He propped himself on an elbow to face her. “Really?”
Her grin was almost shy. “Who knows?”
“The idea of it doesn’t make you nervous?”
“We’re well past the common age of betrothal, Johnny.”
“Be serious.”
She reached up and touched his face. “Not with you. The idea never has with you.”
“Since when?”
“Since when?” She shook her head. “Probably since we met. Does that seem weird?”
“Maybe not on your end. But on my end it might’ve been.”
“The Remnants made the age of consent low for a reason. Lots of couples are years apart.”
“It’s not just the age difference. I’ve always been afraid to tell you, Kendra. I could hardly admit it to myself. I’ve been afraid to tell you as long as I was sure there was something to be afraid of because—”
“Because?”
“Because what I feel for you—” he began, then closed his mouth and started again. “I would’ve rather not had you than have had the possibility of losing you.”
“You won’t lose me, Johnny boy.”
“No, I’m serious, Ken.”
She rubbed his cheek. “You won’t lose me. You’re only allowed so much loss for one lifetime. I think I read that in a manual somewhere.”
He shook his head. “I’ve lost enough to know that losing you would be the loss I couldn’t take. That’s all.”
“I love you too.” Her lips brushed his, her words in his mouth. “God, I love you so much.”
They slept nestled warm against each other until the next morning. He woke long before Kendra and watched the sunlight shoot bright and new through the leaves on the tree she had pointed out the night before. It was a good and beautiful sight and made something old and sentimental catch in his throat. He didn’t look at trees in this way very often.
Had he seen sunlight brighten a tree like this the morning after he first met her?
He couldn’t remember that morning six years ago at all. But that night—there was little about it that he had forgotten. That night he had followed orders to the letter. He had gotten Kendra home, brought a doctor to her house, kept his mouth shut in front of her parents. All that was needed for him to do then was to follow the colonel’s last order—to double-time it back up to that clearing in the hills.
He had found Weiss at the far edge of the clearing, almost where he and Kendra had left him. It had grown overcast since he had been gone but the moonlight was still bright enough to see across the field. A carbine lay across the older man’s lap. Between two thick fingers was the smoldering butt of his last cigarette. The scattered butts of several others had been snuffed cold in the dirt around his feet. Weiss had the attitude of a man on guard duty, casual but ready to respond if needed.
“Glad you could make it back.” He stood up and mashed out the cigarette with his heel. “Anyone ask where you were going?”
“No, sir.” John took a sip from a proffered canteen.
“Anyone follow you or hear you coming this way?”
“No, sir. I made sure of that.”
“You made sure.” Weiss huffed out a laugh. “Giordano, remind me to tell you later how long that little girl eluded me.” He shook his head. “If she hadn’t stepped on that branch—”
“Sir?”
“Never mind.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s this way. And remember, this is your blood oath, son. No one can ever know.” Then he lit his collapsible field lantern.
They entered a part of the forest where the brush was dense and thick. John kept both hands high to block unseen stray branches from hitting his face and fixed his eyes on the colonel’s lantern a few paces before him. Every once in a while he looked up at the heavy green canopy high above their heads, hoping that some of the moonlight that had been present earlier would shine through. The terrain was level and free enough of obstacles. They were on a path of sorts—a dried-up streambed maybe—that cut through the brush. Half a klick into the brush, they emerged in another clearing that was almost identical to the one where he had first stumbled upon Kendra and Weiss. In this one, however, a single tree stood off-center as a lonely guard over a nearby rock outcropping.
A step behind Weiss, John could feel the older man tense up. After a moment’s pause, Weiss headed straight for that tree standing apart from its surroundings. Something was lying beneath it that wasn’t stone.
Weiss set his lantern down atop the outcropping of rock, high enough to throw its light on the object on the ground. The colonel stood back. Stepping lightly and slowly, John made a complete circle around what he had been brought there to see, not realizing that his carbine had slipped from his shoulder and into his hands, safety off.
The moon he had been looking for during their trek through the forest emerged from behind the clouds and set the whole clearing into sharp relief. He wasn’t sure if it was a blessing. There, lying on the ground before his feet, was an Orangeman.
John had never seen one. To his knowledge, no one other than the Remnants had. It was all they had described the Orangemen to be and more—a perfectly formed male figure, human-looking except for the fact that he was massive, about seven feet tall, orange in color, with a head slightly larger than a human’s and a pair of translucent wings on his back. His slate-gray eyes seemed to be open and unseeing, but without irises it was hard for John to be certain.
“Is he dead?” he asked without looking at his superior officer.
“Yes.”
John lit his field lantern and crouched down to examine the Orangeman, who was slumped in a heap on his right shoulder. His broad wings were lying cocked and awkward, like a dead bird that had crashed into a tree. He seemed to be less orange in color than John imagined they would be, and his perfectly chiseled face was not quite the platonic form his grandfather had described—but both of these things could be explained by the fact that he was dead. Wait. Dead? An Orangeman dead? Was such a thing possible?
John shook his head. “Is it a Hostile, or a Friendly?”
“A Hostile, I’m pretty sure.”
“How can—what happened?”
“I found him—it—here. With Kendra. I killed it.”
“Killed it? How the hell can you kill an Orangeman?”
John looked again at the corpse and ran his light along its length. Then again, slowly, until he found what he was looking for: a bullet hole just under the left armpit. The tiniest trickle of something—he imagined it to be blood but wasn’t sure—ran from the wound, down the barrel-shaped chest, and across the flat belly before winding its way down to a growing pool on the ground beneath its right hip. He—it—was as dead as any living creature could be dead. It didn’t make any sense. It was like waking up one morning to discover you were breathing out of your eyes. An Orangeman dead. And killed by a man, to boot.
He turned to Weiss. “Why? Sir, I don’t understand.”
“It was attacking her, Giordano.”
“Attacking?”
“It was raping her, son.” His thick bulldog features pulled into a deep grimace. “I stumbled upon them, and it was raping her. So I killed it, and now you’re going to help me get rid of the damned thing. If people found out what happened here—” The older man shook his head. “The people have to be protected from this.”
“Protected, sir?”
“Yes. Protected.”
“Even from the truth, sir?”
Weiss looked at him, his face a half-moon in the lamplight. He hardly opened his mouth to speak or to raise his voice. “This isn’t the truth. Whatever it is, it isn’t true to any one of us.”
Weiss didn’t need to explain any further. John knew and understood. The Orangemen were both humanity’s mortal enemies and constant protectors. The Hostiles had destroyed mankind. The Friendlies had been trying to keep the survivors safe and secure as mankind forged a new path. From this planet, men would defend themselves until their
race was reinforced enough to begin anew and they no longer needed to fear the fallen beasts who brought them to their end. That was what they knew and understood. Not this.
Yet whatever this was, it was still a higher form of life than they were. And still one of God’s creatures. As John broke out his field shovel from his pack and helped Weiss find a suitable spot for an unmarked grave, he felt like Adam in the garden hiding his nudity among the trees. When they finished their grisly work as the rising sun’s rays lit the peaks of the mountains around them, he still felt like Adam, even though God had not yet asked him where he was or what he was doing. John almost wished he would. At least then he would know what the result would be.
CHAPTER 7
Jake Weiss had stood in the street outside the Council chambers for twenty minutes, smoking cigarettes and flicking their butts to the curbstone.
He shook his head with disgust. Fifteen fistfights in the last week. And these on top of a dozen reported the week before. Obscene.
Typically, there were never more than two or three a season. And then only because somebody drank a little too much. He was sure he couldn’t name insobriety as the cause of any of these recent ones.
He didn’t want to go inside. He wasn’t sure anything he’d hear in there would make his thoughts any clearer. In his more gullible moments, he thought his whole life had been a clear narrative. But deep down he knew that wasn’t entirely true. A narrative wasn’t a whole truth, just a story told. It was a construct. It needed an author and readers who believed what they were being told.
They didn’t often talk about it—except among themselves and then only on rare occasions—but most Remnants recalled with remarkable clarity all the hushed conversations they had overheard their parents having with other adults about what the Orangemen might be. Jake was no different. It was hard not to remember anything having to do with the Orangemen. Seeing them that day above the beach after that endless time in the White Place—it was something all of them still felt in their chests like the surging warmth of a glass of wine. So it went without saying that any conversation about the Orangemen could easily stir a young Jake Weiss from a warm bed and a dreamless sleep, even after another long day of helping the adults build the city.
On that comfortable breezy night, his parents had left ajar the window shutter to the room he shared with his brother while they sat with a pair of friends on the front steps. Mostly they spoke in drowsy tones about work that needed to be done or that so-and-so needed to be reminded of the importance of some all-consuming project. That night, however, they were speculating about the Orangemen. The kind of speculating people had done for thousands of years under starlit skies as vast and as wondrous as this one. Jake didn’t recognize the other two voices, but the way they spoke with his parents was easy and familiar. He glanced at Andy. Sound asleep. Jake crept out of their bed to stand next to the window.
“None of us here saw them up close on Earth,” the woman was saying, “so we can’t be sure.”
“But they were there. We saw them in battle,” the man said. “A war between humans and the creatures who destroyed us. So who’s to say they aren’t the beings described in the book of Revelation?”
His father chuckled. The old man had a way of releasing tension in even the most heated of debates. “We’re Jews—and secular ones at that—so I can’t say I’m that familiar with it. But as I understand it there’s a lot of contradictory information in there—just as there is in the Old Testament.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” his mother said.
“Hmm?”
“It’s really not easy to fit what actually happened at the end of the world into what Revelation predicts will happen—the earthquakes, the attacks, the war. There’s too many parts. But yet it fits, if looked at the right way. And there’s the fact that we were left with so many Bibles. That alone is a very potent fact. It’s not surprising if people are starting to believe that what’s in there was clearly foretold.”
“Any number of reasons could explain the Bibles,” his father answered. “Maybe the Orangemen raided a bunch of motels. Now don’t laugh. I’m only half joking. It might explain how lacking we are in the major scientific fields and how we’re overstocked with Western literature. They might’ve collected these books as haphazardly as they collected the last survivors.”
“Haphazard?” the man asked in bewilderment. “We came from only twelve points. And what about the census we took right after we got here?”
“He’s got a point, honey. I mean, exactly one hundred and forty-four thousand? The exact number that had been predicted? A number confirmed by the head count taken again and again in the weeks that followed?”
“Okay, Louise. Here’s an alternate theory,” his father said. “What if these things are just—I dunno—aliens and left the Bibles here to force us into thinking of them as near-omnipotent beings? What if that’s the simple reason?”
“Simple?” the man asked. “Sounds more complicated than what I’ve been saying.”
His father laughed again. “Man, you take too much stock in the supernatural, Frank.”
“And you too little, Dave.”
“And what if,” his mother asked, “what if that kind of thinking is what caused Armageddon in the first place? What if we’ve been too arrogant and not reverent enough?”
“But reverent to what?” his father demanded in a raised but still playful voice. “The power of God? Superadvanced beings? What?”
“Maybe,” the woman said, “just respectful of the fact that as a race we’ve thought for so long we were the top of the heap. And we’re not. One way or another, we never have been.”
Jake crept back to the bed. Andy was awake but quiet, likely woken by his father’s voice. Jake tried looking for a comfortable spot but couldn’t seem to find it.
After a while, Andy spoke. “They’re wrong, Jake. Don’t you think otherwise.”
“Wrong about what?”
Andy snorted. “Everything. They think too much, talk too much.”
“How so?”
“They all talk about the Bible like they know it. I’ve been reading the Bible. It says in there all we have to do is love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. Seems to me to be easy enough to do.”
“But what about the Orangemen?”
Andy turned to him, his deep-set eyes disappearing into the shadows on his face. Jake could feel his brother’s breath on his cheek. “I know what they are. I knew it when I saw them hovering over the beach. And you did too. You knew it in your bones.”
Jake thought about it for a second. “Yeah, I did.”
“They’re trying to think their way out of that feeling, but they can’t. That’s why they’re making us build this city, instead of having us wait for New Jerusalem to come out of the sky. Because despite all their doubts, they know we’ve got to get ready to build a new race—a more decent kind of human being—right here for when the time comes.”
“And when will the time come?”
“Dunno. That’s not up to human beings. But you and me better make sure to be ready.”
“Will we?”
“Yeah, we will. Because we’re brothers and we love each other and we’ll always have each other’s backs.”
Almost a half century later, the Weiss brothers stood side by side before the dais in the Council chambers waiting for their invited guests to arrive. Andrew was certain it wouldn’t be a very long or very pleasant meeting.
“Still not sure this is a good idea, Andy.”
“You got a better one? If we don’t do something now to get them to cool things down, we’re going to have a lot more than fistfights on our hands. This rabble-rousing has to stop. Fistfights are bad enough. What if somebody, God forbid, decides to pull a gun on someone else?”
“And your solution is to—what?—scold them like misbehaving students? Yeah. That’ll work.”
“Dammit, Jake—”
Petra and Grace entered the C
ouncil’s chambers first, but only as fast as old Grace could walk aided by her cane and Petra’s arm. They were as early by as many minutes as Gordon and Sofie Lee were late. Andrew wasn’t surprised. In fact, he was pretty sure his daughter had told her husband to show up late. A little spiteful—almost teenage—willfulness on her part was not atypical behavior.
The two pairs sat at the tables in front of the platform. A trick of the light coming through the shutters made it seem as if they were balancing on ends of a scale. To Andrew, it was more than a bit funny and pretty much appropriate.
“We’ve asked you all to come here to impress upon you the seriousness of just what you’ve done to our city with that little stunt you pulled. You’ve sown dissention, confusion, and discord into a community that has long been at peace with themselves and with their neighbors. And now look what’s happened with all—”
“Where’s the rest of the Council, Mr. Chairman?” Petra asked, ignoring Andrew’s opening statement. She had allies there.
“This isn’t a formal Council meeting. If it were, we might have to consider bringing you all up on charges.” He snorted. “Charges we’ve never needed to use in the half century since we began to build New Philadelphia.”
“So what’s all this about?” Petra asked.
“The old carrot and stick,” Lee muttered, shaking his head. “I wasn’t expecting that. Really.”
Jake had been leaning against a nearby wall, arms crossed, listening to this exchange. “We’re worried about people getting hurt, Gordon. Fights are already breaking out over what the Tylers really mean. Sofie, you were in the Defense Forces a long time. We’ve got enough trouble worrying about whether the Hostiles will find us. We don’t want to have to worry about policing ourselves too. We’ve never had to, and we don’t intend to now just because you’ve decided to make your private spat as public as possible.”
Lee shook his head. “This isn’t just about the Tylers themselves. What the Tylers are—what they represent—is vastly important to our future as a society. Their knowledge alone could significantly improve—”
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