The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  John and Kendra glanced at the materials. “How long do you expect us to be out there, sir?”

  “No more than forty days.”

  “Sorta biblical, don’t you think, sir?” Kendra asked with a cockeyed grin.

  “Not intentionally,” Weiss replied, taking another drag. “It just happens to be the end of the Tylers’ official ‘quarantine.’ So forty days—no more—and you get your asses back here to report what you’ve found.”

  John took the books and report from the general. “When should we give you our answer, sir?”

  “Twenty-four hours. Once you’ve read everything.”

  “Or we can just give you our answers now,” Kendra piped up. “I’m in.”

  John nodded toward the pile of reading in his hands. “Well, I guess I’m in too.”

  “Strictly volunteer,” Weiss said. “You’ve still got your twenty-four hours. Semper fidelis. Dismissed.”

  In the overcast morning light outside, Kendra adjusted her cap and wrinkled her nose. “Think he noticed?”

  “About us? Hell yeah.”

  “Think of it as his gift to us. A sort of honeymoon. But with carnivores.”

  “Honeymoon, eh?” he asked with a grin.

  “Okay, it’s a little ass-backwards. But you’ve gotta admit, it’s about the kind of honeymoon we’d have.”

  They hiked until shortly before nightfall, watching their breath become ever more visible as the sun pitched down toward the tree line. Just as John was about to suggest that they set up camp instead of continuing on to the stream’s source, they heard a low, roaring rush of water nearby. Using their machetes to clear through the brush, they came upon it—the source of their city’s fresh water bursting through an ivy-covered rock face about forty feet high. They pitched camp away from the spray in a clearing on one side of the rock wall.

  Twenty minutes later, Kendra had sparked a roaring fire. She kept her back to it as the temperature dipped. John had finished pitching their tent and was digging through their packs for the worst of their field rations. Before leaving they had agreed to eat their rations in worst-to-first order, while mixing in whatever fish or game they could find. Looking at the hardtack and canned beans in his hand, he imagined waking tomorrow morning to find Kendra and her rifle long gone.

  John opened the can and set it on the grate over the fire next to the coffeepot. Kendra spoke without turning. “Coffee will be ready in a few minutes.”

  “So will the beans, for better or worse.” John’s gaze moved from the beans on the grate toward the sound of the falls nearby. “Glad you decided to pack some coffee.”

  “Just because we’re leaving civilization doesn’t mean we can’t be civilized.”

  “Speaking of civilization.” He handed her one of the two cigarettes he just rolled. “There’s not much of this, so we’ll have to go easy.” The falls were now more heard than seen as night fell, at least until the moon rose to fill its white foam with yellow light. “Funny to think we’re the first people ever to see this, even though we’ve been using its water all this time.”

  She gave him an almost imperceptible shrug as she smoked in the backlight of the campfire. “We’re not the first.”

  “You’re probably right. We haven’t gone that far from the city. It’s likely a few Remnants went beyond the perimeter in the early days.”

  She smoked some more, then turned to him. “Not what I’m talking about. I mean we’re not the first ones here today.”

  “What?”

  “Not here,” she said, jerking her chin at the ground by her feet, “or here or, um, there.”

  John immediately noticed two things: first, that Kendra was sitting with her hand on her sidearm’s holster, and second, that from the bank of the stream to the clearing where they had made camp were several footprints, partly obscured by his own blundering ones. And in each spot near a mostly clear print was one of Kendra’s.

  “Son of a—” He shook his head. “How old?”

  “This morning.”

  “Direction?”

  “Not from the city.”

  “Not from the city?”

  “Nope. So no one’s following us.”

  He crouched next to the clearest print and examined it by torchlight. “Can’t tell one way or the other. It could be some son of a bitch with big feet or some Orangeman with tiny feet.”

  She gestured at the tracks. “Our friend here was wearing boots. Know any Orangeman cobblers?”

  “So what’re you thinking?”

  “So much for cuddling up tonight.” She picked up her carbine. “Rock-Paper-Scissors for first watch?”

  I’m fifteen, I’m always fifteen, and I’m shaving my face in our house mirror, but after a minute it doesn’t look like my face really. The mirror image, not mine, sort of twisted like a film over my eyes. I rub it away. My father stares right back at me, and it’s clearly my father, nose a bit thicker and more Roman than mine, hair a shade or two closer to brown. And he’s telling me not to worry. He’s read all these things, and it’s not like they’re going that far anyway.

  We’re on the pier. How? My older brother’s loading things onto the boat—what? Boxes? Satchels? Christian’s two years give him that much more comfort in his own skin, his hair a bright reddish from Mom but toned down somehow, sun bleached against his seaside tan, his skin more olive now than I could ever get.

  Anger. At both of them. It’s in my shoulders and right down to my bare feet on the hot dock. Christian’s going to be married soon, but I have Sofie already, Sofie still and always and forever? That’s not it. I’ve brought them a net full of oranges that we grew together from seeds in the city’s greenhouse, the bundle weighing almost as much as I do, but I don’t dare let them drop, because Dad and Christian will need them even though they’ll be gone only a week. Grandpa used to read about scurvy and sailing in the Archives and explained it to me. The oranges are beautiful things, bright with life in my white hand. I pass each of them one from the net, and we stand together before the boat, sucking our oranges bone-dry and spitting the seeds between the wooden slats of the pier. We make a game of it. Then my father and brother drop their pulps on the sunbaked slats; the last vestiges of moisture in them land on my bare feet. Then they’re gone and the boat’s gone, so I slip under the pier and find all the teenagers there pawing at one another to the edge of sin, trying not to go over it, everyone including Kendra and Alex, even though they weren’t teenagers then, just babies really, and I ask them how these wild orange trees got under the pier, and Kendra says to me, as Alex nibbles her neck, “You brought them here, Johnny. That’s the reason why they’re here.”

  The olive-green roof of the tent shimmered slightly, and the flap, slightly open, let in the first traces of morning light, cold and sharp and good. John stumbled out of his bedroll and toward the tree line at the edge of the clearing to relieve himself. Kendra was nowhere to be seen.

  That dream. No surprise. He had been thinking of his brother and father ever since they left the city. It was making him stupid. First the tracks he didn’t see, and now he was out here barefoot and without even a knife on him. He doubled back to the tent to retrieve his sidearm and toiletries and wandered over to the falls to clean up. A little cold water would do him good. At the falls he found Kendra’s clothes lying in a messy heap on the grass.

  “Good morning there, sleepyhead.”

  Kendra was swimming in the middle of the pool around the falls, the morning smoke on the water still thick and rising. The temperature couldn’t be more than just above freezing. But her lips didn’t look blue. In fact, her cheeks were an almost-cartoonish rosy pink.

  “You’re clearly nuts.”

  “Nuts would be thinking I could spend another fricking minute as stinking and as filthy as I was from that hike yesterday. Come in. It’s not nearly as cold as you think. Must be a hot spring around here somewhere.”

  “Or you pissed in the water.”

  She stuck out her
tongue and rolled her eyes. “Har har.”

  John looked around. “What about our friend?”

  She kicked off a nearby rocky overhang that stood out from the shore like a diving board and whirled around in the center of the pool, her dark-haired head as black and slick as a seal’s. “Recon for the last hour. Nobody’s been anywhere near this whole area since before we arrived yesterday.”

  John stood at the water’s edge, brushing his teeth and looking around him. The air did seem cooler than the water. He looked around again as he scooped up a handful of water and rinsed.

  “Would I lie to you, pal?”

  He shook his head and stripped and waded into the water but left his pistol as close to the edge as he dared. Kendra slipped her head under before emerging again, blinking water from her eyelashes.

  “So, Captain,” she asked through her grin, “where to next?”

  “I dunno. I guess it depends on where that trail you found leads to. But we did come—”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant about us.”

  “Shouldn’t have called me Captain, then. Mixed signals.”

  She swam closer. “Yeah, probably shouldn’t have called you that and been naked at the same time.”

  “And wanting a serious conversation. Really confused at that.”

  “So what do you want to do about us?”

  “You’re serious about this serious conversation?”

  “That’s kind of why it’s called that.”

  “Do?” He laughed. “What do I want to do? I want to marry you the minute we get back. What brought this up?”

  She swam around in a lazy semicircle. “Last time I was out beyond the perimeter was when you found me with—”

  “I don’t care about that, Kendra. I never have.”

  “But what you don’t know was that I was with Alex before that. Often. We started right when I turned fourteen.” She laughed through her teeth. “All those rumors at least were true.”

  “Still not caring here, Ken.”

  “Come on—”

  “Come on what? Okay, you were with Alex before you were betrothed. So what? Would everyone peg it as a sin of the flesh? Sure. Was it? Sure. But again, so what? It would’ve been a hell of a lot worse if you lied to me about it.”

  That quieted her for a minute. “Since we’re playing honest, Johnny—”

  “Shoot.”

  “Were you ever with Sofie?”

  “With Sofie? No. Came close enough a couple of times. There was someone else, though. A little older than me. My first times were with her. I’d go to her often and did so for many years, but that’s a long time done with now.”

  “Oh.”

  “She doesn’t matter. And Sofie’s married to Gordon now. And Alex is dead. Forgive me for being so blunt, but it’s true. We’re clean, Kendra. No ties.”

  “And you really don’t care.” Her blue eyes, filled with the reflection of the morning sun in the water, searched his face for doubt, hesitation, dishonesty.

  “I swear to Christ I don’t.”

  “That’s quite a vow.”

  “And it’s meant. Just like all my vows to you will be.”

  She blinked. “Well, okay, then.”

  “Are we done with this seriousness now?”

  “The personal serious. We’ve still got that public-trust stuff to deal with.”

  John floated on his back and found himself surprised to be so relaxed. “So the question is, where do we go?”

  “My recon suggests our friend came up this way and then made his way down to the valley beyond here. He didn’t much care to hide where he was going—footprints all over, broken branches, he even stopped to pee—all of which either suggests he doesn’t suspect anyone would ever bother to follow him or he doesn’t think anyone else is around to follow him.”

  “Doesn’t give much of a clue to his identity. Other than the fact that he’s probably human, since he pees.”

  “Again, wouldn’t necessarily take that for a sure sign.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So do we follow him?”

  He dunked himself and swam up, then wiped water from his eyes. “We’re out here to find something about where these Newcomers might have come from. It only makes sense to me to follow a trail, any trail.”

  “And how far do we take this? How long do we go on?”

  “I don’t know. Until we get some answers.”

  “Glad I fell for an honest man.” She paddled closer to him. “So should we start now?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “A very honest man.”

  CHAPTER 9

  For the first two days after leaving the falls they had good weather. The daytime skies were knife sharp and filled of the kind of high white clouds that painters on Earth-of-old often showed behind saints to suggest their clear and direct connection with heaven. They hiked in a roughly northwestern direction, always away from everything they had ever known. It had been cold both nights and all the way through each morning afterward and didn’t warm up to shirtsleeve weather until well past midday. On the third night the air coming down from the mountains to their north brought the first real cold with it. Despite the chill, they enjoyed the nights as they sat huddled around a fire in thick sweaters and leather jackets.

  Such was their pattern those first days as they walked through the open, unknown valley. They found themselves feeling fortunate that the trail they followed was so clear and the valley itself so full of wonders. It was rich and lush land, abundant with wild fruit trees and herbs. The whole place could probably be ready for cultivation in a generation or less, depending on how many hands would be doing the work. And that was only the little they saw as they hewed close to the trail they were following. At night, lying in each other’s warmth, they heard the scratching and cawing and scurrying of wildlife. They smiled at each other’s faces in the dark tent. Game and plenty of it. If ever human beings were going to live outside New Philadelphia, this seemed a fine place to begin.

  Beginnings. John had thought a lot about beginnings while hiking those first two days through the valley. What they meant, how people defined them. In school—but more so in late-night conversations with friends—it had been suggested to him that God is unbound by the concept of beginnings and endings. God never needs or desires a do-over. He knows what will happen but always allows us the power to do what we will and start over as we need to. Each day since the first day men used their intelligence for the first time, humanity had been given a chance to begin anew, make a choice, the right choice. And now here on this planet all that was left of the entire race had tried to do that.

  Beginnings. A related thought crossed John’s mind, sparked brightly and maintained a long afterglow as they took a break one night at dusk. He thought they should abandon this lunatic trek and make their separate peace here in this valley. Long after they had settled in for the night, he would lie awake, seeing the house they would build, the fields they would plant and till, the game they would cook over the fire. He could see his wavy blond hair thinning, his skin slackening over sinewy muscles, Kendra’s bright eyes lining, her breasts drooping. Several times he had come so close to suggesting it aloud that he knew he was serious about it.

  Then the rains came.

  They came at night during the deepest part of their sleep but were not hard enough at first to penetrate the depths of their dreams. A little before dawn the skies finally burst open. Lightning illuminated their tent for moments at a time as the storm drew nearer. In those moments they could see each other’s faces—blue white and flash-frozen in the instant—as they sat facing each other and feeling the sides of the tent suck and buckle in the wind. They waited and waited for something—daybreak or a lull in the downpour—but the storm’s increasing intensity masked the dawn and kept them wondering about sunup until at least an hour after the sun had already risen.

  “We’re not going to pick up the trail again in this, are we?” John ask
ed Kendra’s silhouette after a while.

  She shook her head slowly. “Nope.”

  “There’s a question that should’ve been rhetorical.” He whistled. “Okay. We’ll worry about what to do next later. Let’s eat breakfast until this stops.”

  Kendra unbuckled the tent flap’s opening and looked up at the hard-angled rain. She glanced at John and shook her head again. “We’ll be eating for a while.”

  It didn’t take much longer for water to begin seeping in. Even their breath turned to moisture right outside their mouths and soon beaded the tent’s walls before running down them in rivulets. The water seeped through the floor of their tent, then through their sleeping bags, then through their socks and pants. At that point there was no choice but to abandon the tent, which they did just after making a best effort to secure everything inside—especially their food stores—in dry containers, in tarps, in whatever they could find.

  They stood outside their tent, their hair matted to their foreheads, and watched the canvas slowly give way under its sheer soaked-through weight. As the tent caved, they looked around for shelter. Nothing nearby. They had seen little of the kind as they crossed this open valley.

  “We can’t stay under one of these few trees,” Kendra called over the downpour. “We’ll be electrocuted.”

  “If we don’t freeze to death first. Suggestions?”

  “No shelter back that way for miles. We should scout ahead for a bit. This camp—or what’s left of it—isn’t going anywhere.”

  John slapped his wet thighs and then shouldered his pack. “Can’t say I disagree. Lead on.”

  They walked for an hour or two in what they thought was a mostly straight line, but drifting always as the rain twisted around and against them. John shivered as he and Kendra pulled each other along. Soon he began to seriously wonder about the possibility of hypothermia. If they didn’t find someplace dry—and soon—he couldn’t see how they would survive.