“Which leaves us where?”
She reached over and tossed him a blanket. “Which leaves us sleeping under the stars. God does work in mysterious ways, you know. We can decide in the morning.”
Derek was content to push off the decision for the morrow. Too much had happened already today. A good night’s sleep would allow his subconscious to make sense of it all and find a plan.
“May God watch over us and keep us safe through the night,” Maria prayed aloud.
Not “me,” “us.”
As a member of the Conversion Forces, Derek should have been insulted, even outraged, by this mal effort to undermine his world view. But he was not. If, indeed, he had no control over his life, he kind of liked the idea that someone, somewhere was watching over it—maybe even making sense of the whole sorry mess. He stared at the starry lights in the heavens and wondered if that could truly be.
* * * * *
Unnoticed by Derek, or even Maria, one of the lights in the night sky above flared minutely and then blinked out, like many of its brothers had before it. It would never watch or speak or listen again.
Hank and Ali noticed the passing of the light, but neither one commented on it to the other. They had seen other such lights disappear, as if by the flick of a switch, before. They knew that they would see it again. The world was returning to a dark age and there was nothing that they could do to stop it.
Still, they scurried in the increasing darkness, gathering what they could before things progressed to the point that no more could be gathered. They continued to work, silent as the remaining stars.
* * * * *
Maria slept well.
It was the same cold ground she had slept on many a night and the same cruel world greeted her in the morning when she awoke, but, somehow, knowing that she was safe—even if just for one night—deepened her sleep and allowed her pleasant dreams.
She awoke with the sun shining in her face, but with a pleasant breeze cooling it and playing lazily with loose strands of hair. A cup of cool water and a plate of small potatoes scrounged from Kyle’s cabin was set near her for breakfast. She stretched and rolled from her side to her back and saw Derek sitting on the other side of her sipping his own cup of water. An empty plate sat on the ground near him.
“You have to shoot me,” he said.
That certainly took the sheen off the morning. Her mind reeled in confusion.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve been thinking it through. Neither one of us wants to kill the other. I won’t convert you and you can’t risk leaving me alive. That leaves very few choices.”
She turned her conscious mind to the task. “I don’t understand why that means I should shoot you.” She hesitated to go on . . . to suggest what had occurred to her in her musings as she fell asleep the night before, because to her it would be anathema—a mortal sin, perhaps worse. But she was not him and she had to respect his beliefs—or his non-beliefs—as long as he didn’t try to impose them on her, so she made the suggestion. “Couldn’t you just convert yourself?”
He shook his head. “There’s two problems with that. They say that techs at the conversion processing facilities have a way to check as to whether a ConFoe conversion that is submitted is an unauthorized voluntary conversion. I don’t know how they do it—whether the process checks for body damage to repair or they implanted something during training or what. But they threaten to flush any canister with a voluntary ConFoe conversion that occurs before the end of the grunt’s tour.”
“I couldn’t . . . wouldn’t . . . ask you to risk that.”
“You know, as bad as life has become in the ConFoes, I might even risk it, but there’s more. They also threaten to reverse your sign-in bonus.”
She looked at him curiously; her nose wrinkling and her brow furrowing as she cocked her head slightly to one side like a puppy. “You’d risk your immortal soul, but not your paycheck?”
Derek smiled broadly and let out a sudden exhale that was almost a laugh. “The enlistment bonus consists of credits used to make physical alterations during the conversion process.”
So she had been right in her assumption the previous day. She didn’t know what to say. She looked him over. Less than handsome and showing a bit of wear and tear, but overall not a bad specimen. He noticed her appraisal and blushed slightly.
“Does your family have shortcomings . . .” He blushed even brighter. “. . . er . . . physical deformities of which I am unaware?” she asked.
Derek shook his head, still smiling, but his eyes betraying a wistfulness she had not seen before. “Nothing like that. They used them for Katy, my sister. She is . . . was . . . paraplegic. No matter what happens to me, I wouldn’t want her to be . . . crippled . . . again.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, the world was once more a sad and dangerous place, devoid of innocence. “They would do that?” It seemed unbelievably cruel, but then the ConFoes had refined cruelty to unfathomable depths.
“I don’t know. They might. Whether I live to see her on Alpha Two or not, I . . . well, I just need to know that she is and always will be . . . whole . . . there.”
Maria understood his meaning, even if she could never understand how someone could hope to be whole while denying the existence of the soul, but she stood mute on that theological point for now.
“There’s also a practical problem. If I were to convert here, my canister might not ever make it to the processing facility. I could be between worlds forever.”
“In limbo.”
“In what?”
“Limbo.” Her voice took on just a slight professorial tone. “It’s what we call the place between worlds, between life on earth and heaven. It’s a sad place—no one wants to be there for long.”
“So, really, when you were talking to Kyle before about the virtual worlds—that’s what they are to you, limbo.”
She had never thought of it that way, but Derek had a point. She nodded slightly. “No one wants to be there for long.”
Now Derek shook his head, smiling. “Certainly not for eternity.” He gave a small grunt. “And eternity is our biggest selling point.”
Maria chewed a potato and thought a bit.
* * * * *
Derek again watched her eat, distracted from his plans for a moment by the simple pleasure of her presence. But the moment passed and reality intruded once again.
“So, how does my shooting you help this in any way?” she asked.
“I don’t want you to shoot me now, not here,” Derek said, pointing to himself, then realizing that he was pointing to his own chest. “Er . . . or any place vital.”
“Then where?”
“A leg, my leg would be okay.” Derek had lived with a paraplegic in the real world. He could handle being crippled in this world or the next if he had to.
“Yeah, yeah, I figured that part out already. You said not now, not here. I suspect you originally meant not this geographic location. So where, when?”
Derek’s military training kicked in. He liked Maria. He trusted her with his life, but he would not trust her with the lives of others. After all, she was the enemy. She was a mal.
“I can’t tell you that, you understand. Not yet. Let’s just say far from here, where I can be ‘rescued,’ but you can still be safe.”
He could tell from her expression that Maria was unhappy with his response, but understood. He suspected she especially liked the part about far from here. If something went wrong—if he died or she died or they ran into others of his kind, they would not associate them with this geography. And her duty to her home—he guessed from her earlier clearly regretted comment that they called it Sanctuary—was to move him far away from this place.
Maria began to gather up her things and tuck them into the backpack nearby. “Then I guess we’re going on a road trip.”
Derek grimaced. “More like a very, very long walk.”
She stopped, puzzled. “We’re not taking Kyle’s truck?”
“I looked around a bit, while you were still sleeping. I couldn’t find Kyle’s truck.”
Maria snorted in mock derision. “Silly boy. It’s obviously on the other side of the pass.”
Derek looked at her incredulously. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Look around. Sure, there’s not any deadfall among the trees—he’s cleaned that up pretty regular—but there’s plenty of these scrawny, twisted little trees and nary a stump in sight.”
Derek’s look had morphed from incredulity to utter confusion.
She continued. “The man’s been living here decades, but hasn’t cut any firewood here. Probably cuts it on the other side of the pass. It maintains the pristine view, after all. Then, he loads it up in the truck and hauls it home whenever the load is full.”
“Why not just drive it home every day?”
“The thing’s undoubtedly ancient. Probably doesn’t want to wear it out any faster than he has to. May take quite a while to charge up on the solar panels at this point, too.” Maria stood and shouldered on her backpack.
Derek did the same. As he did, his eye caught sight of the wrecked cabin in the background.
“Should we, you know, bury the bodies?”
Maria frowned. “Like I said, I’m not going back in there.” She looked about at the surroundings for a moment. “Besides, it would be a lot of work and there’s no real reason to. If anyone finds them before the animals get ‘em, they’ll just think your squad took out the old man in a fight and go on about their business. I doubt they’ll be able to tell if all this occurred before or after the other . . . incident . . . on the highway.”
Derek concurred. “That works for me.”
Maria started to walk, then turned back to Derek. “I would like to say a few words for Kyle.” She paused. “But I’d like to wait until we can look back at the cabin, from a distance.”
Derek understood. The personalized violence of the place still troubled her. It was better to put some distance between them and it. “Sure.”
Maria paused again, looking at the ground, rather than turning back to her walking. Finally she spoke. “I don’t plan to say any words for . . . him.” She gestured with her head toward the cabin. “You know, Manning.” Derek had told her the ConFoe’s name when they had talked last night before they fell asleep exhausted. Somehow it had been important to her to know his name.
Derek snorted. “Fine by me. The only reason I could even dream of to say words over that bastard is that it would piss off the little prick.”
Maria gave a nod and headed out the driveway and up the forgotten road to the top of the pass.
As they walked, Derek could see that Maria had been right. The ill-kept road did show signs of some vehicular traffic uphill from the driveway, where it had shown none on the stretch he had walked as he approached the cabin. He hadn’t noticed the difference when he passed this way a couple nights before, when he had trekked uphill before circling back on the cabin, but it had been dark and he hadn’t been looking.
They picked up Wires’ bulky scanner where Derek had ditched it partway up the hill. Maria looked at the equipment with undisguised contempt and Derek had to admit that the scanner was a bother to carry. But there was the promise of a truck over the saddle of the pass and Derek had carried . . . was carrying . . . heavier burdens than this.
After all, the ConFoe training manual told him that every ConFoe soldier carried the fate of the world, all worlds.
It was a lot to carry.
Chapter 14
Hiking with Maria was a whole lot more pleasant for Derek than any mission with the ConFoes had ever been. Even struggling through the steeper sections of the climb was more pleasurable with Maria’s derriere as his focal point than strolling through a flat, shaded meadow behind his squad-mates’ sorry asses.
He thought, too, that it was more than the fact that he hadn’t seen a woman—certainly not a desirable woman—in some time. Maria was an impressive woman. Certainly she was an excellent soldier. It was no wonder that she had managed to track him to Kyle’s. And her smile, that was genuine, more genuine than anything you ever saw in the “adult” virtual reality programs, back when he had still had access to them during training. Such things weren’t allowed on missions.
It wasn’t that the pornographic vids were too much of a distraction, so much as the Conversion Forces liked to have the men testosterone laden and frustrated when out on patrol. It put them on edge. It revved them up and made them more effective.
Derek’s musings were interrupted by a loose rock skittering into his chest as it bounded from the scree Maria was moving through above him.
She heard his “oomph” of surprise and turned back to him.
“If you kept your eyes on something besides my ass, you might have seen that coming,” she said jokingly.
“If I kept my eyes on something else, I might have minded the pain when it hit.”
They continued on, enjoying the hike, their minds churning in an attempt to imagine a world where they would not be enemies.
* * * * *
They crested the pass in the late morning, surrounded by banks of melting snow amidst the rocks. Maria proved her skills yet again by locating Kyle’s refrigerator, a cache of elk meat stowed in the hollow of a massive chunk of dense snow and ice.
“How is it that the bears haven’t gotten this?” wondered Derek aloud as they built a small fire and feasted on the find.
“They’re probably at lower elevations by the time he stashes this stuff away in the late spring,” replied the wilderness-savvy Maria. “Besides, not that many bears left. Even with the ‘decline’ in human population, they haven’t come back much. The ConFoe patrols kill ‘em for sport when they see them, don’t they?”
She was right, of course. The ConFoes killed everything that moved if they had a weapon handy. All that pent-up testosterone. Manning had even used an armor piercing shell on one black bear, Derek remembered sickly—almost losing the taste for his delicious lunch, if not the lunch itself.
“Yeah, they . . . we do.”
She looked at him sternly. “They do. I’ll bet you never did.”
Derek smiled weakly, his appetite returning. She was right, again, of course. “Thanks. Thanks for . . . knowing that.”
Maria also turned back to her meal with vigor. “If we can, we’ll stop back here and pack a bit of meat and ice into the truck. At least we’ll have meals for a few days of our journey.”
“Yep.”
“Wherever we’re going.”
It still wasn’t time to tell her, even though he wanted to trust her and knew she was fishing for information.
“It’ll be at least that long,” was all he would say for now.
Maria had also been right about Kyle’s forestry habits. Many of the scrubby trees on this side of the pass had clearly been harvested, some recently, others some time ago. Small ones were replacing those cut, but it would be years before the new growth would be worth cutting. The old man had avoided clear-cutting, probably because of good forestry management habits, rather than a desire to mask his presence from foes he had never imagined, so it took a bit of time to locate the truck near his latest cuttings, but eventually they did.
The truck was big old SolarFord two-ton, two-seater pick-up from before ConFoe times. Accordingly, instead of guzzling scarce, dirty fuel, like the ConFoe vehicles now did, it was covered with dull black photovoltaic cells that soaked up the sunlight and charged up a bank of batteries located in an internal compartment between the cab and the bed of the truck. The tires were oversized snow tires, beginning to show wear, but still capable of throwing mud and gravel up behind. The bed was partially filled with cut firewood, which was covered by a black tarp to keep the wood dry.
Derek dropped the tailgate and clambered into the bed. “I’ll unload the wood.”
“Keep the tarp and leave some of the wood.”
“The extra weight will cut down on ou
r range,” Derek replied.
“I don’t know how far we need to go,” countered Maria innocently.
“We’ll need some range,” said Derek simply.
Maria sighed softly with exasperation. “Then whether we take some wood depends on how sunny you expect it to be where we’re going and whether you want someplace to hide your ‘equipment’ in case someone takes a peek under the tarp,” she said, gesturing toward Wire’s scanner with obvious distaste.
Derek thought about it for a minute. “I’ll leave enough wood to hide the scanner.” With that, he set about his work.
* * * * *
In the meantime, Maria checked out the cab of the truck. The glove compartment actually contained gloves, of all things: a pair of leather work gloves, well-worn, especially where the finger joints fit into the handle of the ripsaw she found behind the seats. She also found wrenches, pliers, and fuses that could be used to repair the truck if needed. Finally, the glove box contained several road maps: one for Colorado; one for the western United States; one for hiking trails in the eastern Rockies; and, strangely, one for Wisconsin. Maybe Kyle or Henrietta was from there and used to visit at some point in the distant past. She pocketed the trail map—it might be useful to the Believers if . . . when . . . she returned to them. The others she left alone.
The driver’s seat was in pretty bad shape—well worn and stained with dirt and sweat from years and years of use. The stuffing poked out from the seat and front edge of the cushion. The passenger seat, on the other hand, was in much better condition. But then, it hadn’t seen a passenger in a long time.
Maria left the cab and checked under the hood. Mechanical things weren’t really her specialty, but the old solar equipment was prized among the Believers, so she knew a bit. As far as she could tell, everything was in order.
Finally, she shut the hood and came around back to the growing pile of wood off the end of the bed. Without a word, she began picking up logs and chucking them various directions into the scrub and trees.
* * * * *
Derek stopped his methodical transfer of logs from the truck to the ground.
Forced Conversion Page 13