The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  She did another survey of the weapons as she strapped the knife in its sheath to her belt. It was enough, more than enough to get there and fight her way in if need be.

  Once on the road, she found it hard to sleep the first night, even though the day of slogging through foot-deep snow was strenuous and the winds had seemed to rise up that morning with the express purpose of flaying the skin off her face and pushing her back toward their refugee town. On the second night it took all of her last reserves of strength to get the tent up and the fire started. She crawled inside and fell into a heap. The chill never completely left her, even wrapped in her bedroll. And tired as she was, real sleep remained just past the tips of her fingers.

  For a long while her mind just couldn’t rest, never lighting on one thought long enough to work through it with any coherence. She thought of the Weiss brothers and Petra, wondering what they had thought when they realized she was gone. She thought of Grace and of the Tylers and of Alex Raymond, all the dearly departed who had never really departed from her but who still inhabited every room she ever slept in, always there, always just past her peripheral vision. And she thought of her parents too. She could hardly recall their faces as they had been during their last fever illness. She saw instead her father as she knew him when she was five or six, with his thick mustache and wavy bush of dark-brown hair, farmer tanned with red-brown neck and elbows, holding her hand as he taught her how to find her way home by following rivulets and remembering details from all along their hikes. She could see her mother, heaven-bright with her blue eyes and halo of black hair, glowing at Kendra aged three or four, feeding her bits of broken food from her well-worked, loving fingertips. The love she felt when thinking of all of them was heartbreaking. She had read that word a thousand times and had never really known what it meant in all its awful fullness until now. Heartbreaking: to know people once lived and no longer did, to know they were real and of this world and no longer were, to hope but never know if you’d see them again—this was heartbreak, pure and true.

  And now—no, she wouldn’t think of that. But thinking of her parents made her think of Alex and his death and how he had been found hanging there. She was thinking clearly enough in her dark and rustling tent to know that spending another hour with Alex’s memory was unnecessary. She put him away and found herself back in the place where she didn’t want to be—thinking of John and why he left and why he had found it necessary to keep her out of his plans.

  He might leave her, do what he felt he needed to do and feel justified in the doing, but none of this meant that she would just sit back and take it. He was her John as she was his Kendra. She would find him and save him, even if it meant saving him from his nobler ideas. She needed his moral clarity, his black-and-white thinking. Why did he feel he had to go back? They had already tried with those fools in New Philadelphia and the broken and ignorant old-timers here. The Remnants. Were they all liars or just delusional? Didn’t matter.

  What had they called it in the wilderness? A separate peace. They would forge their path. Now. Right away. The minute she brought him back. They belonged to each other. That was all that mattered really. They owed this world—whatever it was, whenever it was supposed to be, whatever they actually were—nothing. They owed each other everything.

  The thought made her peaceable. With it clutched to her chest she finally slept, though not for long. An hour, maybe two, later, she was awake. Or rather, she was awakened. She was unsure of the time. It was still before dawn. A voice that was not a voice called to her and told her to get up, get dressed, go outside. She slipped into her clothes and greatcoat, then untied the tent flaps. Though the wind had died down, the predawn chill flushing her cheeks told her she was not asleep, no longer dreaming. The voice that was not a voice kept guiding her. It was fully recognizable and completely unknown. It made her weep. She wiped the warm tears from her cold cheeks with the back of her gloved hands the way a child would. While walking she had a vague sense that she was again a child, stepping with a child’s innocent confidence. All that had happened to her in the years that she had lived between the ages of fourteen and twenty was washed away as weedy topsoil to reveal the hard white stone of the real Kendra beneath. She felt clean and ready, if not exactly good.

  After twenty minutes of hiking, she came to a clearing far inside the dense woods that surrounded the place where she had pitched her tent. This clearing was not only free of snow but also terribly bright and warm. She squinted into the bluish-white light, a hand shielding her eyes. Once inside the clearing, she was surprised that she had not seen the glow through the trees; in fact, she was sure on a night like this one such a brightness could be seen all the way back at their ramshackle town. Her outstretched hand warmed up as she entered the clearing. She had felt this sort of warmth before.

  In the middle of the clearing was a glowing white rock, and on this rock sat an Orangeman—a male one. He hopped off the rock with an effortless, inhuman precision and grace and took a step toward her. She felt the fact that she was unarmed more than she knew it. She reminded herself that this Orangeman was not Samael. His corpse was buried somewhere in these mountains.

  “Were you the one who called to me?”

  His slightly too large head and iris-less eyes seemed to acknowledge her more than his expression did. “I was sent here for you, Kendra McQueen.”

  “You’re not the first of your people to come to me. How do you know me? Through him?”

  “We know all about you.”

  “If you’ve come to harm me, Orangeman, know this: I will fight you and kill you if I can. If you’ve come just to tell me something, tell it whole and true. I’m tired of your race’s games.”

  The Orangeman’s face was still passive. “Bold words for such a little thing.”

  “Maybe. But do what you will and let it be done.”

  “I come to ask a question.”

  “Then ask it.”

  “Why do you turn from what your ancestors learned so bitterly?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your ancestors were told by the Lamb and by generations of peacemakers to love one another. Why do you seek to wage war among yourselves, after so much destruction has been visited on your race?”

  “We’re starving. And if you are truly the servant of the Almighty, and if he truly exists, then you know that the God of Abraham and Isaac and Moses does not hear us.”

  “Ah.” The sound was the closest to complete weariness that she had ever heard. “The God of Abraham and Isaac and Moses but not your God.” When she said nothing, he continued. “And so you would do this—sin once more—after so many years of peace?”

  “What are you, Orangeman? What is your name? Why are you here, and why are you using our Bible to keep us in your thrall?”

  “Is that what you really think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. I’m tired of stories and interpretations. Just tell me what you are, what you want, or leave me in peace.”

  “Has your kind learned nothing in all these years? Have you no true understanding of this age of peace that you so carelessly wish to throw it away? Mark me. Your Revelation was written to teach you one thing: patience is everything. It is the key to your future.”

  “You still speak in riddles, Orangeman. Patience. Your people brought the Tylers among us. Some of your people destroyed most of the human race. Haven’t you had time to reflect on your own actions and realize they have had consequences? You set us up to act like wooden soldiers—guided by nothing but blind obedience—and you expect us not to react as such?”

  “Even soldiers have a choice.”

  “Not this one.”

  He shook his head without disapproval. “You are loved, Kendra McQueen. All of you. You are all loved so much as to be allowed to decide everything—even whether you love back. The choices are your own, as are the consequences.”

  “What choice have I had? What’ve I done to be left alone like this?”
/>   He stepped toward her. “Child of man, you are not alone. You have never been alone.”

  “‘Child of man,’” she scoffed. “Tell me, what are we, the people who lived and their children born here? What were the Tylers, Alex’s father, all those people who existed before?”

  “Your fallen race’s eternal question. ‘What are we?’ And though it has been answered to the best of your understanding in a hundred disciplines and in a thousand tongues and in a million moments of personal decision, still you ask it.”

  “We ask because we see only pieces,” Kendra said, “not the whole.”

  “Much of it is beyond your ken, yes. But enough exists here, on this plane of existence, for you to infer your place in the universe.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “Imagine, even when your science was far more advanced than it is now, the makeup of dark matter was unknown, though it was felt and inferred by its gravitational effects on all visible matter—your stars, galaxies. Such is the influence of the invisible on the visible since before time, as you understand it, began. I come from such a place, as did your remotest ancestors.”

  The hair rose on her arms. She felt as she had the first time she saw Samael. She was in the presence of something far beyond her and all-encompassing, yet part of her, all at the same time.

  “What are we?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Like matter or energy, nothing that can ever be destroyed. Like consciousness, nothing that can ever be completely known.”

  “But what you’re saying is what is knowable is already known.”

  He looked as pleased as those placid outsized features would allow him to be. “To answer your question. You are what I called you: a child of man. How you came to be here does not matter. All of you are a new step out of the river of your history, cleansed and pure. Look to that part of yourself that feels the truest. It knows what I say. To backslide into what your ancestors were—that is a choice. And it begins with you.”

  “How?”

  “You have been called to a purpose, Kendra McQueen. Have you not felt that all your life?” When she said nothing for several heartbeats, he went on. “You are to go unarmed into the city your people built and end this division.”

  With a flutter of his great translucent wings, he rose from the ground and alighted on the top of the rock. Behind him, now fully revealed, was an olive tree in full bloom at the very center of this warm place. It was dark green and massive, likely a thousand years old, its trunk a thick, hard cord—a living burst of life beyond possibility in the depths of winter.

  “Take a branch from this tree and bring it toward the city’s gates. There someone should recognize it and let you in. Once inside, if you follow your conscience, the fall of the last of the wicked will bring peace to all mankind.”

  Kendra glanced from the impossible tree to the Orangeman’s face and back again. “If you know me as well as you say, you know why I’m going to the city and why I’ll be armed.”

  “I know nothing of a time not come, of choices not yet made.”

  “I’m going to save John. Just my John.”

  “In your Talmud, it is written: ‘Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.’” He looked at her and seemed to smile. “You are free to choose as you will, beloved Kendra.”

  Kendra awoke warm in her bedroll with no idea of how she had gotten there or whether it was day or night outside. She sat up gingerly, still half in dream. She paid as little attention as she could to her bare legs sliding against the cool cotton. A little more movement, anything sudden, and she would drop out of her dream completely and forget everything she now remembered in it. Every sensation suggested her memories were just a dream. Nothing special had occurred. Would a visitation leave her with a pasty mouth and a painfully full bladder? She pulled on her boots over her bare feet and untied the tent flap to squat bare-assed in the bitter, frosty morning—yes, she could see now it was morning—and watched her urine first forge a stream in the snow, then run downhill between her booted feet. No, she was still confused Kendra McQueen. No visitation. No messenger. No role to play. No debate about God giving her a purpose. She was going to the city to bring her John home. She hitched up her panties and found a clean patch of snow to scoop up and chomp until her mouth felt more or less clean. Then she went inside.

  Next to her bedroll, lying on its side, was her pack with a bright-green-leaved olive branch sticking out of it.

  She took the branch in her hands, a precious thing. For a long while she sat with it in her lap. Then she wrapped it with care in a spare shirt and replaced it in the pack.

  In less than an hour she was off—breakfast eaten, tent collapsed, pack and weapons shouldered. She glanced through the intense sunlight reflecting off the snow at the ring of evergreens around her and got a sense of where and when she was. If she kept a hard pace downhill, she could make it to New Philadelphia before long.

  Then what, McQueen?

  The wind had tapered down into a prevailing breeze that made her head feel clear and cold. Just the sort of weather for sharp thinking. By midday she had reached the valley just over the far side of the high hills that surrounded the city. She sat against some snow-free boulders in the lowest part of her surroundings. The huge stones blocked most of the wind. Being too close to the city now, she ruled against cooking a meal and instead ate fistfuls of dried fruit and some salted meat. She washed it all down with teeth-rattling, cold water she had captured in her canteen from a mountain stream.

  The snow in the valley was deep and thick but packed down hard. Who had been out here? People fleeing the camp? Patrols out searching for the Remnants? For her and John? No matter. It was just another mystery that did nothing more than simply exist to perplex and bewilder. Okay. Fine. Maybe games were played to satisfactory conclusions, but no one ever said life had to be.

  Kendra took up the pack again and the carbine and set out on her snowshoes. Ten paces later she stopped. She was not far from the city gates. She unhitched the pack and pulled the bedroll free from its straps and tossed it aside. The winter tent followed. She glanced back at them just once before continuing on.

  When she reached the top of the hills, she could see the city almost shimmering against the setting sun. Even from the distance she felt its humming, a low, atonal sound less than mechanical and more than animal. Typically human. Here and there in shadowy places she could see lights sparking to life. Around the gatehouse towers and haloed by the purple sunset, guards stamped themselves warm. She glanced up at the darkening sky, nearly split in two between the ending day and the oncoming night. The place seemed strange to her, totally unknowable. Was this how the Orangemen from on high saw them? She began to hike over the ridge toward the city.

  Halfway down the steep hillside she stopped again and looked at the great stone monster, this work of three generations, a fortress built to protect and keep them, the point from which they were to secure a new human civilization on this world.

  And for what?

  She felt her eyes watering. She blinked the tears away and cursed herself.

  John’s right. He’s always right. He tries to see all of us at our best. Maybe we’re descended from copies of the original humans, or maybe the Remnants had been plucked out of the time stream with their memories falsified just before they were placed here. Maybe we really are the survivors of God’s wrath and are meant to repopulate the Earth. Maybe this all happened last week or a thousand years ago. It doesn’t matter. John’s right; the Orangeman’s right. We’re human in the way that counts most.

  Kendra didn’t turn back after she had dropped her carbine and sidearms and ammo boxes in the snow. If she had, they would’ve appeared to her as no more than small black pinpoints on an unmarred white surface. And before long they would be red with rust and ruin.

  The sun had set behind the hills in the west before Kend
ra found herself skirting the walls of the city. After tossing her snowshoes away, she approached at a midpoint between two of the city’s twelve gatehouses, with the idea that she wanted her arrival to come with as much surprise as possible. She didn’t imagine that her old tunnel was still operational but approached it first and found it as she expected it—sealed with new mortar and bricks still undulled by their first winter. Then she began to tramp along the well-worn paths of snow around the walls—the endless retreads of a winter’s worth of sentries—intending to stop at the first gatehouse she came across. They probably wouldn’t shoot her on sight. She had no proof of this. But it was hard to believe the Orangeman would’ve sent her all this way just to have her die knocking at the door.

  She didn’t want to die and thought she was too young to do so but found herself accepting the possibility. This strange sense of peace held her as she moved toward the gatehouse. She couldn’t remember when it had first begun to bloom, but she was sure now that she had felt it in fits and starts ever since that night John had carried her down from the mountain after Jake Weiss had killed Samael. That serenity had remained with her ever since, but she knew it only in the moments when she understood she had been living on borrowed time since her flight.

  A rustle in the frozen brush dropped her to the ground. She tore off her gloves and reached for the bowie knife still attached to her hip. Then she shook her head, wiped her suddenly sweaty palm against the knife’s sheath, and stood up. She found herself almost nose to nose with a young girl no older than thirteen or fourteen. Her face was fresh and clean. A lock of pin-straight black hair hung out from under her fur-lined hood as her brown eyes went wide at the sight of Kendra.

  “Er, um, hi.”

  Kendra squinted at her. “Hi yourself.”

  “Look, I totally know I’m not supposed to be out here,” she stammered with nervous tears in her eyes. “Oh—please don’t tell my mom and dad.”

  Kendra stepped toward her, her palms out. “It’s all right. Who’re your parents?”