The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  “I know. You’re right.”

  He paused with the canteen before his lips. “Of course, nobody’s saying we’ve gotta stay in the city after we make our report.”

  The points of her smile brightened her eyes. “Clever boy. A separate peace.”

  “A separate peace. A real peace for both of us.”

  Their destination rose up in the distance: a sturdy log cabin of a far more modest size and somewhat newer appearance than the one that had been inhabited by generations of Lewises. The cabin was set apart in a clearing on the hill and commanded a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. On a clear day the people who lived up there could likely see nearly all the way to the riverside campsite they had left that morning. Had these people also been the ones who’d built the lean-to they had slept in? It was a good strategic place to build a home and an even better one to retreat from, if the surrounding woodlands were as impenetrable as they appeared.

  Lewis pulled on his horses’ reins and brought them to a stop in the valley below. Kendra watched him contemplate their destination wordlessly, his lower lip caught between his teeth. No one asked why he had stopped. Kendra did, however, eventually poke her head out from inside the wagon to look at John when it seemed that the break had gone on for a little too long and without reason.

  “I know you both think we’ve been behaving rather cryptically about all this. But we really didn’t know what to say or even how much we should say.”

  Kendra blinked at him. “And now we’re stopping here because . . . ?”

  He glanced at her in a kindly way and then gave John the same easy gaze. “The man who lives up there has many of the answers to the questions you have.”

  “Can he tell us who the Tylers are?” John asked. “Or whether there are Orangemen out here who want to harm our people?”

  “I’m not sure. What he can tell you is what he’s learned out here over the past fifteen years. In that time he’s discovered more about what happened to the human race than anyone else we know. And his discoveries have made my people—well, even less sure of our beliefs than we were before.”

  Kendra and John eyed each other. She spoke first. “And you think his discoveries will make us question our own beliefs? Question things we know to be true?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  Prisha looked out from her seat in the back of the wagon and addressed both of them. “You may have doubts about certain things—but not all of what you know is wrong. Father, make them understand that.”

  He nodded. “That much is true. What you learn may test your faith, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll leave this place faithless.”

  John looked at him. “Okay. I’m officially done with this. Let’s go.”

  The older man touched his arm. John eyed the hand clasping the crook of his elbow. “We’re not being mysterious because we wish to be, Captain. It’s simply not our place to say. And we don’t believe in imposing our thoughts on anyone else.”

  “You heard him,” Kendra said. “Either move or we get out and walk.”

  As they slowly rolled up a path that followed the contours of the hill, it seemed likely that whoever lived in the cabin had been watching them for some time. There was no outward suggestion—not a suddenly shut window or any quick motions outside the cabin—but the sheer absence of movement felt like watchfulness.

  Lewis did not hide their approach, nor did he announce it in any way. The wagon drew up the path almost right to the front door. He tied the horses off at a nearby post. He did not move with the weariness of a man having endured a long journey or the excitement of a man visiting an old friend after a long absence. He climbed the porch steps one at a time with no deliberate speed. Prisha was at his side. Kendra and John followed a step behind. A knock and the door opened into a darkened interior that was illuminated only by a small fire and warmed with recently turned coals. A breakfast of some kind was cooking over the fire. It smelled like eggs and bacon, both probably taken from the animals in the yard.

  “Come on in, Jack,” a voice said. “You’ve brought company.”

  “Yes. You remember my Prisha, of course.”

  A man came into focus as their eyes adjusted to the dim light. He was well into his middle age, thin-framed but corded by wiry muscles. His strong forearms were emphasized by the rolled-up sleeves of his bright-red shirt. On his face he wore a neatly trimmed, reddish beard several shades darker than the graying and somewhat thinning dirty-blond hair on his head. The man reviewed them with a hard squint that hid the color of his eyes. John met the man’s gaze and was about to extend a hand when he staggered back, almost tripping into Kendra.

  “John?”

  “Kendra McQueen,” Lewis said with a somewhat exaggerated degree of formality, “allow me to introduce you to Samuel Giordano, John’s father.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “What’re you talking about?” Kendra shook her head. “John’s father was lost at sea—years ago.”

  The man who lived in the cabin fixed her with an enigmatic squint-eyed stare. He looked like he was doing nothing more than thinking about what to make for lunch. How could this man really be Sam Giordano?

  She turned to John. He was still staring at the man Jack Lewis had just called his father. Lewis himself was looking down at his hands while Prisha seemed desperate to say something but unsure of what she could say to bring anyone any comfort.

  John took a step toward the man and walked around him. The man took this intense observation without comment or action, apart from the fact that he turned to follow John sidelong out of the corner of his crowfoot-framed eyes. When John had gotten about halfway around him, the man grunted.

  “You finished yet?”

  John stepped back. “It’s you. It’s really you. My God.”

  “Of course it’s me. Who in the hell else would it be? You think these people would lie to you?”

  “Where’s Christian? Where’s my brother?”

  “Dead.” The man said this plainly. “Washed overboard during a storm at sea.”

  “You don’t seem so cut up about it.”

  “I had to bury that grief a long time ago.”

  John clenched his right fist at his side. “My father loved Christian more than anything in the world.”

  The older man snorted. “You think I love him any less now?” He tossed his bearded chin in Kendra’s direction. “Who’s this? I don’t like talking my business in front of strangers.” He looked at Lewis. “What’d you say her name was?”

  “My name’s Kendra McQueen.”

  “McQueen,” Samuel Giordano mused. “You Mitch and Jess McQueen’s little girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’re they?”

  “Dead. Of a fever plague, three and a half years ago.”

  “Hmm.” He shook his head. “Must’ve been just a baby the last time I saw you.”

  “I was five when you went out on your expedition.”

  Sam snorted again, then looked at his son. “Sounds like our little research effort hasn’t gotten more popular with age.”

  John shook his head. “You’ve been out here—all this time—and you never tried to—”

  Lewis cleared his throat. “Perhaps Prisha and I should step out for a bit.”

  “Why?” Sam’s question was a sharp bark. “You’re not going to hear anything you don’t already know, Jack. Besides, the bacon’s fresh and there’s plenty to go around.”

  “We’ll stay, Sam.” Prisha patted his shoulder and tried to smile. “Just let me get some of the preserves we brought along to go with that delicious bread I keep smelling.”

  Death always softened memories. It always tricked the senses. Even the worst relationships lost their harder edges once someone was no longer among the living. For those that still were, the hurt faded as the healing nature of everyday life asserted itself like creeping vines over raw and fertile mourning.

  John had mourned his father and brother. A hard thing to
do without bodies to cry over. Without a proper burial, there was always a remote expectation that someday they would come home, strolling along the beach, wild haired and bearded. He’d tried to take comfort in his mother’s assurances that they died as they wanted to live and without regrets. He had always hoped she was right—that they would all meet again. But this?

  Whenever he had thought of his dead father, the one of disappeared hopes, he recalled all the good things said of him during the ritual talk of mourning. Whenever he had thought of his living father, the one of etched memories, he recalled many small things—the shape of his knuckles and the wrinkles over them as he held John’s boy-soft hand in his, the way he sat in a chair and crossed his legs right ankle over left knee as he talked or listened, the sometimes far-off look he’d get in his eye. All that was his father, the living one and the dead one, not this messy mass of hard contradictions that was sitting before him now.

  Looking at this man, he began to recall the things he had suppressed about his father since his “death”—the skeptical eye, the remoteness, the rage or frustration just under his skin that had never found an outlet apart from a barked-out comment brought on by rough booze. This was his father without death to make him gentler, without time’s passage to warm parts of him more than others. This was his father, alive again, here to contradict every memory. And he hated him for it—and for the fifteen years that separated them.

  John said none of this as Sam Giordano told his story. He listened as they all did—even the Lewises, who had heard so much of it before.

  The Council of Twelve had only grudgingly given its permission for Sam’s venture to sail up the coast from the city, following the prevailing breeze and his instincts, and to report back two weeks later. In the years since the Arrival, few people had ventured more than a few miles up or down the coast—apart from, as John and Kendra now knew, those who had left in the days before New Philadelphia’s foundation. Few Council members trusted Sam’s motives or believed the effort to be a worthy one. But like many a politician before him, Sam had invoked the memory of a beloved dead leader in order to sway the weak-kneed and the unwilling. In his case, he had invoked the memory of his own father, the first John Giordano, who had served on the Council so many times. He told the Council’s membership that his father’s one great regret in life was that he had not been able to save more lives than he had. What if there were natural cures in the wild just waiting for them? What if the Orangemen wanted them to explore, to learn how to use nature without exploiting it, to grow as a race? Wouldn’t such exploration be an important first step? And who knew what else they might learn in their journey through a world they hardly knew? Didn’t that alone outweigh any risks?

  Passion appealed to orthodoxy, reason to faithful hope. And somehow Sam won the day. It took him more effort to convince Petra to go along with the idea—and to let him take their older son with him. Against Sam’s passion for exploration and Christian’s youthful eagerness, however, she had relented.

  Whatever books they had on sailing, navigation, and basic construction principles had been brought from the Archives, dissected, and analyzed. Whatever Sam’s inventive, scientific mind could not deduce, he improvised with Christian’s help. Within a few months they’d built a seaworthy sailing vessel and completed a test run in the city’s harbor.

  Sam tried to soften the blow to Petra by surprising her the night before they sailed with a hand-carved sign that he had mounted to the bow of the ship. Petra would be the name of the ship.

  “She didn’t want us to go,” Sam continued as he stuffed his wide mouth with another forkful of eggs. “But Christian and I did lots of little things to make her more comfortable with the idea. Even so, she was a pain in the ass about the whole thing—kept finding quotes in Scripture about tempting fate.” He sighed. “A lot from the book of Proverbs.”

  John glanced up from his plate. “Maybe she was right.”

  “How so, Johnny?”

  “Well, you’re here and Christian’s not.”

  Father looked at son with something bordering on contempt. “Keep listening. Maybe you’ll learn something instead of just acting on assumptions.”

  Kendra squeezed John’s knee under the table.

  Sam wiped his mouth with his fingers and continued. “We were three days out when the storm hit. We thought we were in waters far enough from the coast to be out in the deep but close enough that we felt we could make landfall if necessary. After the storm rolled in, visibility dropped to zero. The wind picked up and began tossing the ship around like it was nothing. Pitch-black sky with only the occasional flash of lightning to let you see your hand in front of your face. No sound except the storm raging, no way to talk. And we couldn’t feel anything around us except the pelting, cold rain as we tried to steer in this overwhelming void.”

  Kendra watched the older man’s eyes grow distant. This he had lived through. And no matter what John was thinking, his father was still living it each day. It was a way of living she well understood.

  “I wouldn’t have seen him go over if it hadn’t been for the lightning right then. A flash and my boy’s face was suspended in midair as he went flailing over the side. A flash again and just the empty deck before me and the black, roiling sea behind it.” He shook his head and turned his attention to Prisha, then Kendra, who was sitting nearest him at the table. “I didn’t even have time to look for him. Next thing I knew I felt something hit me hard in the back of the head—I don’t know what—and then nothing.”

  “But how’d you wind up here?” Kendra asked. “This is as far from the coast as anyone has ever been.”

  “You might not believe me.”

  “Try us,” John said.

  “Better yet,” Sam answered, “finish your breakfast and I’ll show you.”

  The hike was short, only a mile or so, but was mostly uphill into a particularly tight thicket of woodlands southwest of the cabin. There were no major bodies of water in the area—and therefore no way for Sam to have been dumped here as they had been on their ride down the rapids.

  The woods were dark, primordial. Despite being stripped by the season of their leaves, the branches overhead weaved a thick-enough canopy that little sunlight found its way to the forest floor. The ground was spongy with old leaves and the rotting husks of trees. No one had ever lived here apart from small animals, and no one ever would, at least not for a long time.

  How old was this world? Kendra found it hard not to wonder. And stranger still that it seemed no animal life had ever developed on it, apart from the “menagerie” the Orangemen had decided—for whatever reason—to deposit here. How many planets like this one were out there? How many chances would God give humanity to begin again in a new Eden before he finally ended his experiments? She could hear Grace’s voice, cragged with age and rich with experience, telling her that God’s love was infinite, his forgiveness unending, that it was in a very literal sense impossible for anyone to imagine. It was difficult to draw comfort from an idea beyond man’s ken.

  “We’re here.”

  Sam pulled his hatchet from his belt and started to whack at an unruly thicket nearby. All of them stood back as Sam handed newly hacked branches to Lewis, who tossed them aside. After a few minutes they had cleared a space in the bushes about four feet wide. In another few minutes six feet. The widening opening revealed nothing significant, only a field as black as a moonless night. Yet something about it looked wrong to their eyes. The perspective was off—it seemed to have no depth at all.

  In a few minutes a narrow band of orange a few inches thick began to reveal itself.

  With the last of the overgrowth pulled away, Sam and Lewis stood back so the others could see what they had uncovered. In front of them an orange frame surrounded a void—literally a void in space. It was a place without substance, with only the metal frame to provide any proof of its existence. The frame was standing perpendicular to the ground without any braces of any kind.

&
nbsp; “It’s exactly one meter thick, two meters wide, and three meters tall,” Sam said to no one in particular. “Just the right size to let a couple of Orangemen through comfortably.”

  Kendra and John circled the object. There was no back. The space inside the frame was equally black and formless on both sides.

  “Here,” Sam said as he picked up a discarded branch about two feet long. “Watch.”

  He tossed it directly into the center of the frame, where it disappeared from sight without much drama and in total silence. John looked at the back side in a half-expectant way, as if he imagined the branch would come through, just a bit late. He turned to Kendra.

  “Okay. Where’d it go?” she asked Sam.

  Sam continued to stare into the void. “If I’m not out of practice, it went back to the beach where I first fell through one of these things. But when it’s black like that, I’m never really sure.”

  Kendra was flummoxed. “Out of practice?”

  “And where’s that beach?” John asked.

  “About one hundred miles up the coast from your city,” Lewis answered. “And about two hundred miles from here.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Kendra asked. “I mean, that’s a joke.”

  “Step through if you don’t believe me, kid,” Sam said with some satisfaction.

  “Our best guess,” Lewis began, “is that this is some type of transportation portal that was used by the Orangemen at one time to ferry themselves around the planet. Obviously, this particular one has not been in use for some years. John, when your father was shipwrecked, he stumbled around blindly in the dark and must’ve fallen through one on that beach and somehow arrived on this hilltop. He wandered around half-starved for possibly as long as a week before my son-in-law’s parents found him and brought him amongst us. He was the first contact we had had with your people since we left the beach.”

  “Get to the point, Jack,” Sam said. He turned to face Kendra and John as he gestured at the portal. “This—this thing—is technology, not a miracle. This isn’t the work of God. The Orangemen you stand in awe before and the ones you live in fear of are no agents of the Almighty; they’re not angels and demons. They’re intelligent beings like us, ones who wiped us out and are now studying us like damn lab rats.”