The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  A quick look into the yard and Kendra threw her feet over the side of the back wall. After securing finger- and toeholds in the mortar between the brickwork, she made her way down and dropped into the sunny back garden. Sheets and towels, white and crisp, were flapping on a clothesline in the chilly breeze. The back door was to her left and led into the kitchen. She glanced through an open window shutter and found the kitchen empty, the home quiet. She tried the door. Unlatched. All she needed to do was creep in.

  As she was about to grasp the handle, the door sprang in and away from her. She flattened against the wall. Sofie was coming out with a laundry basket. Kendra leveled the rifle at the woman’s head.

  “Don’t. Move.”

  Sofie jumped and dropped the basket, exposing her midsection. She was five or six months pregnant.

  Kendra took a small step forward. “Anyone inside?”

  Sofie shook her head. A slight pout edged the corners of her mouth.

  “You first.”

  Sofie grinned. Kendra pressed the weapon’s barrel into the base of Sofie’s skull as she reached for the door. The house was semidark inside. The morning light had yet to reach the back corners of the first floor. The air was close and dry from the warmth of the fire and seemed only recently devoid of its bustle and activity. It almost crackled with the recently extinguished energy of children.

  “Kendra,” Sofie said without turning around. “Kendra, please talk to me.”

  “Sit in this chair, both hands on the table, palms down.”

  Sofie did as she was told. A lock of her strawberry-blond hair fell out of its bun and into her eyes. She grinned thinly.

  “How’re you alive, Kendra?”

  “How does the wife of the new head honcho not know that I’m alive?”

  “Gordon doesn’t tell me everything.” Sofie shrugged but kept her hands on the table. “Is John okay?”

  A pause, then through her teeth: “Yes.”

  “We gave you both up for dead when you didn’t come back right—”

  “I’m sure it broke your heart.” Kendra shifted her gaze across the kitchen. The sink was still filled with breakfast dishes. The water pump on the edge of the sink dripped off rhythm onto the glazed blue and tan ceramic bowls. The dishware piled up like that prevented her from knowing how many people had been at breakfast. “Where’s Lee?”

  “He’s probably in the Council chambers. That’s where he usually is this time of day. Wanna go for a visit?”

  “Where’s Weiss?”

  “My father or my uncle?”

  “Really. Keep being cute, Sofie.”

  “Probably in the hills. With the others.”

  “What others?”

  “The others who didn’t . . . agree with us.”

  “Careful.” Kendra took a step closer and raised her rifle again. “Let’s not start again with the cuteness.”

  “Most of the Remnants are in the hills. A lot of the Firsters too.”

  Kendra shook her head. “Can’t be all of them. Not Grace Davison. She’s too old.”

  Sofie’s inscrutable grin quivered and fell. Real emotion now appeared to seep through. “Kendra . . . Grace is dead.”

  An old woman’s death should never feel like a sucker punch. But this one, sharp and sudden, did because the second Kendra heard it she knew it was true. If Grace were living, their city wouldn’t be like this. No way.

  “How?”

  “She was almost a hundred years old, Kendra.”

  “I don’t care who you are, Sofie. I don’t care who you’re related to. I will kill you if you lie to me.”

  “No. You won’t.” Confidence widened Sofie’s smile. “I trained you. The last thing you could do is kill a pregnant woman. The last thing.”

  Kendra nodded once or twice, then flipped her carbine over and rammed its wooden stock into Sofie’s forehead. Sofie’s face went from smug satisfaction to wincing pain. Kendra slipped the sidearm into her hand and the rifle across her shoulders as Sofie sat holding her bruised forehead.

  “Maybe I won’t kill you. But I will pistol-whip you until you tell me what I need to know.”

  Sofie’s eyes blazed through the pain. “Do you think God will forgive you for this, ‘little’ Kendra?”

  Kendra readied the pistol, but she stopped in midmotion as she heard the pounding of racing footsteps behind her. Four guards were coming through the front door, carbines at the ready. She clucked her tongue as they snatched the weapons from her and shoved her facedown on the table. They were all from her squad.

  Her hands were bound with rope behind her back, her eyes blindfolded. “I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see.” Exploding gasps and muffled conversations rising and falling in uneven rhythms. She was being led down a busy street, maybe right down the main boulevard past Central Square. Had to be near the square. The winter sunlight was much stronger on her face here, unblocked by any buildings on the tightly packed streets. “For Thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord will lighten my darkness.” How could such morons have gotten the drop? “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another—”

  No, dammit, no. No forgiveness. None.

  Her feet tripped as they hit the first step, but the guards steadied her by her elbows. She shrugged them off and carried herself up the other five steps with ease. Definitely the Council chambers. It was the only building with front steps like these, raised up as it was because the land here had always been a bit marshy. She remembered her father telling her that the building stood on thick stilts set on drained land.

  When they pulled the blindfold off, she was where she expected to be. The Council chambers hadn’t changed much except for the addition of gas-lighting in sconces mounted along the walls.

  Gordon Lee’s sign of progress. Really just a dog pissing to mark his territory.

  The back door that led into the Council’s chambers opened on the left side of the dais. And there was John—her John—coming toward her, his hands bound in manacles before him. His grin broadened as he approached her, sure-footed and true. Her throat tightened. He was whole, safe. Rage was swapped out for confidence in her chest. The world would be set right again. Yes, it would. She would make sure of that no matter what. Even if she would never be forgiven by anyone for what she had to do.

  “Hey,” John said as his guards brought him to stand next to her before the dais.

  “Hey yourself.”

  He looked her over. “You okay, Ken?”

  “Yeah sure. The nose?”

  He laughed and lifted his bound hands to give it a gentle touch. “Just a hairline fracture. My old man swings like a scientist.”

  “Good. Now how the hell do we get out of here?”

  The door John and his two guards had come through opened again. This time Gordon Lee appeared with a quartet of guards flanking him. Eight guards total now, two for each of them and four for Lee.

  Lee looked no different, other than the fact that he was wearing some variant of the ceremonial gray-and-blue robes worn by the Council while in session. His face still held its pinched look, like he was either suspicious or smelling something rotten. His narrow mouth was relaxed and almost bored, his black hair still longish and falling in styled waves over his ears and shoulders. He sat in what was now the only seat on the dais, a high-backed chair of heavy oak that neither of them had ever seen before. It looked outsized in its position at the center of the old rectangular Council table and somewhat ridiculously like a throne.

  Lee didn’t glance at them as he took his seat, seeming to be preoccupied with the papers on the table and his own efforts in looking magnificent and authoritative as he sat there. Kendra barely suppressed a giggle as she watched one of his baby-faced guards stare at him with something bordering on religious awe. She was a young girl, two years into the Defense Forces, and probably only a few years older than Lee’s eldest child.

  John grew annoyed by the show. “What the hell’s going on, Gor
don?”

  “Quiet!” The baby guard on John’s left belted him in the ribs with the butt of her carbine. John winced and doubled over.

  “Hey you.” Kendra leaned over to look at her. “You get yours first.”

  The male guard near Kendra raised his rifle, but Lee held up a hand. “Please. Wait. We’re all friends here. They don’t know what’s happened. They need to understand what’s at stake.”

  John’s brow ridged. “What exactly is at stake?”

  “The fate of the human race,” Lee replied, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “Whether we will all live together as free and knowledgeable citizens or as adherents to an outdated, deceitful, and ignorant orthodoxy.”

  Kendra chuckled. “Well, since you put it like that—”

  John shook his head at her, then turned to Lee. “It kind of feels like we’re on trial here, Gordon. That doesn’t seem too free to me.”

  The rifle-butt girl stood in his face. “You will address Protector Lee as ‘sir’ or ‘Your Lordship.’”

  “So you’re what?” Kendra leaned over to look at her again. “One of his concubines?” The female guard raised the rifle to Kendra’s face. John threw his body between the two women. “We’re citizens of this city, you son of a bitch!” Kendra yelled at Lee as the guards sought to restore order. “What’s happened to the Council?”

  Lee held up a hand to restore calm, then told the guards to let the prisoners sit in a pair of chairs at a table on the left side of the dais. Lee came down the steps and approached the table as soon as the guards were in position.

  He stood before them, face calm, hands clasped behind his back. “The Council of Twelve was dissolved more than two months ago, when it was conclusively proved that its members had lied to the people for decades. A transitional government, under my direction, is now in place until such time when free and fair elections can be peaceably held.”

  Kendra shifted in her seat as she tried to find a comfortable position for her bound arms against the back of her chair. She gave up trying and sat sidesaddle on the chair so she could lean against John. “You kids really believe he’s going to have free elections? I mean, in your lifetimes?”

  “Gordon,” John said quietly, “what was the Council lying about?”

  “Everything, John. Everything about our existence here, how the Remnants got here, who the Orangemen really are—everything. Our entire world has been a complete fabrication.”

  “Pretty big claim.”

  “I will tell you everything,” Lee promised. “But you’ve got to answer some of our questions first. Where have you been all this time? What did you see in the wilderness?”

  “You know we’re under orders to report directly to General Weiss.”

  “General Weiss is no longer head of the Defense Forces, John.”

  “Who is, then?” Kendra asked.

  “My wife, of course.”

  She whistled. “Of course.”

  John shook his head. “We don’t recognize your authority.”

  Lee walked away from the table but kept nodding, as if the movement would prevent his guards’ eyes from drilling boreholes into his suddenly fallible-seeming brain. “You asked what they had been lying about. Yet both of you have said you didn’t entirely trust the Orangemen.”

  “Not to you, I didn’t.”

  Lee held up a hand, the robe draping off his bare forearm. “No, but you did to my wife, a long time ago. Remember? Perhaps you suspected, as we now know, that the Orangemen—both our protectors and our destroyers—are aliens.”

  “That old chestnut? Man, I thought you had something for a second,” Kendra answered, her jaw set. “And yet still no evidence, not before man’s fall and still none now.”

  Lee provided her with a toothless smirk. “Would you believe me if I told you the evidence has been under our very noses all this time?”

  Kendra scoffed. “Well, that sounds to me like the Remnants can’t be the great liars you make them out to be.”

  “Or maybe the best place to keep such a secret would be right out in the open,” Lee said with a shrug. “You might even have read that in a book once.”

  “Gordon,” John said with a level gaze. “Talk to us. Don’t play games.”

  Lee held up a finger to his lips and closed his eyes. “Just a few more questions. If you won’t tell us about where you’ve been, remind us of what you know. First, in what year was the Earth destroyed?”

  “Oh for the love of—” Kendra began.

  “Please. Indulge me.”

  “It was 2491,” she said through set teeth.

  “And how many years have our people been here?”

  “Fifty-two,” John answered. “Almost fifty-three. Come on, Gordon.”

  “Last one, I promise. Just give us a brief description of human civilization before its end. Level of technology, all that.”

  John and Kendra looked at each other. He nodded at her, agreeing to go along. “You know as well as I do that it was pretty advanced. Gene therapy had cured a number of serious diseases. They had nuclear-powered spacecraft capable of getting them around the solar system fairly easily. They had built a domed city, probably as large as ours, on the moon. And they were in the process of terraforming Mars—something confirmed by the Tylers.”

  “Speaking of,” Kendra added. “Where are they?”

  Lee gave his guards a hooded look, then cleared his throat and went on. “Let’s go to the Archives. We’ll find your answers there.”

  The Archives, John thought, everything went back there, didn’t it? Back to where the original volumes of mankind’s previous civilization were housed. And now so did they, this time with their hands newly unbound so he and Kendra could descend the narrow staircase into the fortified bunker. The dry air was rich with the scent of yellowing paper as they drew downward. Memories flowed through John’s mind of beloved days and nights he spent here reading, wandering, exploring, listening to his namesake grandfather—all in the hopes of capturing in full and complete detail a fragment of a civilization he had never known. And with those memories came the old familiar feelings of loss and isolation and dislocation. Everything all the same. Well, not everything. The scent of burning kerosene lamps was missing. Lee had replaced those lamps with sconces of piped-in gas, which he turned on by twisting a switch mounted in the wall at the top of the steps.

  Before them stood the heavy wooden stacks that had been built so long ago by the Remnants, their weight being tested under the couple hundred or so additional volumes their people had written and added to the Archives since the Arrival.

  Lee walked ahead of them, running a hand almost absentmindedly across the spines of a row of books to his left. They all knew classics of world literature were there, mostly translations into English. He pulled a very thick volume from the shelf and flipped it open. The expression on his face was somewhere between smug and bemused.

  “You say the world as humanity knew it ended in 2491?”

  “Gordon,” John said. “Come on already.”

  Lee held out the book. It was a Samuel Putnam translation of Don Quixote by Cervantes, opened to a page none of them had ever had reason to look at—the copyright page.

  “If the world ended in 2491,” Lee continued, “then tell me: Why is there not a single original volume here that was printed any later than 1962?”

  CHAPTER 21

  Kendra tore through the literature section, a lifetime’s worth of art in her arms. She snatched Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—a first edition from 1952. She pulled several volumes at random from the shelves nearest her and furiously flipped to the copyright pages of each. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be—1941, 1938, 1945, 1926—no no no. She grabbed From Here to Eternity by James Jones down from the shelf. His descriptions of army life had made it one of her favorite books during her Defense Forces training. She must’ve read it a half dozen times.

  Copyright 1951. First printing.

&nbs
p; John attacked the history books and stacked one upon another in a pile on a nearby table after scanning them for their printing dates—1920, 1931, 1906, 1936, 1950. He yanked Lewis Mumford’s The City in History from the shelf. That book he knew. After all, it had served the city’s founders well when they were planning out New Philadelphia. Copyright 1961. He moved to the biography section and found in his hand a book titled Al Smith American. Copyright 1945 by Frank Graham.

  “They can’t all be published before 1962,” Kendra muttered. “Somebody—at some point—would’ve noticed.”

  Lee folded his arms across his slim chest. “I assure you that they are. I’ve made an exhaustive check. Not a single one published after 1962. It’s really blindingly obvious when you start to think about it. Why would a civilization as advanced as ours had been still need paper books?” He tapped his chin with his forefinger. “I can say with the evidence before us that the world our parents and grandparents knew ended around 1962, not in 2491. Add to this other cursory facts—the kinds of weapons, tools, and supplies the Orangemen left the Remnants with. They also attest to this. So why lie to us, the two generations born here? It’s quite simple. Because the Orangemen didn’t destroy us. We destroyed ourselves. These Orangemen—who could be anything, but let’s for a moment assume them to be aliens who were passing by our wrecked world—took some kind of cosmic pity on us and deposited the survivors here on this primitive planet, where we could do little harm to ourselves or one another. And they left us here with an admonition to ‘be good’ and plenty of Bibles to show us how to be good. Those little daily reminders in Revelation are a convenient way of controlling our behavior, keeping our technology primitive, and, not coincidently, ensuring the Remnants would stay in charge.”

  “You’re making a lot of guesses there,” Kendra said. “And you don’t even have all the facts. You don’t even know that this planet is—”