The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

“Kendra,” John snapped, then turned to Lee. “Let’s say you’ve got something, Gordon. What’s the point of telling us the world ended in the twenty-fifth century?”

  “That I’m not sure,” Lee said with a shrug and a smirk. “Best guess? They must’ve thought it was better to contrast our brave new technologically inferior Christianopolis with an even more highly advanced, decadent past.”

  “A stretch,” Kendra said.

  “Really?” Lee said. “Almost every Remnant we’ve ever known deplores technology, even when it’s clear that things like advanced medicine could save some of our people from infectious diseases—why, your own parents, Kendra! Even the fragmentary history gathered and preserved here tells us something of the technology of the mid-twentieth century. We know mankind had cures to many diseases at that time—as well as had the atomic bomb and germ warfare in 1962. Maybe it was one of those things that did us in—or maybe something else. But it’s not much of a stretch to think that’s why the Remnants talk down technology—to keep us from getting back to a point where we could destroy ourselves again. Why else would technological improvements be so taboo in the City of Brotherly Love, Part Two?”

  “You must’ve confronted the Remnants with this . . . information,” John said. “What did they say?”

  “Denied it, of course, the arrogant bastards,” Lee said. “Some of them were downright indignant. They said: How could we not remember what the world had been like? We were there, they said, and then somehow assumed we’d all still believe their poltergeist-soaked stories of angels and demons and seas turning to blood. The legendary geniality of Andrew Weiss dissolved when we brought our evidence before the Council. He even threatened to arrest me. My own father-in-law.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “I hadn’t played my trump card yet, John.”

  “Let me guess. Something to do with the Tylers,” Kendra scoffed. “The very people who came among us and confirmed the Remnants’ descriptions of the world’s end.”

  “Convenient, eh?” Lee said. “And also ridiculous. The Tylers show up being no older than I am yet claiming they were survivors of an Orangeman attack on the Mars base that happened, what, more than fifty years ago? You don’t find that strange?”

  Lee nodded at one of the guards, who then disappeared into the stacks. She returned a few moments later with two heavy volumes. She looked at the spine of one and handed it to her “protector” while holding the other in reserve. Lee thumbed through the book until he found the page he was looking for.

  “You remember the Tylers well, then?”

  John nodded. “Of course. We were their guards.”

  “This,” Lee said, handing them the book, “is a photograph of the first lady of a country called Argentina. It was on the South American continent. She died at age thirty-three on July 26, 1952. Her name was Eva Perón, often called Evita.”

  Kendra and John stared at the picture. Apart from the fact that the smiling woman in this black-and-white photo seemed to have blond hair, she was the very twin of the woman they knew as Eva Tyler. Both women even liked to wear their hair upswept in buns.

  Lee gestured for the other book, and the guard filled his outstretched hand with it. “And this is a biographical dictionary of great Americans, which quite fortunately includes with each listing photos or paintings of important persons throughout that country’s history. He’s a bit older here, but I think you’ll recognize this man as well.”

  They took the book and looked at the photo next to the entry for William Tyler Page, a public servant best known for penning something called “The American’s Creed.” Page died in 1942. Though an old man in this photo, neatly bald and wearing glasses, the heavy features and hard line of a mouth were the exact same as the man they knew as William Tyler.

  “The Tylers were fakes, copies,” Lee stated. “I don’t know how, but that’s clearly what they were.”

  “Were?” John asked, his voice edging up. “Jesus Christ, Gordon. What did you do to them?”

  For the first time a look of genuine sorrow clouded Lee’s face. A little boy lived in that look, one who was clearly in the wrong and felt suddenly shamed by those in the right. “They’re dead. When some of my followers found out the truth—”

  Kendra stiffened. “How could you—”

  “I didn’t.” He shook his head emphatically. “It was in the early days. Sofie and I didn’t know everything. People were angry the Council had withheld this information from them. Things spiraled out of control. There was fighting in the streets, lots and lots of injuries. Far worse than the few fistfights we had here before you left. Protesters were pulling down the government’s authority piece by piece. And then someone got the idea to interrogate the Tylers—”

  Kendra’s mouth curled in disgust. “Not a single murder in a half century and a whole family slaughtered ten minutes into your watch. You son of a bitch.”

  “What do you think I am? The children are safe. We’re taking care of them. They’re innocents, obviously.”

  “How is that obvious?” A bitter catch in Kendra’s throat made her choke out the words. “Aren’t they ‘copies’ too?”

  “But they’re not copies.”

  John and Kendra eyed him with suspicion.

  “I’ve found no record of the originals—Eva Perón and William Tyler Page—ever having children together. And Page died in 1942, an old man during Perón’s childbearing years. Granted we have limited knowledge of the era, but it seems unlikely they even met.”

  John returned his gaze to the pictures and shook his head. “So the adult Tylers were, what? Copies of people who were dead but who had children together?”

  “And these children never existed before?” Kendra added.

  “Gordon, you have to understand how insane this sounds.”

  “I know.” Lee gripped the back of a chair. “I’d agree, if that’s all I knew. But I now know they’re not the only ones.”

  Kendra’s mouth popped open, then closed again, before she cleared her throat. “Who else?”

  “Kendra, I—”

  “Come on, Lee, who else?”

  He took the biographical dictionary from her hands and flipped it open to the “R” entries. Once he found the page he sought, he handed it back to her. “You, of course, remember the late Alexander Raymond Sr.”

  Her blue eyes fixed on him hard. The open page beneath her wasn’t even in her peripheral sight. “Alex’s father?”

  “He was one of the youngest Remnants, just a boy of six or seven on the day of the Arrival. John, you might recall I was apprenticed to him as a teenager. They had asked for volunteers to form the official Engineering Corps. I knew everything about him, every line on his face, every hair in his beard. I loved that man. I loved him as much as my own father.” He tapped the book in Kendra’s hands. “According to this, Alex Raymond was an influential cartoonist who most famously drew a newspaper comic strip called Flash Gordon—about a spaceman, ironically enough—in the early- to mid-twentieth century.” He gave Kendra’s shoulder the barest encouraging touch. “Kendra, look and tell me that’s not the man we both knew.”

  Kendra looked, as did John over her shoulder. A middle-aged face stared back at them—broad forehead, slightly jowly, a clipped-thin mustache, slick dark wavy hair. It was without doubt Alexander Raymond Sr. Younger, yes, but him. It was hard to forget those features. Similar ones had played variations on a theme across her Alex’s face.

  She took a defiant step toward Lee. His guards snapped to attention and drew their weapons. She stopped but kept her gaze on their leader. “He grew up here, Lee. He looks the same as this man, sure, but he grew up here. He was a childhood friend of the Weiss brothers. How can a copy come of age?”

  John had taken the book from her and was evaluating the cartoonist’s face. He hadn’t known the elder Raymond as well, but this man looked an awful lot like him. “Wait. Let’s back up. All of these people you’ve named so far died before 1962, the yea
r you claim the world actually ended. It says here this Alex Raymond died in 1956.”

  “That’s right. So there’s no way any of these people could have been snatched up by the Orangemen around 1962 and brought here. There’s no way they can be the originals, say, with their memories somehow lost. And that is especially obvious in the case of Raymond Sr., who as Kendra keeps saying, grew up here.”

  “So how did these copies come about?”

  “John, I don’t know,” Lee said with a surprising modesty. “I’m baffled by it. But I’ve found that to be the same with everyone I’ve located in the Archives. In each case, someone was copied from a person who had died before 1962.”

  “Everyone?” John’s head jerked up from the photos in the book. “There’s more?”

  “How many?” Kendra asked.

  Lee pursed his lips and paused for a moment. “Nearly three thousand and fifty of the Remnants. At least, those are the ones that people in my group can identify.”

  John stared in disbelief. “Three thousand—”

  “What about us?” Kendra demanded. “Our families?”

  “Not so lucky there,” Lee said. “No Giordanos or McQueens or Lees who look like our grandparents. But there may be another reason why we haven’t found them.”

  “And that is?” John asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe they simply aren’t in any of the books the Orangemen snatched up. Of course, that said, books tend to identify famous people. What if the originals of our Remnant ancestors were not famous—or famous enough—to be written about? What if they were just ordinary people?”

  John said nothing. It was all almost too much to bear. Even all that blood pounding in his ears couldn’t drown out Gordon Lee.

  “Okay, so let’s extrapolate.” Lee clapped his hands together. “What if every one of the original one hundred and forty-four thousand was a copy of someone who died on Earth before the end of the world?”

  “That makes the rest of us—everyone born here—no different than the Tyler children,” John said.

  “Exactly,” Lee agreed, nodding. “We’re all creations after the fact. A new mixture taken from a sampling of humanity. In fact, I’m even starting to wonder if the livestock they gave us are copies of dead sheep, cows, oxen.”

  John and Kendra looked at each other again. Living creatures copied from dead ones—all of those “extinct” animals they saw in the wilderness . . .

  “So I ask you,” Lee continued, “as one intelligent being to two others, can any of this really be biblical prophecy come true? I know one’s faith must be tested but—”

  “So what are we?” Kendra said in a low voice to no one in particular.

  Lee took it upon himself to answer. “Free, Kendra. We’re free for the first time in our lives, free to live life however we want.”

  Kendra eyed him. “But what are we?”

  Lee smiled. “Does it matter? Without rules, without a preening orthodoxy, we can do and be whatever we want.”

  “No, dammit, no,” John said, rubbing the back of his neck, “it’s not that simple. Even if all of the facts have been wrong, all of this,” he said, gesturing at the books around him, “all of this proves one thing. Life isn’t easy. All the rules you’re dismissing out of hand are the very things that make it easier for us to coexist. Without them life goes from being not easy to unlivable. At least by human standards.”

  “But we may not be human.” Lee shrugged. The gesture made him look small in his loose robe. “An issue for another day. As will be my questions for you. Remember, I still need to know where you’ve been all this time.”

  John smirked. “And maybe if we’re ‘real’ and not just copies of the people who left the city months ago?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly, “there’s that too. Guards.”

  Kendra hurled the heavy volume she was still holding at the tip of Lee’s nose. The stinging blow made him recoil, just as John jumped between Kendra and the guards. She snatched the sleeve of Lee’s ceremonial robe and pulled it free of his arm and wrapped it around his neck in a tight noose. Already his skin had begun to glow red.

  “Anybody here thinking I’m not crazy enough to kill him?” She grinned at the guards. “Drop the guns.”

  “On the ground, facedown, now!” John barked. He snatched the two sidearms and two carbines from the guards as Kendra held the wriggling and red-faced Lee in her vise grip.

  “You first, Lord Protector.” She pushed him toward the steps as John covered their escape with one of the carbines.

  “John,” Kendra called as they ascended the stairs.

  “Yeah,” he said, walking backward up the steps.

  “I have less than zero idea what to do once we’re up these stairs.”

  He laughed. “I do.”

  “Hit me.”

  “We find Weiss and make our report.”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said as she shoved Lee face-first out the bunker doors.

  They ran. Once up the stairs and back into the bursting sunlight of their fortified city, they ran and ran hard. Lee was dispatched at the end of the block with a shove and a rifle butt to the kneecap. Kendra was glad to have that scream. She wanted to hurt someone, wanted to lash out. John was with her, a pace ahead, shoving aside the confused faces on the city streets. Here and there, on sidewalks and at intersections, they would scare someone off with a barked threat or a proffered weapon. No one inside New Philadelphia had leveled a gun at another human being in two generations; it was a terrifying thing to do and have done to you. Kendra felt sick and uneasy. How well it fit into Lee’s theory that mankind’s assertiveness and aggression had done them in. But she also knew it made her feel safe, and that made it feel almost right.

  Crowds pulled away from them. Were they shocked by the threat of violence? Or because two old friends and colleagues long given up for dead were running through their streets? Whatever the reason, it kept resistance at the city’s center nonexistent. They had to do less shoving once they were away from the Archives and near the manufacturing district, where the escape tunnel built into the city’s walls remained hidden.

  The run hurt more than it should. They were feeling their injuries and recent imprisonment and were slow to react to the people around them. But keeping each other safe pushed them forward despite their labored breathing, the stitches in their sides, their thirst and hunger. When they reached the corner nearest the tunnel, they found the area deserted. John stopped short, and Kendra nearly ran into him. They both leaned against the stone wall, hands on their knees, as they tried to catch their breath.

  John peered around the corner. “Trouble.”

  Kendra peeked over his shoulder. “Four Novices are trouble?”

  “Sitting on top of the tunnel they are. We’ve gotta wait.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  She flicked off her carbine’s safety and ran at the Novices while screaming at the top of her lungs and firing several shots in the air. When the kids dispersed in a panic, she smirked at John. He jogged toward her, his weapon’s stock at his shoulder, circling for snipers as he did.

  “Don’t do that again.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not here to kill our own people, Kendra. Got that?”

  She felt the sting of his scolding. “I’ll get the tunnel open. Cover me.”

  As Kendra crouched to work the pulley system that slid the stones away to reveal the tunnel, the Novices she had chased off were now pounding back toward them, this time led by several of the guards who had been in the Archives with them.

  “Terrific,” she muttered.

  John sighed, then squeezed off a round that whizzed over the lead soldier’s head. Kendra jumped involuntarily as the bullet hit masonry. The soldiers took up positions pressed against the walls.

  “You’re out in the open, Captain,” one of them called back. “You don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “I swear by God we’re leaving this city. We’re leaving whethe
r or not I have to kill you. Make a choice.” As they hesitated, John muttered to Kendra, “Get in now. I’m a step behind you.”

  “John—”

  “Go!”

  She ducked back down and popped the mechanism, then slipped in and slid headfirst on her belly into the tunnel. Keeping his rifle level aimed at the corner, he crouched before the hole. The lead soldier was the one Kendra had called Lee’s concubine. She was out to prove something, and that made her careless. John could see more and more of her inching around the corner all the time. He waited a second, then two, and found his shot. He squeezed off a round and hit the fleshy outside part of her right thigh. As she dropped into the open and her team struggled to pull her back behind the wall, he dove into the hole. Kendra was already pushing a heavy stone toward the exit to block it.

  Before them were the hills circling New Philadelphia, the past and future of their civilization. Their frozen breath hung around them in a cloud as they got their bearings. Then they raced through the heavy brush, carbines slung, hand in hand, not knowing who or what they were and out to discover if they had been raised by the most artful of liars.

  CHAPTER 22

  If history was always written by the victors, how could the losers know themselves?

  All human knowledge was fragmentary. Nothing known was whole or complete. Every great civilization had been stitched together from inseams of information; each was only ever remembered by the torn bits of cloth that remained.

  As John hiked with Kendra into the wintering hills, he thought of these and other things as they found themselves on the edge of a world not of their making. The tide was drawing away the sand from under their feet, but the urge to survive was still strong.

  Near the top of the hills, not far from the tumbledown cabin where they had spent their first night together, John felt the ground rushing up toward him as Kendra shoved him down hard. She spread herself across his back to shield him. He lay still at her urging, but after a few minutes of cold grass tickling his nose, he ventured to speak.

  “Kendra—”

  “Wait.”

  “Ken, there’s nothing out there.”