The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  She let him turn over to face her. “I thought I heard something.”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “Better paranoid than dead.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  She looked at him, her lips parted, the black waves of her hair roping around her ears in the wind. “I don’t know what’s wrong and what’s right, John. What’s real and what isn’t. All I do know is that I have to keep you safe.”

  “We’ll find Weiss and the others. We’ll tell them what we saw out there, and we’ll make sense of things. Believe me.”

  She wiped the standing tears from her eyes and said in a firm voice, “If Samael wasn’t an angel, wasn’t a Nephilim, if he was just some alien thing, then—”

  He squeezed her hand. “Ken, I’m not saying I understand everything. But I do know one thing: Gordon Lee can’t be right.”

  “But the baby—”

  “Was loved and mourned and rightfully so.” He kissed her cheek and rubbed her shoulder. “Up and at ’em, Lieutenant. Let’s find the others.”

  The abandoned cabin wasn’t more than a mile or so from their position, but it took an hour of crawling through frost-hardened thickets to reach it. It was already dusk by the time they glimpsed the cabin silhouetted against the sky. The coming night air fluttered with a dusting of snow, and the wind held no noises apart from the stirring of evergreen foliage and winter-bare tree branches. They hadn’t been followed. John began to wonder if a serious attempt had even been mounted once they were through the city walls.

  The cabin had changed little since their first night there, other than it being much colder. They needed to risk starting a fire in the fireplace if they were going to get through the night without gear. Warming themselves against each other and near a fire had a great appeal, even if they would be forced to sleep in shifts. They found the nubs of candles they had secreted in a crack in the stonework of the hearth, lit them with matches Kendra had swiped from the Novices, then began to scavenge for wood and kindling. A fire large enough to keep them warm was burning within an hour. They watched its smoke drifting into the night sky through the hole in the thatched roof. Someone would see this. Someone would come. They took to their expectant vigil.

  About an hour and a half after the haloed hazy-yellow moon had reached its zenith, a dozen gray and wrinkled heads rose out of the dark woods beyond the tumbledown cabin’s walls. The Remnants had come.

  Their fleshy, balding, worn, and worldly features were still a happy and familiar sight, despite their coming out of the brush like that. So, John realized, this is what the Remnants had been like during those rough early years of exile, surviving by silence and cunning. It was hard to imagine that either of them—or anyone—could pry any truth from such mouths.

  As the Remnants entered, John and Kendra came to attention. Neither raised a weapon. John spoke for both of them. “Captain Giordano and Lieutenant McQueen request permission to report to General Weiss.”

  A flash moved among the graceful, grizzled faces, a shock of faded red coming to life. Then they heard that voice. “John? Kendra? Dear God, is it really you?”

  John saw his mother coming near. Her face was worn and flushed and tired. A hundred thoughts flashed through his mind, things he wanted to say to her but didn’t know how. For the first time he realized she was beginning to take some of her last breaths in middle age. Yet at the same time, next to the wizened visages around them and with that unexpected joy in her eyes, she appeared almost as young as Kendra. Not today but soon, he would talk to her.

  “We’ve come home. Will you have us?”

  “Oh thank God,” Petra said with her hands folded, her eyes lifted to the sky. “Thank you for bringing our children back to us.”

  Her face cracked open as she burst into tears. “None of that now, Mom.” He gripped her by the neck and pulled her to him to kiss the top of her head. “I haven’t always been the most understanding son,” he whispered in her ear. “But you have always been a mother filled with love. And hope. You never did anything wrong by me, Mom, never ever.”

  They camped that night in the cabin, each taking a shift on guard duty. The Remnants—and Petra—shared their provisions with Kendra and John as they talked late into the night. From Petra they learned how Gordon Lee’s faction had sown doubt among the city’s population, how he and Sofie had led street protests against the Council, at first simply demanding to see the Tylers but later campaigning more vigorously for their handover. It was then that the talk of a new government began to surface in public. Some had even urged the Council’s overthrow by violence if necessary. At the time these appeared to be a few radical voices—squeaky wheels attracting outsized attention. At least that’s what the Council thought. Then Grace Davison intervened. If anyone could assuage the people’s fears, this most respected woman could.

  For two weeks she was as dynamic as she had been twenty or thirty years earlier. She addressed crowds of the angry and confused, speaking to them always in a strong voice with a message of reflection and prayer. She warned them that evil often came into the world through the best of intentions—that it often came disguised as a gentleman. She told them to assume nothing, to be open to any possibility. And to always be accepting of unity and of peace.

  Few in the angry crowds—even many Seconds who had never been taught by her—came away from her talks without something new to consider. To those who were still angry, Petra was dispatched. She met with them in informal groups, over tea in common rooms or at lunches in family rooms, always cajoling, charming, convincing. If Petra couldn’t go, she would send one of her lieutenants, a devout Firster or Second, to talk members of their respective generations down from the battlements.

  All of this was done outside the Council’s privy. Petra, however, was certain that these actions had the members’ blessing. Both Chairman Weiss and General Weiss had signaled their unwillingness to resort to harsh measures against the protesters. And though both men had clashed with Grace and Petra over the Tylers, each knew that the two women could serve as pressure valves on a pent-up populace overflowing with questions and depleted of patience. For the first month, the Weiss brothers waited on word from John and Kendra. Even as more and more time passed, they and the Council continued to hope that the findings from their recon mission would provide some answers to who the Tylers were and what they actually represented.

  Everything broke open from the most unexpected of places: the Archives. Somehow, the Lees had discovered that the two adult Tylers bore an incredible resemblance to long-dead people. The revelation that no book in there had been published after 1962 only reinforced the growing belief that the Council was hiding a great deal from the people of New Philadelphia—and nothing seemed more representative of their secrets than the sequestering of the Tylers. One night, a group of two or three dozen men and women loyal to the Lees overpowered the guards around the Tylers’ villa and somehow set fire to it. An hour later Petra walked over to Grace’s house to tell the old woman that both parents were dead, the children taken by the protesters.

  Grace didn’t come to the door, hadn’t even called out to tell Petra to enter. As close as the two women were, Petra had never entered Grace’s home without being bidden. This time she did. Grace was sitting up in her chair in the dark, her fixed eyes reflecting the glow from the distant inferno beyond her open window.

  With Grace gone, the Tylers dead, and the Council seemingly disgraced by what had been found in the Archives, the city’s leaders knew that their administration had come to an end. Petra went to the Council to urge them to explain their side of things—to at the very least publicly theorize as to why the Tylers looked so much like people who’d died in an era supposedly five centuries removed from their own. A violent and anxious public could be heard in the streets through the barred shutters as she spoke. Their anger held the Council’s attention far better than her finest oration ever could. Yet these restless citizens weren’t the deciding factor. T
he idea of abandoning New Philadelphia came from an unlikely source. But it was from a voice that carried far more weight than anyone else’s ever could.

  “What would you have us do, Petra?” Andrew had asked. His dark eyes had been watery and tired but firmly fixed on her. “Go to war with our own children? Because that’s what will happen if we stay.”

  Petra had shaken her head as if she had been slapped. “What do you intend to do?”

  “Go back to the mountains.” Andrew rose from his chair and pulled off his ceremonial robes. “Go up there and wait for a miracle.”

  Jake Weiss believed one of the mottled blessings of growing older was the fact that you needed far less sleep than you did when you were young. He often wondered why that was. Was it because you had less to exhaust yourself with—less labor, less sex, no young children to chase after? Or was it the Almighty’s way of giving you more time toward the end of your life to reflect on your failings? Whatever the reason, he found himself glad of late to have these hours. Without them he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to ensure his outcasts’ survival in these mountains during these winter months.

  These hours had also convinced him that he had made terrible mistakes in his efforts to protect humanity. He had lost the unity of his people. His paranoia about infiltration had kept the Tylers isolated and likely had gotten them killed. Killed. His mind reeled. The first murders in more than a half century. Murders committed on his watch, as much his fault as if he had done the lynching. And John and Kendra. He’d sent them out to die alone in that wilderness. He was relieved that most of their families were already dead. It was hard enough looking at Petra every day.

  He indulged Petra more than he should. He let her go on wild-goose chases like this one up to the tumbledown cabin just outside the city. Every wisp of smoke on the wind these days was a clear sign that her surviving son was on his way home. He assumed this campfire had been set by a couple of kids, freed of all the morality the Remnants had sought to instill in them, needing a little light to screw by. It couldn’t be anything more. It was certainly no sign that the dead were coming back home.

  He emerged from the cave that had more or less been his residence and office since leaving the city and out into the morning light. From his slightly elevated position he could see all of the lanes in their tent-and-cabin makeshift town, located about a day’s journey in good weather from New Philadelphia. The morning was already noisy with coughs and grunts and greetings and the shuffle and struggle of early-morning chores. He stretched and took a step toward the nearest latrine, hoping the line wasn’t too long. Even a tepid shower would take some of the chill from his bones. Along his lane he nodded at people he had known his entire life—a ragtag collection of Remnants, Firsts, and Seconds—carting firewood and water and airing the blankets of the sick and the dying. He was about to round the corner when he heard an excited murmur rising up the lane before him, which faced east to the outskirts of camp. Everyone was now looking in that direction. Even with the sun in his eyes he knew Petra’s unmistakable tall frame. And after a moment he realized that flanking her on both sides were John Giordano and Kendra McQueen.

  He kept still and waited for them to approach. When they stopped three paces before him and saluted, he was almost too overcome to return it.

  “General Weiss,” John said. “We’ve come to make our report, sir.”

  A roar lifted out of everyone’s throats, these haggard men and women so beaten down by their recent plight and now so suddenly bright with hope. He kept his composure until he looked at Petra, beaming as she stood alongside her son. He broke through the crowd pressing in around them to shake their hands. Only much later would Weiss realize that this—the innate ability to believe even when all reason told them not to—was what had kept humanity from the abyss.

  “You didn’t make a liar out of your mother, Captain.”

  Cleaned up and rested and fed, John and Kendra were sitting in what these wretched outcasts of the city called the Main Cabin. It was part supply house, part informal meeting center, and the most solidly built thing in the town. Here they learned that leadership among the outcasts had devolved into little more than a vague civilian/military arrangement between the Weiss brothers. The Council had resigned. Much of the Defense Forces leadership remained in the city, now loyal to the Lees. Messengers had been dispatched to the last serving members of the Council in the hopes that they would come to hear the report. After an hour of waiting for anyone else to arrive, John and Kendra told their story to the Weiss brothers. Petra sat in on the meeting for reasons that remained unexplained.

  Andrew Weiss was ashen and gray but for a pinch of color in his cheeks. He had lost some weight off of his thickset frame. His features looked too big now, his eyes and mouth and nose all outsized. His skin seemed to hang off the bones underneath. A very sick man suddenly rekindled by a last burst of energy. Jake Weiss still very much looked like himself, strong and hard as granite. It was difficult for John not to think that this shared leadership wasn’t in name only simply to avoid the appearance (if not the reality) of a military takeover.

  Whatever their reservations they spoke at length. John felt oddly detached from their story. Petra gasped when she learned her husband was alive and had been outside the city gates only days earlier. The Weiss brothers listened in silence, even when John revealed Sam’s belief that this had been Earth a long, long time ago and that they were now in the very distant future.

  “So in conclusion,” John said as he set his cooling mug of tea down on a nearby table, “I guess we need to know if we’ve been getting the truth all these years from you.”

  “From us?” Andrew asked, his thick salt-and-pepper eyebrows arching.

  “Not from you specifically, sir. From the Remnants in general. Did you know anything about the things we’ve uncovered—or about the things Lee found in the Archives?”

  “Captain, Lieutenant,” the general began, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “The world did not end in 1962, no matter what the hell Gordon Lee says. We were there—”

  “We need to know what we are, sir,” Kendra added.

  “Lieutenant—Kendra—” He rubbed his clipped mustache. “Please don’t get the wrong idea. We’re as much at a loss as you are.”

  “Just tell us, please. Is this the Earth?” Kendra asked. “Are the Orangemen just . . . aliens? What—what has all this been for?”

  “Kendra.” Andrew’s voice was just a shade harsher than his brother’s. “We just don’t know. But from the testimony you’ve given, it’s not hard to believe that, contrary to our long-standing beliefs, this is Earth and that we’re somehow on it a long time after humanity was all but wiped out.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “Of course we don’t, Lieutenant,” he shot back. “How could we be certain? We didn’t even know of these portals right outside the city.”

  Kendra shook her head. She stood up and stormed out, knocking over her chair in a fit of almost-adolescent rage. John was about to say something, but then his mother lifted a hand at him and followed Kendra out.

  Kendra didn’t slow down until she was on the outskirts of the settlement near a guard post. Her breath came out smoky and heavy in the frosty air. It was not yet midday and did not feel like it would get much warmer.

  “I snatched your coat on the way out,” Petra said from behind her. Kendra turned to find John’s mother holding the jacket in her extended right hand. A look of something like sympathy played in the corners of her lined mouth.

  Kendra took the jacket and put it on while shaking her head. “You don’t understand. You think you do, but you don’t.”

  “Try me. I just found out my husband is alive and has no interest in coming home to me.”

  Kendra tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “I was sorry to hear about Christian. My condolences, Petra.”

  “I stopped mourning his loss a long time ago. At least now I know for certain that he’s
at peace, awaiting resurrection to the new life.”

  “How can you still be so certain?” Kendra asked through her teeth. “How can you possibly believe that after everything that’s happened? After everything we just told you?”

  “Why is it so easy for you to think that the Orangemen are something other than what you know them to be?” A closemouthed smile lit Petra’s face. “How can you be of such little faith?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  Petra gestured in the direction of the path along the perimeter. Cold as it was, it was a bright winter day with little wind and a sunshine that glistened everything into a crystal radiance. A walk in that sunlight would be good if for no other reason than it would be warmer than standing still. Petra stepped down the path and Kendra followed, her arms folded and her hands warming in her armpits.

  “So how am I of little faith?”

  “You listened to the Scriptures; you heard people like Grace talk about what it meant to have faith. You have heard us talking about the dead rising to new life, the resurrection of the body—not the soul, Kendra, the body. And you know that the kingdom of God must be made here, in this world.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  This stopped Petra in her tracks. “Kendra, don’t be dense or juvenile. Maybe we didn’t interpret Revelation correctly. Maybe we were being too literal. But it’s coming true. All of it.”

  “How do you see that?”

  “Those Remnants who came from people who had already lived on Earth years ago—people like the Tylers, like old Alexander Raymond, so many others—I believe those are the dead rising to new life. And if I’m right, that means the kingdom of God is at hand.”

  “If that’s true, then why don’t they have memories of their original lives?”

  “Of that I’m not sure. But I’m sure they are the dead returning to life.”

  Kendra stopped to think about that but then felt the contrarian’s pride grip her again. “Sounds too good to be true.”