children and elderly who should be somewhere safer. It’s hard on them, and it makes us less effective. It would give us stability. We’d fight with a military unit. We’d all have a better chance of surviving.”
“And we’d be military.”
“Is that so bad?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly, remembering the guy in my choke hold, the colonel. You’ve signed our death warrant.
I can’t trust my dream, though. I can’t know if it will even be our future — if it really is a future. And I know we can’t survive like we are.
“New America will do what you say,” Sam says. “They’ve elected you leader without casting a single vote. You know what we should do, though.”
I know. I don’t see much choice, really. I call a meeting and put it before New America. Sam is right. They want to know what I think we should do. They trust me. I’ve kept them alive, they say. Not true. We’ve all kept each other alive, except for those we haven’t. Too many.
I say we should join the survivors in Albuquerque.
The trip, by foot, takes us four days. We don’t run into any more hunters, though I don’t know if it’s because they can’t track us anymore or because they’ve had to regroup after the loss of the Hunter. We do run into other survivors: a gang of what turn out to be renegades. There are maybe fifteen of them. They look us over, and when they realize how many of us there are and how armed we are, they retreat into the hills.
I remember the future. These gangs will be powerful. There will be many of them, small groups willing to kill for what other people have. And some of the gangs will join and make larger gangs and eventually small armies. And there will be wars and fighting. I remember the future, the one we survive in, the best one, and it will be hard, too.
When we reach the camp, the colonel — Colonel Hamilton — is there to meet us. I’m upset but not entirely surprised that he’s the colonel from my dream. I shield my thoughts so that he can’t see my memory of putting him in a choke hold. Even so, his eyes are cold when they meet mine.
Colonel Hamilton makes a short speech welcoming us. Then he wants to talk to Sam and me in his tent. He has a town-hall tent somewhat like Doc’s, but the tent isn’t open the way Doc’s was. The flaps are closed, and there’s a guard standing watch.
Colonel Hamilton is a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache. The two men in the tent with the colonel have shaved heads. One of them is really big, like pro-football-player big, and the other is small, compact, and fidgety. They’re two of his captains. There’s a table with some maps spread across it and a few chairs.
I can hear our two groups mixing outside the tent. The colonel’s group is offering food and water. We’ve had a long, hot, dusty walk, and I can hear how glad our group is to have arrived. This camp is like a little town, and I can feel the relief in the minds of our people to finally be someplace safer, if not exactly safe.
The colonel wants a report on everything that’s happened so far — basically since I arrived at Doc’s camp, at New America. Sam and I take turns telling the story, each of us fleshing out different details. When we get to the part about Doc’s murder, the colonel frowns.
“Dr. Cabeza was a good man. That was no way for him to die.”
When I mention Running Bird’s death, though, the colonel says nothing.
“He was a great man,” I hear myself saying, which surprises me. “He saved me. He saved a lot of people.”
“As you say,” the colonel says, but I can feel that he disapproves of Running Bird for some reason. Not a serious man, he thinks.
Once he feels he’s been sufficiently debriefed, the colonel begins to explain how his unit operates. “The Fourth is a military unit. We’ve organized a chain of command. Everyone who can fight is part of the Fourth, but there are civilians here and they’re part of the Fourth’s responsibility. Our mission is to attack the enemy whenever possible and damage them and stay alive. We’ve had little contact with other units, but we do know there are other units out there. Communication among units is a work in progress, but, however disorganized, there’s an army of fighters. Don’t doubt that.”
“You’ve had some contact?”
He nods but won’t say any more about that. “There are rules,” he tells us. “They are posted. There are penalties for not following the rules. They are posted. We have an MP and three officers who act as judges for any disputes or alleged crimes. We’re strict but fair. This is not a peacetime army, though. We’re at war. I won’t pretend otherwise.”
He asks if there are any questions.
I shake my head. “No.”
“No, sir!” Sam says, and salutes him. It’s natural for her. I wonder if I should salute, but I don’t
.
The colonel dismisses Sam and his two officers but asks me to stay.
When it’s just the two of us, he says, “I assume you agree to my condition about command since you’re here?”
“I agree, but I’m not a soldier. My father was.”
He says he didn’t know my father but he’s glad to hear I understand the military.
“Doc called us, the survivors, New America. We’ve voted on decisions. We’ve tried to make our group a democracy.”
“You know it can’t be that way in the military. I like the name, though. New America. That’s a good name. The civilians can have it, and we’ll pay allegiance to it, but right now we’re at war. There’ll be time later for democracy. There’s no time for it now.”
“There has to be,” I say.
He sits back, frowning a little, his eyes on me. “In war, some freedoms have to be taken away for the good of the whole. Your father was a soldier, so you know this. No true American likes it, but that is the way it is in war.” He pauses. “They say you can dreamwalk. Is that true?”
I nod.
“And I can hear in your people that you fight like the aliens. Remarkable. How did that happen?”
I do my best to explain. I tell him about my martial-arts training and the things I’ve discovered and how my power has grown over time. He eyes me closely, and I can tell he’s trying to decide if I’m an asset or a threat. I think he decides that I’m both.
“Every able man and woman is part of the military. Anyone can refuse and face a hearing to determine if there’s a good reason for them to receive a deferment. Otherwise they serve in some capacity.”
“I’ll fight,” I say. It’s what I’ve wanted all along. But what I want to know more than anything is if our decision to join the colonel and the Fourth is the one that will lead to the future I’ve already seen. And that’s something I can’t know.
“That’ll be all, soldier,” he says, already turning his attention to some papers on his desk.