The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  “No one is disputing their significance,” Andrew cut in. “But we just can’t—”

  “When are you going to let them go?” Sofie spoke up. “Uncle Jake, why are they being held prisoner?”

  Ah, this is your part to play. Andrew looked at his youngest daughter, her pointy chin thrust forward, arms folded across her chest, all armor and defiance.

  “No one is imprisoned, Sofie,” her father answered in his public voice, soft and level.

  “But they’re not free, Dad. Do you really think they’ll gladly give us whatever knowledge they have after being locked up for so long? How is keeping them isolated going to get them to trust us?”

  “I understand your concerns. But we have no experience with any newcomers, so it’s better to be cautious. What would you do in our place? Think about it now. Should they come into our midst without their knowing anything about us or us about them? Just because they’re human doesn’t mean they can be trusted.”

  When Jake cleared his throat, Andrew glanced at his brother. “Might as well tell them, Andy.”

  Andrew nodded. “And consider this: What if they aren’t in fact human but are Hostiles in disguise? We know from the Bible that the beasts of old took on different forms—”

  “But you have no proof of any of this!” Lee said. “You’re just feeding into their interpretation of what the Newcomers are.”

  Jake looked at Lee over the rims of his glasses. “We have proof of nothing, Gordon. That’s the point.”

  Lee looked from one brother to the other. “If they’re allowed to be questioned by the whole community, then maybe we, as a community, can dismiss some concerns more readily. This is too big an issue to be decided solely on our leadership’s say-so.”

  “That’s how a representative democracy works, Gordon.”

  “You set yourselves up like Pharisees,” Petra said, condemnation in her voice. “You judge for all of us.”

  “Not our intent,” Jake replied. “We’re just trying to protect what’s left of the human race as best we can.”

  “Sounds noble,” Petra said, “but you both know that throughout human history many miscarriages of justice have been carried out with the best of intentions.”

  Andrew groaned. “Petra—”

  Grace, who’d been sitting quietly, her rootlike hands folded over the head of her cane, spoke. “When you two were just boys, I remember the whole community used to decide all matters of great importance—such as agreeing to build this city.”

  “Things, as you know, are a bit different now, Grace. Our population, thankfully, is much bigger, we have a formal government—”

  “I’m well aware of the differences, Mr. Chairman. I helped create this representative democracy.”

  “So what do you suggest we do?”

  She leveled her gaze at him. “Let the Tylers into our community. If they are what you fear they are—Hostiles in disguise—they will make their true natures known soon enough. But if they’re not, if they are what the faithful believe them to be, then we have no fear of them, for despite the crisis they may herald, through that final trial leads the way to everlasting peace.”

  “Or through them leads to a further advancement of our civilization, the likes of which we have never known,” Lee added.

  Grace nodded in Lee’s direction. “Let our people judge them as individuals and among themselves and as a whole. This is a decision to be made by everyone, not just the Council. Or the two of you.”

  “Strange as this may sound,” Sofie said, “we’re in total agreement with Grace.”

  “At least on this,” Lee said, smiling at the old woman.

  “Of course,” Andrew said. “They will be released once the threat assessment has been deemed to be nil.”

  Grace let out a soft chuckle, dry with experience. “You sound so much like the politicians of old, Mr. Chairman. So I will play politics with you. Refuse to release the Tylers in short order for evaluation by the community, and you’ll see rallies among our people that will make the one in the square seem like a family gathering for Sunday dinner. I’ll live long enough to do that, and Petra will carry on for me if I don’t. The choice is yours.” She stood and, with one hand on Petra’s arm, hobbled out the door.

  When the Weiss brothers were alone in the chamber, Andrew turned, a look of disgust on his face. “This is all your damn fault.”

  “My fault, Andy?”

  Andrew groaned and got up from his chair. “‘If you want to keep the human race going, never allow an argument to go unsettled.’ That’s what the old-timers told us. That’s the advice they gave us that you’ve always so cavalierly disregarded.”

  Jake slipped his hand into his uniform’s inside jacket pocket and took out his rolling papers and tobacco pouch. “No one ever said that particular piece of advice was Bible truth.”

  “Don’t get cute, Jake.”

  “I’m not.” Jake finished rolling a neat cigarette, licked the paper closed, and lit it with a match from the wooden box next to the metal candelabra on the table. “I’m here to keep the peace and protect our people. I do that. But I’m not about to force anyone not to think for themselves.” He grunted. “Then we really would be Pharisees. Or worse.” He took another drag, then looked at his brother through the blue-gray smoke. “This is about Sofie again.”

  “It’s not about Sofie.”

  “Cut the crap, Andy. It’s always about Sofie. You have five living children who revere you. And yes, your youngest daughter has always questioned you, questioned our beliefs, questioned everything. She’s always wanted more.”

  “What’s that old expression, Jake? ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ Augustine wrote that before creating heaven and Earth, the Lord ‘fashioned hell for the inquisitive.’”

  “Yet he still questioned things. We revere him for his questioning. And if I remember right, Augustine believed that the Bible should not always be interpreted literally, but metaphorically—especially if it goes against what we know from science and our God-given reason.”

  “You ask questions about every damn thing. She had to get that from somewhere.”

  “So it’s my fault, huh? Okay, let’s say it is.”

  “Or let’s say it’s in the blood.”

  “Right.” Jake smirked as he fingered his mustache. “Dad was never sure about everything that had happened to all of us. You always took that as weakness on his part.”

  Andrew leaned the better part of his bulk on his knuckles against the edge of the table. “When I see her—God almighty—I see you, I see Dad, I see the doubts and the skeptical eye.” He looked at his brother with love and weariness. “I see everything that brought the human race to its end.”

  Jake smoked his cigarette and did not say anything for a long time. “We’re still nowhere on what to recommend to the Council about the Tylers.”

  A derisive laugh bubbled up from Andrew’s throat. “Well, I’m sure glad you haven’t come to a decision about that all on your own.”

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  He waved the comment away. “Forget it.”

  “No, say it.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Jake. When you came down the mountain with that girl.”

  “Kendra? What’s this with you, old-grudge night?”

  Andrew said nothing.

  “Andy, we were right not to tell anyone about that. Think about what would’ve happened if—”

  “If people found out that a fourteen-year-old girl and her boyfriend had fled the city to have sex in the woods?”

  “Dammit, Andy, that’s not what happened, and you know it.”

  “We know that she and the boyfriend were having sexual relations before they were legally betrothed.”

  “I was there. I saw that Orangeman. I killed him, as I could’ve killed any man. You gonna call me a liar?”

  Andrew again said nothing, just nodded a couple of times without looking at his brother.

  “
Clear your damn head, Andy. You’re taking this too personally. What has any of that to do with the Tylers and the decisions we have to make right here, right now?”

  “I just need to know I can trust you, Jake, whatever happens.”

  “I’ve always had your back. You know that.”

  “But will you follow my lead here?”

  “What’re you suggesting?”

  “We don’t know what the Tylers are—just as we don’t know what that Orangeman was that you killed.”

  “At the next meeting our Orangemen said that he was a Hostile, probably rogue.”

  “Right.” Andrew smiled. “But if that were the case, why didn’t anyone ever come looking for him?”

  “I’m not following.”

  “What if these Tylers are the search party in disguise?”

  “Seems six years too late for a search party. But again, we’re going in circles. We don’t know.”

  “But we have reason to fear it as a possibility. So we kill them quietly before either side can question them. Everybody’s left with a mystery but not a menace that will tear the city apart.”

  Jake weighed his brother’s words. The soldier in him thought it made sense—sacrifice four to save a race. Had he done anything very different when he saved Kendra and kept quiet what that Orangeman did to her? If he had to do it all over again, he would. He knew that. But this? Was this the kind of decision a new race of man should make?

  “Supposing we could even get away with it—and that’s a really big if. What if we’re wrong? What if they’re not Hostiles, not demons in human forms, whatever? What if they are human and exactly what Grace believes them to be?”

  Andrew nodded his resignation. “We need to know one way or the other. We need more evidence.”

  Jake tossed his cigarette on the wood-plank floor and tamped it out with his heel. “Let me see what I can do. But until then, get the Council to stall this release.”

  CHAPTER 8

  No one except Kendra McQueen had ever ventured more than six miles beyond the hill perimeter of New Philadelphia. Even back in the lawless days of living in the hills, the Remnants had not gone much beyond it. Whether this was an agreed-upon decision or just a matter of subconscious groupthink, neither Kendra nor John—nor anyone in their generation—ever really knew.

  The city had been built close to the beach, not far from where the Remnants had landed all those years ago, on a rising plain surrounded by high hills that spooned much of the shoreline. While people had traveled many miles up and down the beach, north and south, the lands past the hills that encircled New Philadelphia on three sides were a mystery. Along the tops of those hills was the perimeter—not a fortification or a demarcation in any way, just a worn-down path where generations of humans had stood watch day and night to ensure that none of them would ever be caught off guard again. Inside the perimeter was the last of human civilization. Outside of it? None of them knew. Forest from the look of it. Mountain streams. The realm of predatory animals. Beyond the perimeter was the world beyond—whatever world it was that the Orangemen had stuck them on.

  As John hiked toward the perimeter with Kendra, he remembered a story his grandfather told him of an ancestor who, having come into his father’s fortune as a young man, sold all of the father’s property in Italy and traveled the world for years before going broke and coming to America, where at fifty he married a young widow, had children, and painted merchant ships in Brooklyn until his seventy-fifth birthday. “And that’s where we all stayed, generation after generation,” his grandfather said, “until we wound up here.”

  To most, rebuilding the human race, protecting and nurturing every child, took precedence over exploration. Whether such thinking was progress was still a matter of debate. “Mankind was exploratory, had been since the earliest days in Africa,” John could hear his father saying. “We needed to see what was over in the next valley and where the source of that freshwater spring came from. It was normal and natural to think like this, to seek out the new. This paranoid fear of the unknown, that takes away the best part of being human. It sets us back on our instinctive heels instead of allowing us to step forward using our reason.” Good old Samuel Giordano could talk when he wanted to.

  Yet John had felt that kind of fear. It was an old thing and made him wince when he thought about it long enough. The fear came along with him every time he went on perimeter patrol. Alone up there on moonless nights, that paranoia crept out from under his skin. Some soldiers claimed fear kept Novices sharp until they learned how to conquer it. John was never sure he had ever conquered it. He suppressed it because he was an officer and people were relying on him. But he never mastered it, because he knew he could never account for the infinite variables of the unknown.

  At the top of the hill, they stopped and swigged from their canteens and looked at the beaten-down dusty path before them that meant they were about to leave civilization. He stared into the woods beyond. Nothing. He tried to breathe the fear out of his nostrils.

  Kendra—his Kendra at long last—looked at him, nodded a couple of times, whistled, adjusted her short dark hair under her cap, and sighed. “Okay, so here goes, eh?”

  “Nervous?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Me too. So we gonna do this?”

  She touched his arm. “Don’t think about your dad and your brother.”

  He glanced back at the city in the valley below them. “I’m just thinking of better ways we could’ve spent this morning.”

  She kissed him once on the mouth and let her lower lip hang between his for a second. “Me too, pal.” Then she slipped her carbine from her shoulder and crossed into the world beyond, following the gushing stream that provided their city with its fresh water back to its unseen source. A second later and another glance back and he was right behind her.

  He and Kendra could have said no. It hadn’t been an order. Still, it had all the bells and whistles connected with one. A message had come for them—urgent—that General Weiss wanted to see them in his office in the barracks ASAP. The messenger, a very baby-faced Novice, had found them walking together a few minutes after they’d traversed the tunnel back into the city after spending another night at the cabin. They’d sent the clueless kid packing with a return message that they would see Weiss in a half hour. Just enough time to clean up.

  They found Weiss sitting behind his rough-hewn desk, the one that they both knew had been made by his parents. Books and papers were scattered about the desktop. Several pencils lay by his writing hand along with a small manual sharpener. Between his elbows was a leather-bound Bible, open to the well-thumbed pages of the book of Revelation. In a half circle around it were a number of open and unopened volumes, including an English translation of Augustine’s Confessions, several maps, several files, and three memoirs by Remnants. The names on those spines were unfamiliar except one: John Giordano, MD.

  The younger John had of course read his grandfather’s only book years ago, more out of respect than because of any intellectual curiosity. The bits he recalled from it were mostly funny anecdotes from his grandfather’s youth on Earth. Why the general had the old man’s book among these others, he had no idea.

  “Thanks for coming,” Weiss said after answering their sharp salutes with a tired one of his own. John looked at him and felt he seemed more than a bit old. John had never thought of him as old. But now in the morning light the general’s face was cut with reminders that he had more years behind him than there were ahead.

  “I’m setting up a recon mission,” he began, lighting a cigarette. “And I need volunteers. I need soldiers I can trust, reliable people I trust as much as members of my own generation but young enough to handle the rigors of this mission. I need people who can think for themselves no matter what they may face and still feel an obligation to their community. And two names immediately spring to mind.”

  “Sir,” John began after glancing at Kendra.

  “Now, Captain, befo
re you snap to attention and agree to it out of some silly sense of duty, it won’t be held against you if you don’t want to go.”

  Kendra nodded. “May we ask what the mission is?”

  “Simply put, the mission is to find where the Newcomers came from. We know their story, but we’d like to know how they got here. We’ve long suspected that our Orangemen maintain some kind of . . . presence on this planet, to watch over us and make sure we’re protected from the Hostiles.”

  “General,” Kendra said. “But that would mean there was no point in building a walled city.”

  “This surprises you?” Weiss drummed his fingers on his desk. “None of us who lived through the last days ever imagined that something as simple as a walled city would keep out invaders who could strike from the air. Although the wall protects us from native predators, it was built for psychological and spiritual reasons. We were left basically bare-assed in the open with a few guns and fewer hopes.” He shrugged. “It made sense then.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” John said, “but do you and the other Remnants know exactly where this Orangemen presence is?”

  Weiss pointed at one of his maps. The cigarette now smoldered between his thick fingers. “They always come from the northwest over the hills. We’ve all seen the flashes of light coming from that direction. Time and again it’s been recorded that they arrive somewhere out there and are found by our people around two miles to the north on the beach.”

  Kendra gave him an incredulous look. “But they could be using that direction just to throw us off. Maybe they’re looping around from the south. Maybe they come across the sea. They do fly.”

  Weiss rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “All true.”

  “You have to admit it’s not a lot to go on, General.”

  “It’s not, Captain. But you’ve seen what the Newcomers have done to our peace in the short time they’ve been here. We need to know if they’re a threat, if they’ve actually come from our Orangemen or from Hostiles posing as our Orangemen.” Weiss gathered two of the books in front of him and a folder filled with handwritten sheets of paper. “These two books are collections of first-person accounts of every single encounter we’ve ever had with the Orangemen, starting with the Arrival. And this is the report of the most recent visit, when the Newcomers showed up. Study them. Maybe you can see something in them that we never have.”