The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  “You say a white place?” Lee spoke up.

  “Not a heavenly sort of white,” Eva added.

  “More like a limbo,” Andrew suggested without emotion.

  “Yes,” Eva responded. “No sense of time passing, no sense of movement.”

  “Or place or destination.” Andrew tapped his chin. “And then you arrived here, not knowing how you even came to be here.”

  “Sir,” William began, “you act as if you—”

  “Speak from experience?” Andrew asked in a flat voice. “Yes, we’ve all had that experience. All of us sitting here on this dais arrived here the same way as children, some of us with our parents, others with the last dregs of humanity.”

  “Arrived here as children?” William blinked several times and stared at them. “I don’t understand. But that would mean Earth was destroyed—”

  “More than fifty years ago by our calculations, at least as we measure time here,” Andrew added.

  “Here?” Eva asked. “Where are we?”

  “We don’t rightly know. Other than to say that this is the last human civilization still in existence. What you see here in this city is all we believed was left of mankind.”

  Petra smiled without showing teeth. “Until you arrived.”

  Andrew glanced sidelong at her, said nothing, then spoke to the Newcomers. “Your appearance here has presented us with something of a dilemma, I’m afraid. It’s something we can explain to you far better in more informal settings. I would suggest we adjourn for the time being. You and your family need a bit more time to recover from your journey privately.”

  “Sir!” William stood up, pushing off the table. “I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what I’m allowed to say, but permit me to ask one thing of you before we leave.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can we . . . stay?”

  “Stay?”

  “Permanently, here, with all of you. With other human beings. We can’t—we can’t go back with the Orangemen.”

  “I seriously doubt they’d let you,” Lee muttered, just loud enough to be heard.

  “The Orangemen won’t be back for another two years,” Hector Phillips explained. “We only ever see their representatives every other year.”

  “As I said earlier, my wife is a doctor and I’m an engineer,” William continued. “Surely there’s something we can contribute to your city.”

  Eva stood with her husband now. “We could not help but notice how primitive things seem to be here. You obviously were not left with much. We could help improve your medicine, your technology—”

  Andrew nodded. “Yes, we can always use medical know-how. Tell me, Dr. Tyler, I could not help but notice your accent. Do you speak—I believe the language was called Spanish?”

  “Yes,” she replied, a wrinkle in her brow. “It was my first language. I was born in Argentina.”

  “I thought so. The lilt of your letters reminds me of someone I knew long ago, a woman, but she was one of the early settlers who died. She was planning to translate our Spanish books for us before she passed. You see, when we were deposited here, the Orangemen left us with a number of books, a few of which were in languages none of us could read. So we don’t know Spanish as a living thing. All we’ve been able to figure out is what words translate the one Spanish Bible we have into our Latin and English ones. But we don’t know pronunciation, all that. It’s one of the many things we lost.”

  Eva smiled. “I would be happy to teach you. And to translate whatever books you have that I can.”

  “Wonderful, that would be—”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Lee began, “this is too much. Now really I must ask—”

  “Gordon?”

  “Technology?” he asked, wide-eyed. “What technology can they give us?”

  “Gordon,” Andrew said. “I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

  Petra turned on him. “Gordon, come on now—”

  Lee held up his hands. “I know technology may not fit into your worldview, Petra, but really—don’t you think that particular view could stand a bit of—”

  Andrew’s sharp clack of the gavel, banging now for several seconds, grew louder and more furious. “Gordon, that’s the end of it. Let’s discuss this later.”

  Lee gave a mocking bow. “Of course.” Then to the Tylers: “Bad manners.”

  William turned to Andrew. “We’ll gladly share with you any knowledge we have and will help in any way we can.”

  Andrew smiled and nodded. “Of course you will. But let’s discuss all of this later, when you’re a bit more informed as to the lay of the land here and”—he turned to the generations’ table—“emotions are a bit more under control.”

  He rang a bell to summon the guards to bring the Tylers back to the anteroom, where everyone inside could see the children still waiting.

  “Please shut the door on your way out, Lieutenant McQueen,” Andrew said.

  As the door closed behind the Tylers, a heated silence filled the room. Andrew watched Lee stand up and stretch dramatically. Lee then leaned against the hearth-warmed stone wall with his arms folded and said, “One hundred and forty-four thousand—plus four? And showing up fifty years apart? Now that doesn’t quite work, does it?”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Hey Jake, how’s about we take a walk down the beach tomorrow?”

  Jacob Weiss had no illusions about why they were going or what they would be talking about. Although technically it was against civil law for serving Council members to speak with friends or relatives about issues before the Council, Andrew, as chairman, also had the right to consult with the military leadership, who happened to be his brother, on matters of defense. So while the brothers were not doing anything technically illegal, that technicality didn’t prevent either of them from thinking it might be a wise idea to have their conversation in as isolated a place as possible.

  Knowing they would be outside the city walls for most of the day, they both took along light packs with provisions and their carbines. Andrew, the heavier of the brothers and the elder by two years, would want to rest three or so miles into their walk and make camp to eat. Jake, in better physical condition, planned his day around his brother’s desires—eat when they decided to rest, walk on for another couple of miles, rest again, then turn back and repeat the rest stops. Jake didn’t see such gestures as a burden, having had to consider his older brother’s wants since childhood.

  Andrew was already on the beach, his pack in the sand at his feet, his rifle lying against it. “Let’s walk south.”

  “Sure,” Jake said with a curt nod as he adjusted the straps on his pack and set off.

  The brothers said nothing at all for the first mile or so. They walked side by side on the brightening beach. Their shadows, thin and long, stretched out alongside them. They listened to the waves breaking against the shore and smelled the salt air, each seemingly lost in his thoughts and comfortable leaving the other to his. Jake couldn’t recall anyone else in his life with whom he could be silent for so long. Certainly not his wife. Amelia and he had filled their time together with endless conversation, even about the most trivial matters. Sometimes they even bickered just to fill the silence.

  It’s said that you can’t be silent for long in the company of someone you’re uncomfortable with. Despite their silence, Jake was not always perfectly comfortable with Andy. As much as he loved him, he had never quite come to understand him. He wondered if it was always like that between brothers.

  “How’s about a break?”

  Right on schedule. Andrew laid his rifle in the sand and pulled his pack from his shoulders. With a sigh and a scratch at his shaggy gray hair, he leaned against the pack as he sat in the sand.

  Jake stood over his brother, watching him down the edge of his nose, then set his own rifle and pack down. Andrew was obliviously pulling at his bootlaces to free his hot and tired feet.

  “Think I’m going to cool my dogs in the surf a bit
,” Andrew said. “Might still be a bit chilly.”

  “Sounds good. Be right with you.”

  A few minutes later the brothers were standing barefoot in the frosty surf, their pants rolled up to just below their knees, feeling the sand under their heels get sucked back into the undertow. The first time they swam in this ocean they had been just kids. A clear memory, despite all the years, one they often recalled together. It was around the time the adults had agreed to begin living together as a community. The proposed city was already being called New Philadelphia, despite the protests of some who wanted to name it New Jerusalem. The brothers, dark haired and strong and lanky, knew the work would require a lot from their developing muscles, but they were eager to help because it would also allow them to come to this beach, someplace they had not been since just after the Arrival. The beach still felt like a reward. A day in the sun and surf—though neither had ever admitted it to anyone but each other, they couldn’t imagine the promise of heaven being any better.

  Jake smoothed his trim mustache with the L of his thumb and forefinger. “You know, we’re going to have to talk at some point, Andy.”

  Andrew kept his gaze on the horizon, where the blue sky met a slightly darker blue ocean in a clear line. “I don’t trust them.”

  “The Newcomers or the Orangemen?”

  He snorted. “Neither.”

  Jake grunted a laugh.

  “I know I don’t have any real reason to distrust our Orangemen,” Andrew added quickly. “They’ve left us alone and watched over us and have kept us hidden from the Hostiles—but they haven’t exactly helped us either.”

  Jake wiped ocean spray from his wire-frame eyeglasses with his handkerchief. “So why’d they bring us these four? To help us?”

  “Or to test us?” Jake added impassively.

  Andrew turned back to the horizon. “I think that’s the problem here. The Newcomers are clearly a test for us. Do we trust them and accept what help they can provide? Or do we spurn their help because we’re being offered some of the same vanities and comforts that led to our destruction?”

  Jake shook his head. “‘Vanities and comforts’—”

  “What else would you have me call them?”

  “Necessities for our survival.”

  “Now you sound like my Sofie. Or maybe she’s just sounded like her favorite uncle all these years.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Andy. What’re you asking me?”

  “I’m asking you what you think, Jake.”

  Jake shifted out of the holes his feet had sunk into and milled around his brother in the surf, hands in his pants pockets, head down. “I think none of this makes any damn sense.”

  “Go on.”

  “Four Remnant humans alive after all this time, Orangemen deciding to drop them off here and now—even trying to understand who and what the Newcomers are is setting our people at odds.”

  “And how. You should’ve seen that meeting.”

  “It seems like a test. But who’s testing us?”

  “Jake—”

  “I’m not trying to be blasphemous. I’m just saying we can’t be sure. And not to be paranoid, but how do we know these Orangemen are ‘our’ Orangemen anyway? Sure, this pair came on the appointed date, but the Hostiles have found us before.”

  “One rogue Orangeman, that one time—”

  “One who did enough damage.”

  “So that girl says.”

  Jake looked at his brother, jaw set. “Let’s just skip that.”

  “Skip what? That what happened six years ago up in that clearing has made you a doubting Thomas?”

  “The point is that the Newcomers’ presence is stirring up debate among our people, getting us to distrust ourselves, our beliefs.”

  Andrew chuckled. “You’ve never feared—what’d you call it?—‘healthy debate’ before.”

  “This is more than debate. Or about our differences of opinion about what the Orangemen are.”

  “Opinion, you say—”

  “This is the beginning of factionalism, the kind that causes lines to be drawn and wars to be fought, just like the ones we’ve read about and feared all our lives. Some, like Grace, are going to take the appearance of the Tylers as the fulfillment of Revelation. Others are going to say it can’t be—that the foretold thousand years haven’t yet passed.”

  “Go on.”

  “Look, we haven’t had any strife in all the years we’ve been here. No wars. No crime. Despite all our initial differences in backgrounds and faiths, we’ve all developed a single set of beliefs: that what happened to us, both here and on Earth, sure as hell looked like it was Revelation fulfilled. If God really gave us anything through the Orangemen, he gave us peace and unity on this rock. And now we’re at risk of losing it.”

  Andrew was quiet for a moment. “Point taken. Anything else?”

  “Just one more piece of paranoia I’d like you to indulge.”

  “Shoot.”

  “We know the power of the Orangemen. We know that prophecy foretold that only a certain number of people were supposed to survive—the exact number that in fact did. So here are my questions: How do we know that these four really are the risen pagans of Revelation? Hell, how do we know if they’re even human?”

  Andrew’s eyes took on a stung look, as if he had just been smacked in the mouth. “God in heaven. What do we do?”

  “If they’re Hostiles?” Jake mused on this for a few moments. “Drive them out. Or kill them if we can.”

  “And if they are human?”

  Jake threw up his hands. “Then Grace may be right.”

  “How can she be?” Andrew growled. “As you rightly note, the prophesized thousand years haven’t passed.”

  “I’m not sure. But on the off chance she is right, then I don’t know what to do. But we better find out what they are for certain before we do a damn thing.”

  Gordon Lee stirred himself out of his twisted sheets to face his day. He would later admit in his journal that nothing about the day seemed like it would be one filled with epiphanies. Half-awake, he had overheard Sofie rushing the girls off to school about an hour earlier—so much intense shushing whenever one of the young loudmouths came near his bedroom door—but all of that frantic energy had dispersed, leaving their house abnormally quiet. It was in that quiet hour that he tried to twist himself back to oblivion again, only to find thoughts of his dreary existence keeping him on the less pleasant side of dreaming.

  For several minutes he stared at the exposed beams of the ceiling, thinking about the amount of heat lost on any given cold night in this house. He came up with a rough (but fairly accurate, he thought) estimate and then multiplied it by the number of homes in the city, shaving off percentages here and points there. After another minute he decided to discount the oldest buildings, which were fully exposed on all four sides to the elements (if he had had his druthers, they would have been pulled down a decade ago), and concentrate on ones like his own, built in rows and better protected. Ten minutes after he had begun he had a number in his head, representing the total amount of energy wasted across the city each night the temperature dipped below freezing. The actual number didn’t matter. What did matter was that he knew he could do nothing about it. Or about much else in this backward world.

  Stumbling out of bed, he scratched his trim chest and shambled over to his dresser, where he poured cool water from the pitcher into the basin and splashed some on his face. Then he wandered into the kitchen to see if Sofie had left him a fresh pot of coffee. He closed his eyes in bliss when he saw that she had—just needed some warming. Sofie was very considerate and very good-looking—a wonderful combination if one must be married to only one woman. He stirred the coals in the fireplace, set the pot on the grate, and ate a torn-off chunk of bread while he waited for the coffee to perk.

  She really was a fine wife—strong and smart and determined. The walls between theirs and the houses next door were thin enough to make him realiz
e he could’ve married a god-awful shrew. She knew that his work—primitive as it was—was important and mentally challenging. Yes, it required him to work odd hours, but she always gave him enough space in which to do it and kept their three little loudmouths at bay. She even tolerated his occasional frustrated rants because she knew he was right and agreed with him. More than agreed with him. Encouraged him to do as much as he could, almost as if she could see the future he wanted as much as he did.

  His greatest frustration—his lifelong bafflement really—was the Remnants’ blind acceptance of their lot. They tolerated so much of what happened to them. And tried to block out what they knew they had lost. They made do with the primitive weapons and tools the Orangemen had left them with. They revered the scant number of books they’d found in the containers and shrugged off what was missing—the vast, unimaginable treasure trove only hinted at in their surviving volumes.

  Yet nothing—bar none—frustrated him more than the infamous missing collection of Eastern books listed among the initial inventory. The religious books on Buddhism and Hinduism and the like, he could not care less about. But there had been so much more there, books on science and mathematics. Perhaps some moron had left the box too close to the tide or had decided to use the books for kindling. It didn’t matter. Their loss was a personal irritation to Lee, who had been told all his life that his ancestors hailed from a place called China, one of the most ancient and revered civilizations on Earth-of-old. So much of its knowledge only glimpsed now, so many questions left unanswered. Who was Confucius? What was the I Ching? What was in Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book that had stirred a generation?

  And why did the Bible not mention China at all? Every time he read it, Lee tried to find China in it—perhaps by another name—but could find nothing that seemed to fit with the pieces of information he had on it. He couldn’t imagine any reason for God wanting to hide an entire civilization. And for that reason among others he found it hard to believe God was behind any of this at all.