The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  “That’s not true,” Kendra objected. “You can’t prove this—object—is technology.”

  “Maybe not,” Sam answered, “but tell me: If it’s a holy relic, why doesn’t it appear and disappear as needed? Why is it set up like it’s part of a transportation system?”

  “Speculation, untested theories,” John jumped in. “You should know better. Apart from having gone into one and come out another, you know nothing about them. You ever take one apart? See one built? Know what powers it? Besides, what makes you an expert on the divine? How could you possibly deduce the difference between something divine and something material? This thing could’ve been God’s way of saving your life by bringing you here.”

  “I remember talk like that.” Sam shook his head. “You sound a lot like the old Remnants, justifying everything to fit Scripture.”

  “I remember my father never took anything at face value,” John answered. “And never tried to shoehorn a handful of facts into pet theories. That’s not the scientific method at all. Frankly, I don’t take you at face value because I know my father—and you are not him.”

  Lewis stepped between father and son, his rotund body acting as a subtle but likely ineffective barrier. He glanced at John and Kendra. “You’ve both had a lot to process today, and I admit that we may not have done our best to prepare you for it. For that, I sincerely apologize. I suggest we all return to the cabin for a while—”

  “Before we do that,” Sam said, “let me say this. I’ve learned how to use this thing. Jack knows all about it. It’s controlled by will. It takes you where you want—or need—to go. And I can take you back to your city as soon as you want.”

  “What?” John asked. “There’s one of these outside New Philadelphia?”

  Kendra cocked her head to the side. “And the catch?”

  Sam aimed his hard gaze at her. “No catch, McQueen. But I do want you to go back to your people prepared—which means I’ve got a couple more things to show you.” At Prisha’s surprised look, Sam turned to her and Lewis. “Things I’ve never even shown you. Things I hoped would die with me.”

  “With a build-up like that,” Kendra said, “who can resist? Lead on.”

  Sam laughed, for the first time flashing clear brown eyes not unlike John’s. “You’re brave, McQueen. Good. You’re going to need it.”

  CHAPTER 17

  After they had returned to the cabin, Sam set out again in the early afternoon. He said nothing of what he wanted to show them, nor did he suggest that it needed to be seen right away. If Kendra had to guess, she would’ve said he was afraid. It didn’t surprise her. People who talk about bravery were really cowards. She had known that since her Novice year in the Defense Forces. The biggest mouths with the cockiest walks were usually the ones who smelled like they had soiled themselves after being surprised in recon and ambush drills.

  And then there was Alex. But she had thought of him too much recently and turned her thoughts away from his memory.

  She worried about John. He had been unusually restless since his father had taken off. He couldn’t stay in the cabin for more than a few minutes at a time. He stepped out for a third time after Prisha had tried to make some small talk with him. It was coming on dinnertime and Sam still wasn’t back.

  Kendra found John out on the front porch steps. He was whittling a three-inch-thick tree branch with his bowie knife. He didn’t turn around when she opened the door.

  “It’s not him, Kendra.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ears as she sat on the porch steps next to him, elbows on her knees. “How?”

  “He’s too hard, too inflexible. He doesn’t have any . . . compassion, I guess. At least not the way I remember he did. He was always skeptical, but the skepticism was bounded by rational thought. This . . .” He trailed off, turned from the late-afternoon breeze, and looked at her. “The Weiss brothers were worried the Tylers might be Hostiles in disguise. What if he’s an Orangeman posing as my father?”

  “Or,” she began with some deliberation, “what if he is your father but changed? It’s been fifteen years, John. People change, especially after—”

  “It’s hard to believe anyone can change that much.”

  “I know the Weiss brothers said they had this suspicion, that people might not be who they say they are. But have you seen any proof of it anywhere? I sure haven’t, even when I’ve feared it myself. Not in the Tylers or the Lewises—or even your father. I think all of these people are who they say they are, like it or not.”

  “But he’s just changed so much, Ken.”

  “But you’ve got to ask yourself if it’s a logical change. From what you’ve told me, he was always skeptical about the fact that mankind really had lived through the events predicted in Revelation. Wouldn’t an already-skeptical man who is made more bitter about life eventually become a hard cynic?”

  John shrugged, hands in his jacket pockets. “But the bigger question is, would he still be an honest dealer? Despite his skepticism—heck, despite my mother’s unquestioning faith too—I always trusted my parents. They always played it straight with Christian and me. That man—all this hinting and foreshadowing—I’m just not sure.”

  Kendra stood and shuffled around in the dirt at the bottom of the steps, hands in her back pockets. “Let’s take a step back here. Your father’s information about that . . . object he showed us is based only on his own limited experience with it, right?”

  “So far as we know.”

  “So it’s fragmentary.” She grinned. “In that way it’s really no different from the larger question we have about the Orangemen themselves. We’re trying to understand things based on clues, hints, visits every couple of years, handed-down descriptions of what the Remnants saw and heard of the Orangemen on the day of the Arrival. Your father had drawn his conclusions based on those things plus his experience with that portal—but it’s all colored by his experiences, just as our take is based on our experiences.”

  “You make it sound like we’re all biased.”

  “Purposely biased, no. Human—yup.” She sighed. “Seeing that portal reminded me that we’re mortal and therefore we can only ever see the bits—never the whole truth of creation. We’re too small to see the whole plan. We’re too much a part of the plan to see the plan.”

  “You talk as if you still think there’s a plan.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” She shook her head. “Because your old man showed us some hole in space and claimed the Orangemen were mortal beings like us because he fell through it? That only proved to me how little we actually know and how fragmentary our understanding is. And you need to remind your father of that.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else?”

  John smirked. “I can think of better people to tell that arrogant ass that he doesn’t know everything.”

  “Who, me? Sorry. It would come from no one better than you—especially since your arrogant ass thinks you know everything about what he’s been through since he lost your brother.”

  John cocked his head at her. “Nice shot, Lieutenant.”

  “My aim is true.”

  He smiled at her, but the grin faded quickly. “Kendra, that thing looked like a mechanism, not something made by God.”

  They had been talking so intently they hadn’t realized that the sun had almost set until a light brightened the immediate area. Prisha was standing in the doorway, little more than a silhouette against the fire-brightened interior. “He’s back.”

  They found Sam inside, having slipped in his back door, standing before his table, drinking cupful after cupful of cold water from a lumpy clay mug that he kept refilling from a chipped clay pitcher. Lewis sat at the table before him, hands folded. Sam spied them entering the cabin over the rim of his cup, finished its contents, and set it carefully down on the table.

  “It’s all there still,” he said to no one in particular. “Everything. I half expected them to have gotten rid of it, but it’s all
still there.”

  “You mean the Orangemen?” Prisha asked.

  Sam nodded twice. “You’d be surprised how much they take just to screw with us. I’ve seen it. It’s all about control with them.”

  A half-mad glee seemed to have overtaken his father. John approached him with caution. “I’m glad it’s still there. When can we go see it?”

  “Not now.” He shook his head. “It’s dark or getting there now. We’ll go at first light. It’ll all be truer then in that clear, cold light. That’s how I first saw it. That’s how you should see it, Johnny.”

  “Is it far?” Kendra asked. “Maybe we could get there before dark.”

  Sam took another long drink of water. “Took me most of the day to get there and back again. Besides, unlike where you’re from, there are real beasts in these woods. Maybe you’ve seen a few of them.”

  Kendra and John glanced at each other.

  Sam sniggered. “Thought so. Not fit to see them at night with an oncoming winter. Their hunger doesn’t necessarily know about God’s plan.” He set the cup down. “Speaking of God’s plan, you two aren’t married, right?” He laughed again. “Then I better make sure I hang a blanket or something when you all sack out here tonight.”

  As promised, they were out at first light. It was a clear deep-autumn morning brightened by the kind of sunlight that sets everything in such sharp relief that even the most mundane rocks and tree branches appear more beautiful and ideally formed. It was the kind of day made for human eyes and one that would set even the most hardened hearts at ease.

  Sam had changed again. Not hard, not mad, he seemed almost buoyant as he led them northwest and farther down into the valley beyond his hilltop home. They had set off on foot, as the path was too narrow and begrudging to let the wagon through. It seemed to Kendra that they were following the path of least resistance—a shallow gully that had been eroded by the rain’s runoff down the nearest hills. It would be more difficult to hike back up, but she thought that even Prisha would be able to get back to the cabin with relative ease, despite her condition.

  Father and son walked together but didn’t walk close to each other. Kendra was a step behind them and the Lewises a step behind her. The two men didn’t say much. Here and there one would point out something of interest on the horizon or underfoot. What that empty air they framed was filled by was anyone’s guess—all the years between them or the loss they both shared or the things they wanted to say to each other but didn’t know how. Yet there was something there, something permanent. When John and Kendra left this place—however they left this place—there would be no tender words between father and son. Their lives would separate again, and they would die a second death to each other. But this time, no mourning would be necessary.

  Before midday the trek downhill came to a stop. Where the land leveled out, they were standing in a shallow riverbed seeded with tall clumps of wildflowers and weeds and grass now in their autumnal death throes. It ran in a smooth, flat line until it disappeared into the canopy of trees in either direction. How far past the greenery the river valley continued Kendra couldn’t guess. Sam stood in rapt wonder for a while as each of them took turns providing one another with a quizzical glance.

  “This is our destination?” Prisha finally asked. “A dry riverbed?”

  “This isn’t a dry riverbed, Prish.”

  “Sam,” Lewis said as he pulled on his jowly face, “I’m afraid I just don’t—”

  John waved him off. “He’s right, Jack. This is no riverbed. The contours are all wrong. We were walking down a dry gully—definitely something made by runoff. But this runs flat—and perpendicular to the gully. If this is where the runoff emptied into, it should’ve either pooled out here at the bottom or kept running downhill somewhere, not cut straight across like this.”

  “I don’t understand,” Prisha said. “Not enough water perhaps to keep going?”

  “No.” Kendra shook her head. “Look down it. This thing’s straight. You can see it all the way down to where it’s getting really overgrown. It’s almost as if—” She glanced at John. “It’s almost as if somebody deliberately built this as a canal.”

  “Or a road,” John finished, then turned to Sam. “Okay. We’ve got a theory, Dad. Now prove it.”

  The older man slipped out of his knapsack, then extracted two collapsible shovels and handed one to his son. They began their work in a spot about ten yards from where they had been standing, nearest the hillside part of the bank. After a few minutes of digging up dusty clumps of clay, something few living human beings had ever seen was revealed.

  Sam leaned on his shovel’s handle. “It’s called asphalt. I read about it in the Archives years ago. They paved and waterproofed roads with this stuff. It’s a residue that comes from refining petroleum.”

  Kendra shook her head as she stared at the smooth black surface peeking through the brown clay. “How’d it get here?”

  “The people who built this road put it here,” Sam answered. “People who died a damn long time ago.”

  “You keep saying people, Dad,” John said. “You mean intelligent beings like us?”

  “No,” he said, the hard edge back in his eyes. “I mean what I say. I mean men like us. Our ancestors built this road.”

  “Sam, that doesn’t make any sense,” Lewis piped up from where he was standing at the edge of the hole. For the past few minutes he had been running his fingers across the smooth black surface they had uncovered. “Be reasonable. This road or whatever it was has obviously been in disuse for quite a long time, maybe hundreds or even thousands of years—far longer than we’ve been on this planet. Considering the fact that none of us have the technology to do this, this road is simply a ruin of a long-dead race. It couldn’t have been made by mankind.”

  Sam jammed his shovel into the pile of clay he had built up at his feet and walked along the center of the buried road, neither quickening nor slowing his pace through its weedy expanse after shooting a quick glance back to make sure they were following him. A quarter mile later he made a sudden dash into the woods and came out with a heavy object wrapped in thick burlap, which he held with some reverence before setting it at their feet and removing its weatherworn covering.

  The object gave off a dull glint in the sunlight coming through the cross-stitched canopy of branches. It was clear that it was something metallic, maybe copper or bronze. But at that moment it mattered less what it was made of than what it appeared to be: the head and part of the shoulders of a man.

  Kendra crouched nearest it. Pitted and dull, it was worn smooth in places like an old coin but not so much so as to have rubbed out every detail. The man’s hair and beard had a flowing wildness to them that reminded her of photos she had seen of men who had lived during the American Civil War. It was hard to make out his clothing, the neck and shoulders being too chipped and cracked, but it seemed that he was wearing a high collar reminiscent of what had been worn by many men in the nineteenth century.

  “You asked for proof, son.” Sam’s voice was gentler than it had been. “So here it is. The long-dead race on this planet is us. The Orangemen never brought the Remnants to another planet. We’ve been on Earth all along.”

  Kendra looked up from in front of the bronze head. “We’re only two generations removed from the Apocalypse. This place—everywhere we’ve been—it’s all wilderness. There are no cities—”

  “Except for this road and bronze bust,” Lewis said quietly, “there’s little proof that a civilization ever lived here—or that this is Earth.”

  “And a beat-up plastic bowl Kendra and I found on our way here,” John added. “At least we thought it was plastic.”

  “But we would’ve seen cities,” Kendra continued. “Ruins, something. Not just a damn bowl.”

  “Not if the Apocalypse happened a very long time ago,” Prisha said, her gaze still fixed on the staring eyes of the bronze man. “A long-enough time and the Earth would’ve reclaimed almost every
thing we formed from it, just as if the world had always existed without us.”

  “How long?” John asked, calling Prisha’s attention to him. “How much time would’ve needed to have passed for everything around us to return to this wilderness?”

  She turned to him. “Hundreds upon hundreds of years. Looking at the thickness of the vegetation around us, I’d say it could’ve been a thousand years. We may never know.”

  “A thousand years,” Lewis muttered in awe. “The Millennium.”

  John approached him quickly, his breath trailing from his lips. “You’re a Remnant, Jack. How can this be? If you witnessed the last days as a child and that happened a thousand years ago, how in hell can you be here now?”

  Lewis removed his cap, scratched at his bald head, and looked at John with empty eyes. “I don’t know. I was a child, but I know what I saw. How could I forget the waters turning to blood, the scorching heat, the earthquakes—”

  “Put that aside,” John said to keep the older man’s more maudlin thoughts at bay. “We’re missing the obvious. The moon, the stars. I never heard of the Earth’s moon being surrounded by a halo of dust or having a V-shaped gash in its yellow face like ours does. Was the moon even yellow? You’re a Remnant, Jack. Can’t you remember?”

  “Yes,” Lewis murmured, a hand on his chin. “Our moon didn’t look like that at all. But the stars—it’s hard to remember the stars.”

  A hand gripped Lewis’s shoulder, and Kendra saw Sam standing beside them. “Here’s my best guess. We’re a long time in the future. A long, long time. The moon and stars could look an awful lot different in all that time.”

  “That doesn’t explain my father or the others of his generation,” Prisha protested. “How can they still be alive a thousand or more years in the future?”