The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  Then she looked to the sky. As much as the sight of a civil war frightened her, she was even more terrified by what literally hung in the air above them—dozens of Orangemen, hovering in a protective wing above the fray, their silvery swords drawn and at their sides.

  Kendra watched the scene in transfixed wonder. Now and again another concussive flash would herald the arrival of another band of reinforcements. She strained to make out their faces but recognized no one at this distance. As the defenders jostled against her, she was pulled away from the parapet and her own observations. She searched the immediate crowd for faces she knew and saw no one. A moment later she found herself nearly nose to nose with Sofie Lee, whose flanking guards were pushing through the mass of defenders.

  Sofie’s recognition was immediate and outraged. Kendra spoke before she could get a word out.

  “Sofie, you need to stand these people down. This isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing. Do you realize who’s out there?”

  Her statement was met with an explosion of pain on the side of her head. Only after she fell against some surprised Novices did she realize that she had just been pistol-whipped. She looked for Sofie and her men. They were all gone by the time her vision cleared.

  The swelling from a growing bruise stretched the skin on her temple and cheekbone. She stumbled through the crowd, looking for John, looking for Grace, looking for anyone who would help her. She tripped and fell against thrusting bodies again and again; each time she was shoved off, tossed aside, kicked away. She stopped and held up her hands and called out to them. Few heard her. And those who did ignored her plea, too trapped by the idea of taunting their attackers below.

  They had reached the end of the play. Kendra whirled in a circle and watched the frightened faces around her, teeth bared, eyes wild. The men and women she knew and loved were gone. Primal fears had taken over; the animal had taken the reins. War had come, and all they had struggled for and won would be lost. The tide had pulled it all away. Love and hope, solidarity and peace—all these illusory dreams were now ready to take their place in the dirt with a plastic bowl and an asphalt road and the bronze likeness of a once-great man and the body of a very good one.

  No.

  She wouldn’t allow it.

  Kendra drew her pistol from her waistband and flicked off the safety, firing two shots in the air. The shots silenced and pushed back the crowd around her. Their silence hushed those farther back.

  “Listen to me!” she yelled in a raw voice. “Listen to me! The people outside are not your enemies. They’re our starving brothers and sisters. Do you really think they want to kill you? They’re desperate. Look at them! Take a good look! Lay down your arms!”

  Somewhere a voice behind her yelled: “But the Hostiles—they’re back! They’ve come to finish us off!”

  “How do you know that?” Kendra shouted. “How do you know who they really are?”

  “Those mirror-gate things—the flashes—they’re coming out of the air—”

  “You don’t know. None of you! But we do know those are our people out there. Our people. This is the war no one wins. And you know that—you goddamn know that!”

  A burp of jostling erupted among the faces turned toward her. She saw a hand jut into the air and heard a voice call her name. “Kendra! Over here!”

  A moment later John was standing in the circle that had been cleared around her since she had fired those shots. His arms looked gangly and long. He held them loose, as if he had just run a marathon. His hair was mussed and stuck out in odd waves, and his face was careworn and tired but pierced with joy as he looked at her. Only her.

  “Always good at making a scene, eh, Ken?”

  “Better than you are at telling me where you’re going.”

  She stepped toward him and he to her when the report of shots rang out from somewhere beyond the circle. She didn’t connect the shots to why John was suddenly falling into her arms, why he was resting his whole weight on her, why she was holding his head at an awkward angle above a pool of blood spreading in the snow on the stone walkway beneath him.

  But then she saw his face and, somehow, understood. The care and the exhaustion long etched there were gone as he looked up at her with his head cradled in her lap. It was gone now, all of it, except the love and joy he had in him, all for her, all of it always for her.

  “Hey,” she said through her teeth as tears fled into her mouth. “Hey now. It’s okay, Johnny. Shush. It’s okay.”

  She looked at his eyes, nothing else. The love stayed there through the wincing pain, even as the light faded from them. His lips moved in thick motions, but nothing came out. He found her hand on his face with his own and gripped it once, hard.

  “I know, I know. I love you too, John.”

  Only after the light fled his eyes did she close them and kiss them and scream her anguish to God.

  She didn’t know how long she remained there, how long the eyes of those who had surrounded them and done nothing continued to watch her in cold silence. The world was very far away now. Death had moved out from the background and was close to her shoulder and ready. Everything felt slow and still. The blinding lights that had drawn them to these ramparts in the first place were no longer seen.

  Then at once she looked up and saw Sofie at the circle’s edge with a pistol hanging loosely in her right hand.

  Kendra kissed John’s face once again and let his head come to a gentle rest on the snow-covered stonework. Her sidearm was still in her hand.

  Kendra never let her gaze move from Sofie. Ten paces at best separated them. Kendra had firsthand knowledge of Sofie’s marksmanship. The gun she dangled at her side could be raised and aimed and fired faster than Kendra could do it, even in peak condition. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Kendra felt her own gun drop from her hand. So many other things fell away with it, far more than she could ever put words to. She stepped toward the woman who had been John Giordano’s first love. There was no indifference in Sofie’s darkening features as she aimed her gun at Kendra’s forehead.

  Kendra opened her arms wide and continued to step toward Sofie. Kendra’s arms reached around Sofie even as she brought the pistol in contact with Kendra’s forehead. The barrel was only slowly losing its recent warmth. Kendra thought the side of her swollen face must be a tempting target. The bullet would splatter the blood pooling under her skin all over them and the crowd and the snow and maybe John too.

  Kendra brought her lips to Sofie’s cheek and kissed her. “I forgive you, Sofie. I forgive you; I forgive you.”

  Sofie’s face contorted with rage into a tear-streaked grimace as she shoved Kendra away and fled into the crowd. Kendra stood as she had before, with her arms outstretched, as she watched her disappear. Then, with concentrated effort, she lowered her arms.

  Silence. How long it went on no one knew. Then breaking it was a voice, clear and loud: “Open the gates! Let them in!”

  And another: “Lay down your arms!”

  And another: “For God’s sake, let them in!”

  And still another: “Kiss our brothers and sisters! Welcome them home!”

  Kendra retraced her steps and sat down in the snow next to John and waited for what would be the rest of her life to come to her. It was snowing again. Against the flashes of light from the portals, the falling flakes shimmered in brief sparks and faded. She pulled John’s head back into her lap. People began to approach her, caution mincing their steps and love filling their eyes.

  A moment later there was a tremendous roar unlike anything anyone living had heard. The ground beneath them shook and ruptured and split as if the sky had crashed into it. And then Kendra McQueen accepted the blackness and silence she had always feared came with the true death.

  CHAPTER 27

  Seventeen years later many things were different. But in a lot of the everyday ways many things were just the same. The sea air still sweetened the old city. Harvests, good or bad, were still an endless preoc
cupation. People still worked the fields and hunted in the hills. When they weren’t busy, each of them could be found at one time or another relaxing on the grass in the old Central Square, eating picnic lunches, laughing, listening, talking, flirting. And preachers still stood on the raised stone platform at the square’s center, hoping to keep the spirits of the old up and those of the young in line.

  Today was no different. An old woman with long white hair cinched in a bun and topped by a rusty-colored patch in her bangs took to the platform to reflect on what had passed since the siege of the city, the last night the Orangemen had been seen. Some of the young people there listened out of politeness for a respected Firster or hoped to learn a little more about beings who’d disappeared years before they were born, others because it was just too fine an autumn day to be anywhere but in that sun on that broad field of bright grass. But no matter how young or old they were, everyone in the audience knew the story. Petra Giordano had told her version of it often enough.

  “Only a fallen man can rise again. Only a civilization utterly destroyed can be remade. So it is with mankind today,” she intoned.

  Petra moved around the platform with quick and dramatic steps, trying to draw the eyes and attentions of as many of her listeners as she could. Some even met her gaze.

  “Beloved brothers and sisters, what I’ve told you is not a fantasy written to satisfy whims or to fulfill prophecy. It is not a product of malicious deceit, is not legend to entertain or propaganda to convert, but is rather the cumulative truth that comes from the corroborated questioning of eyewitnesses. I was one of those eyewitnesses. It was seen, and it was lived. It is now as much a part of the makeup of the human race as the thousands of years of destruction that came before it.”

  A slim sixteen-year-old boy with dirty-blond hair stirred uneasily in his spot on the grass. He had been restless ever since joining his friends in the square and discovering that Petra would be one of the day’s speakers. His grandmother’s assurances had often done more to stir J. J. Giordano’s doubts than to ease them.

  “The wall fell. The dead rose. Peace poured forth.” Petra’s lined face was aglow with affirmation and looked almost youthful. “Brothers and sisters, we are loved. We know it now, just as we now know how love has changed the fate of mankind. It permeates the universe. It is as quantifiable and as tangible as water and just as needed for the body. And it always has been—we’ve just been too angry or envious or selfish to see it. Whatever you believe, however you interpret these events, know this: you are loved without condition.”

  J. J. stood and slipped between picnic blankets and away from his friends. He didn’t turn back to see if his grandmother watched him leave. He hoped she had, just as he hoped his friends would think he was gutsy to do so. Loved without condition? What did that even mean? What could possibly have changed all that much?

  J. J. had no destination in mind, only a place to leave behind. He had nothing to study, no chores to do, but he didn’t want to go home. Instead he walked toward the fields and orchards near what had once been Gate Eight. As he approached it, a solitary stone portal standing like a watchman against the hard-blue sky, he found it difficult to imagine that an enormous wall had once curved all the way around the city. It was easy to see where it had been—lots of its stonework still lay in neatened piles circling New Philadelphia—but it was impossible for him to picture everyone cowering behind it, afraid of everything and everyone. On that last night with the Orangemen, the earthquake had taken that ridiculous wall down clean but had left the old city more or less intact.

  He was glad it had. The idea of living cooped up behind it seemed just crazy. He climbed over some of the fallen stonework instead of going straight through the gates into the fields. He liked wild growing things. And there, among these tumbledown slabs, he had found all sorts of wildflowers and crabgrass and even the young shoots of trees. Life came up through almost anything, given a chance. In a hundred years or a thousand, all this debris would be the bed of a new little wilderness, if only everyone would let it alone and stop trying to figure out what to do with it.

  He often wished his grandmother would let things alone. How many nights had he listened to her interrogate his mother about what had happened that night? He knew she wanted to know how her son, his father, had died. She needed to make sense of his death. But try as he might, he couldn’t understand his mother’s patience with that old lady.

  The world was at peace . . . and maybe that was a big thing. He didn’t know. He hadn’t known it any other way. They had opened the gates and let the exiles back in. Before long those living in the wilderness came to meet them. Many of them had stayed, and many of New Philadelphia’s citizens had gone to live with the Lewis family and their people out there. He had no idea what it was like to starve, but he figured it might make people do some pretty crazy things—even make peace with their worst enemies to make sure no one starved. But brotherly love and a new humanity on a new Earth? He didn’t see it. People still held grudges. People still tried to get the better end of a deal. They still got stomach bugs and broken bones and suffered in childbirth—although many old-timers claimed all of this happened a lot less than it used to. And nobody seemed to be thinking of brotherly love as they hushed up around him whenever they had just been whispering about his mother.

  J. J. hiked out just past the orchards by following the main river that ran through the outskirts of New Philadelphia. The dwellings there, built mostly by those who had come in from the wilderness, weren’t part of the city proper but weren’t a suburb either. He liked these homes a lot. They were more a part of the natural world than any dwelling yet devised by human beings. Their roofs were covered with vegetation, their walls with flowering vines and ivy. They made the old stone city with its geometric lines and curves look odd, almost abnormal, to the human eye. For J. J., these outlying homes suggested that the world of man wasn’t meant to be built.

  A silhouette of a man emerged from the direction of the old cemetery. He came from behind a tree about a hundred yards off and began to approach. J. J. found it strange that he didn’t even raise his hand in greeting. His heart leapt, not knowing who he was or what he wanted.

  Yet he had the odd sensation that he knew him. As the man stepped out of the sun’s glare, J. J. saw that he definitely wasn’t any man he knew; in fact, he wasn’t a man at all, just a boy about his own age. His face was soft, his hair dark and long and wavy and hanging over his eyes. Even after seeing and not recognizing his face, J. J. still felt as if he knew him, so much so that he thought his merry eyes seemed somehow wrong, not meant for his face. It was an irrational thought but there just the same.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi,” J. J. answered. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m afraid you don’t. I haven’t lived near here in a long time.”

  “Are you one of the others?”

  His lips curled into a playful smile. “There are no others anymore.”

  J. J. laughed. “Come on. You know what I mean. The people from the wilderness.”

  “No, I’m not. As I said, I’m of the city.”

  “Why’re you wandering out here?”

  His smile never left his face. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Well,” J. J. said, tensing now, “I asked you first.”

  “I’ve only just arrived. I was out here in the groves thinking about someone I’d very much like to visit.”

  “So why don’t you go see them?”

  “It’s been a while. A long time.”

  “Maybe I know who you’re looking for. What’s the name?”

  “Kendra McQueen.”

  “Kendra—” A surprised laugh popped out of J. J. “That’s my mother! You know her?”

  He nodded, hands in his pants pockets. “I did. A long time ago.”

  J. J. was about to ask him how but stopped. “Sir,” he said, not knowing why he was addressing someone his age like that, “what’s your name?”
>
  He looked at J. J. with those mirthful eyes. “Alex Raymond.”

  “Alex Raymond.” J. J. shook his head. “No, really. Who are you?”

  “Why are you getting upset?”

  “You goddamn know why,” J. J. said, grabbing him by the front of his sky-blue shirt. “Somebody put you up to this. Who was it, you son of a bitch?”

  “No one,” he answered without anger. “I assure you. I mean you no harm, nor your mother. Though I would appreciate it if you could direct me to her.”

  J. J. looked all along the boy’s face without letting go. A gentle hand took hold of his right wrist.

  “What’s your name, friend?”

  He felt his grip slacken. “Jacob John Giordano. Everyone just calls me J. J.”

  “J. J. it is, then. Would you please take me to see your mother? I’ve got a message for her.”

  “What message?”

  “I’m afraid I have to tell her first.”

  “She’s not big on surprises.”

  He grinned again, then laughed. “Believe me, I know.”

  An hour later they found his mother inside the quad of what had been the old barracks. It was near the harvesting season, and she was giving a lecture to some of the older children about various techniques. They stood toward the back under some poplar trees that lined the edge of the yard and listened to her for a bit.

  J. J. studied his mother. She was just past her thirty-seventh birthday. Her hair was still almost all black. Her body was strong and thin from her farmwork. Her blue eyes had around them the creases that come from spending a lot of time squinting in the sun, but they were bright and playful, even as she talked about mundane topics like crop rotations. After a few minutes J. J. saw that she had spotted him from the corner of her eye as she was speaking. Her gaze then rested on the young man standing next to him. Her eyes widened for just a second; then she smiled back, almost mischievously.

  “Class dismissed. We’ll pick up again after midday meal tomorrow.”