The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  “What is this place?”

  Lewis smiled and looked off in the distance. “Well, that depends on what you believe.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The fever came on as John rode on the back of Jack Lewis’s horse. It crept into him, as his fevers usually had, starting in the middle of his back and working its way outward to his limbs. He didn’t notice it much at first. He was too transfixed by the lolling rhythm of the horse beneath him, the grade of the well-worn path they followed through the woods, the scuttling and rustling of small and unseen creatures, the sharp clip-clop of Prisha’s lead horse, and the weary look on Kendra’s face when she would toss back a grin at him as she held on to Prisha’s waist.

  Before they agreed to leave together, Prisha told them that Kendra had only a mild concussion and assured John she would make a complete recovery with a bit of rest. John knew he should believe her—no one had sought to do them harm when they could’ve easily done so—and at first couldn’t understand why he didn’t. That distrust was his initial hint that he was feverish. How often had he seen feverish people become paranoid? And he well knew what fevers did to him. He still found it odd that he had survived so many, even that bout of scarlet fever when he was twelve. Now so far from home, he had little expectation of surviving this one if it turned out bad.

  Once out of the woods, they found themselves in a neat clearing of sharp and definite borders. They passed through a gate in a wood-rail fence built to contain the horses and an extensive and well-maintained vegetable garden, now lying fallow. On the opposite side of their path was what looked like an autumnal grove of fruit-bearing trees at least several decades old. The thick old trees partly obscured their final destination: a wide and well-built one-story log cabin with two fieldstone chimneys rising into the setting sun. The cabin, not new by any means, had portions that looked newer than others. A family lived here and had lived here for a long time, perhaps generations.

  When next John looked around, he was in a bed. He didn’t know how he had gotten off the horse or through the front door, but when he opened his eyes he had been stripped of his wet clothes and was shivering under several heavy woolen blankets. The blankets were soft, and their cool earth tones made him feel as if they could break his fever. Prisha was stirring coals in the fireplace as her father sat on the edge of the bed. She was so young and pretty, this girl, with her dark skin and beautiful straight black hair and high cheekbones. She looked nothing like her father except in the eyes. Her eyes were the same shape and color green and seemed just as intelligent and as mischievous.

  John tried to lift his head to find Kendra but couldn’t see her. The old man patted his shoulder as a father might. His soothing voice was already growing warm and familiar.

  “Easy, Captain,” Lewis said gently. “You’re not well. You fainted right off my horse. I don’t think that dip in those freezing-cold rapids did you much good.” He opened a small clay vial and shook something into his hand, then cradled John’s head in the crook of his arm. “These are called aspirin. It’s an old medicine known to cut fevers.”

  “My grandfather—a doctor—never used them.”

  “I assure you they are quite reliable. Saved my life and those of my children more than once. Now don’t chew them. Just swallow them with some of this water.”

  John did as he was told and then sat back on the bed and let sleep start to take him. As it did his ears fixed on the Lewises’ hushed conversation.

  “Once they’re both on the mend,” Lewis told Prisha, “we’ll let the others know. No reason to rouse everyone when these two can barely talk.”

  “Do you think they’re really from the city?”

  “It appears so. A genuine miracle they found us.”

  Prisha touched her father’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Or fate.”

  The next morning Kendra winced as she tried to roll away from the sunlight coming through the crack between the shutters on the far side of the room. They’d been recently painted green, a nice green. The color brought a cheer to the small, warm room. She tried to sit up, winced again, then decided to wait and conserve her strength. She slipped her hand under the pillow and found the bowie knife. If she could rely on her good aim, she could put all her strength into a single thrust. That is, if only her head would stop pounding. She went to touch the cut in her hairline and found it covered by some kind of bandage.

  She turned her head a bit more and saw her clothes and underwear draped over the hearth and wondered if she had the strength to get across the room and put them on.

  “I thought I heard you stirring,” a voice said from near the foot of her bed. Kendra glanced in that direction and saw Prisha standing in the doorway, holding a two-inch-thick slab of wood in her hands. As she approached, Kendra could see that the wood was in fact a tray and on the tray was an earthen bowl of soup and what looked like a matching, perspiring mug of very cold, very clear water.

  “John?”

  “Resting.” Prisha set the tray on a nearby table, made of the same rough-hewn wood the walls were made of. “I’m afraid you’ve had a mild concussion. You’ll need to rest a while here, but you should be fine.”

  “Can’t rest—we have to get back, report in . . .”

  “There’s little chance you could get back now in your condition. Any pain right now?”

  Kendra snorted. “That’s an understatement.”

  Prisha smiled as she helped Kendra into a semi-sitting position and repositioned the covers over her naked body. “We have an analgesic that may help with the headache. I’ll bring you some. But you should eat.”

  “I want to see John first.”

  Prisha touched her arm. “Eat first; then I’ll help bring you to him. He has a fever, but he’s young and strong. Both Father and I feel he’ll mend quickly.”

  “You need to tell me everything,” Kendra whispered as she gripped Prisha’s sleeve. “I need to know.”

  “Need to know what?”

  “None of this makes sense.” A tear ran from one of Kendra’s bloodshot eyes in a long streak down her cheek and onto her pillow. “I need to know. You have to tell me. Are you—are you the resurrected pagans? Is the Last Judgment upon us?”

  Prisha took Kendra’s hands in hers. “I am your friend. You have nothing to fear among us.”

  “But I—I have so much to confess.”

  Prisha smiled, her white teeth flashing in the semidarkness. “Eat. Get strong. Then we’ll go see your John.”

  Within an hour Kendra was back in her uniform and pleasantly surprised to find that it had been both cleaned and mended. With a proffered crooked elbow and a tender pat on her hand, Lewis led her into the adjoining bedroom. John—her John, as Prisha called him—was lying on the bed, looking pale and clammy beneath the blankets. Even though Kendra had seen him only yesterday, he looked thinner somehow, diminished. The sudden smallness made her stomach spin almost as much as her head. From the day he’d carried her down that mountain, John Giordano had never seemed small to her.

  “He’s been in and out of consciousness this morning,” Lewis said as he helped her into a chair Prisha had moved toward the bed.

  “Is he getting better?”

  He sighed. “The fever seems a bit weaker today, and there’s no sign that pneumonia’s developed, which is very good.”

  Prisha squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll leave you with him for a while. But then you should get some rest yourself.”

  Kendra didn’t look at John until the bedroom door clacked shut behind her. After she did, she found it hard to keep tears from welling up in her eyes. She had heard concussions made you more emotional. If he saw her crying, she would blame that.

  “Hey,” she said, leaning forward to take his hand. “Hey there, buddy.”

  What was it about a sickbed that made you think the worst things and say the stupidest ones?

  She watched him snort and stir. He seemed to hear her breathing, if only for a second. She knew what this was. It was
a moment among moments. She would always recall this scene in the clearest details down the whole vista of her life, because she knew that whatever came after this sickbed, her memory would shape it sharp and clear and permanent. His profile. The awkward angle at which she sat so she could bend forward to touch him. The low-burning flame of the candle swimming in its soup in its clay holder. The way her wrist with the tattoo on it looked as she held his limp hand. The sickly hot feel of John’s skin. The way the fever seemed to shimmer the air between them like an uninvited ghost. The prickly feeling on her neck that told her the Lewises were waiting just outside. All this, all of this moment, would never leave her. There would be no do-overs after this moment. Her life would be only one way or the other.

  “You better get well soon, okay? I’ve been thinking about how I’ve got a lot of apologizing to do. You know this is big time, Johnny—me apologizing. So if you want to hear it, you better get well soon, or I might change my mind, okay?”

  His eyes flickered for a moment, then closed again. She wet his lips with a damp cloth that had been left by a bowl on a nearby table. Another detail.

  “Don’t think you can get out of loving me like this, pal,” she said with a half grin as she leaned close to his ear. “You don’t get to check out just because you’re afraid of losing me first. You don’t get to quit. You never ever get to quit.”

  She kissed his hot forehead with pressed-tight lips once, then again. “Semper fidelis.”

  She squeezed his hand, then stood up and left the room without calling for help. When she reached her own bed, her head throbbed so much that she was sure she would cry or throw up. But she refused to do either. So she held on to the bed, felt the coolness of the pillow against her cheek, and got back enough strength to minister to John four hours later and then four hours after that. And she kept up that routine—four hours on, four off—despite admonitions from the Lewises, until John’s fever broke two days later. Then she slept the entire next day with nothing in her mind except the unclouded vista of what her life would now be.

  “You’re really quite a remarkable young woman,” Jack Lewis said as he stepped out onto the porch to find Kendra sitting on the front step lacing up her boots.

  “John’s on the mend and Prisha’s with him now,” Kendra said, swinging her leather jacket around her back and tucking her arms into its sleeves. “Prisha was the one who suggested I go out for a short walk.”

  “I can’t imagine my budding young doctor said that without some prompting.”

  “You’ve got me,” she said with a grin, then stood up and looked at him.

  “Might I see the cut on your head?”

  She leaned forward a bit and let him lift the bandage—what he called “the plaster”—and inspect the wound.

  “Nice small neat stitches,” he said with obvious pride. “My girl took her lessons well. You shouldn’t have much of a scar, and most of it should be covered by your hair.”

  She placed the bandage back on her head herself. “I suppose I’ve never thanked you for saving us.”

  Lewis shook his head as he pulled a pipe from his jacket pocket and began to fill it with what looked like tobacco. “Couldn’t have you out there being eaten by the saber-tooths, now could we?”

  Kendra looked out toward the woods in the distance. The tree branches had been shedding steadily, leaving the arching treetops looking ever more like the heads of balding men. It was hard for her to imagine all the life that existed out there. How stupid she had been! Apart from her people and a few predatory animals outside the city walls, she’d imagined this world to be a big green emptiness. The sea—that she knew teemed with life. But all this rugged land, these woods and streams—she had thought it nothing more than an oversized garden. What idiocy.

  “Are they really saber-tooths? And woolly mammoths? And buffalo?”

  “I’m fairly sure they are.”

  “How did they get here?”

  “A good question. But one I have only speculative answers for, I’m afraid.”

  “Best guess?”

  “They were brought here with us,” he said.

  “Even the extinct ones?”

  His eyes twinkled. “I never said that it was an entirely good theory.”

  “There’s so much I want to ask you.”

  Lewis stuck his pipe between his teeth, lit it, and puffed away for a time, then gestured toward the fields. “I think I’ll join you on that walk. You can ask me what you like—and you can tell me all about my fellow survivors. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any word of them.”

  Kendra talked first. She told him nothing she felt would compromise the city’s defenses, but she did describe their journey over the last weeks and the basics of their mission. Lewis listened to every word without comment, nodding now and then, as they walked among the fruit trees in his grove. The colors of the autumn leaves were a rich tossed salad of reds and browns and oranges, with a few defiant greens hunkered down in spots. He plucked at a few clinging dry leaves while leaning against an apple tree and puffing on his pipe.

  “And you think if you should find out where these Tylers came from, you might discover their true purpose, if they are in fact in league with the Hostiles or are with the ones who brought the survivors here and visit your people every other year?”

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” Kendra answered. “We don’t know anything. But we do need to be ready to defend what’s left of the human race.”

  “But you don’t know that’s all there is of the human race,” Lewis said. “After all, we’re here too.”

  Kendra folded her arms across her chest as she leaned against a tree. “You know, you never told us. How many’s ‘we’ exactly?”

  “I don’t have an exact number. All of those who chose not to stay and build the city,” he answered. “Those survivors and their descendants.”

  “All I’ve seen so far is you and Prisha,” Kendra answered. “That proves nothing.”

  “I’m telling you this on my authority.”

  “I’m not much for authority.”

  He laughed. “Everything we believe—from evolution to religious revelation—we believe on authority. You believe the world ended—and you weren’t born until decades later.”

  “Many people witnessed it. My family. John’s. People we’ve known for years.”

  “In other words—”

  “Authority. Cute.”

  A playful look danced across his face. “Not very trusting, are you?”

  She shrugged. “Force of habit when you’ve been defending a beachhead all your life.”

  He chortled. “You mean your city? That captive farm community? That defensive alliance? That’s no beachhead. You can’t fight from there, hemmed in by hills and the sea.”

  “You’ve got a better plan, living out here?”

  “No, I can’t say we have.”

  “So what do you have?”

  “Just faith. Faith in the future. I suppose it’s our battle plan. Mine, anyways. Faith has always been a beachhead into a hostile land. True belief, I mean, not just the hope one grasps for when following ritualistic rules and regulations or building walls or conducting drills. This kind of faith may not bring you the comfort that comes with those things, but it can bring you truth. Tell me, do you have such faith in New Philadelphia?”

  Kendra took a step back. “What are you?”

  He shrugged. “Merely someone who perhaps sees things a bit differently than you do, Kendra.”

  “How so?”

  He tapped the bowl of his pipe against the trunk of the tree he was leaning against and scattered the dead ashes at the base with the tip of his boot. “The people who live out here are not unlike the ones you know in the city who lived through the end of the world, who saw the Earth burn, who saw the waters of our world fill with blood, who saw the armies descend from the skies, who lived through the Armageddon. We know what happened, just as those in the city do. We just chose to respond to it
in a different way.”

  Kendra cocked her head. “I’m still waiting for the how.”

  “How? Each in his own way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look,” he said with a bemused sigh. “You can’t expect a hand to react the way an ear might, now can you? Yet both are part of the same body. In the same way, we’re all part of the same body—all of us Remnants, as you call us, all of us humans, in fact—different organs and cells working sometimes together and sometimes separately to keep the whole alive.”

  “So you’re human?”

  He laughed again. “What else could we possibly be?”

  “Orangemen,” she said quietly. “Or Nephilim.”

  “Now I don’t understand.”

  “Skip it. So, just to be clear. You have no contact with any Orangemen out here? They don’t maintain some sort of a base in the vicinity?”

  “No to both questions, I’m afraid.”

  Kendra wrinkled her nose. “Do you have any rolling tobacco? I’m not much for pipes.”

  Jack took out another pouch and some rolling papers and handed them to her. Kendra put together a neat cigarette in a few expert moves. As the smoke hit her system, she felt a bit light-headed but not in a bad way. She took two more drags before going on.

  “Some of our people fear the Tylers are Hostiles in disguise—demons sent to infiltrate us by appearing human and sowing dissent among us. Demons did such things in the Bible. As did the Antichrist on Earth.”

  “You mean—” he began, then closed his eyes for a moment before sporting a pained grin. “I try not to discuss him, my dear.”

  “Suit yourself. But the book of Revelation warns us that the devil will be ‘loosed a little season’ to stir mischief among the people.”

  “So it does. Not that I’ve read Revelation very recently.”

  “It’s not an implausible theory.”

  Lewis nodded. “I understand it all too well. Living in semi-isolation out here, one tends to develop a healthy fear of the unknown. And I understand the protective instinct of your city’s leaders, just as any parent might. You’d do anything to protect your children, suspect all strangers. Just imagine being mother to what you thought were the last dregs of humanity.” He shook his head. “But you’re too young to understand those kinds of worries.”