Forced Conversion

by Donald J. Bingle

  A small line drawing of a fish symbol in ballpoint pen convinced her that she had interpreted the Lieutenant’s message correctly and that her midnight ride had not been in vain. She looked at the map carefully and noticed another pen mark indicating the south side of the Festival’s jousting field, as well as an arrow suggesting she move around the outside of the grounds to get there. Her rejuvenated spirits, as well as the fast-approaching end to the night, spurred her to the meeting point with relative alacrity. She took the map with her, not just for guidance, but to remove it from its place of understated prominence. The map and its markings clearly suggested to her that the Lieutenant was indeed a prisoner and it would not do for her evil captor to know that the Lieutenant had had assistance in making her escape.

  * * * * *

  Derek awoke before dawn.

  Without bothering to look for Maria, he immediately shuffled off to the privies, then washed up with some rain-barrel water. Next, he set about cooking up the remains of the elk meat, which had been stashed in snow in the back of the SolarFord. It was more meat than they could possibly eat, but the packed snow had melted faster in the bed of the pick-up than they had imagined it would and he knew the truck would be in the bright sun all day. It was better to cook the meat before it spoiled.

  He put his cares and plans aside and focused his mind on the fire and the grilling. He spent a few minutes gathering deadfall from the trees interspersed among the once brightly-colored shops and stalls, rather than using the concealing logs in the truck or tearing up any of the planking from the structures themselves. It wasn’t that he cared about this place or these storefronts, it was just that wood used for building tended to be painted or treated and the tainted smoke would spoil the natural savor of the meat.

  The fire started up quickly and he stoked it with thick, dead branches to efficiently raise the temperature and produce good coals for the grilling. While waiting for the coals to be just right, he took a knife he had gotten at Kyle’s place and began to prepare the meat—butchering it on the smithy’s huge, immovable iron anvil, which he first cleaned off with a bucket of rainwater and a little elbow grease. The first rays of the dawn assisted both his cleaning and his cutting efforts.

  Roasting meat last night on hand-held sticks had been alright, but what he really needed was a decent grill to put over the fire.

  “Yo,” he called out toward the “Sky Chair” booth. He had recommended the chairs to Maria when he woke her for her watch. He could see several of the once vividly-colored canvas chairs swaying gently on the morning breeze. The canvas was fading and deteriorating from the elements, but the black plastic rope on which the fabric and wooden chairs hung was still shiny and unaffected by the elements.

  The two most enduring things mankind had created were the computers that held their virtual future and plastic. And, although his job was to assure that the virtual future was eternal, if he had to bet, he would bet that all the mundane plastic crap that had been molded and extruded and mass-produced and that now blanketed the earth in the form of fast-food cups and Frisbees and lawn chairs and garbage cans and car bumpers would last longer. Plastic, that was surely eternal. He would fetch some of that rope before they left.

  The lack of a response from Maria to his call broke through the trivial meanderings of his mind and brought his attention back to the moment, to the situation at hand.

  “Hey, Maria,” he called somewhat louder, looking up and down the wide, grassy aisle between the mock-medieval businesses.

  Where could she be?

  * * * * *

  Kelly cursed, to her chagrin, when the first rays of light crept over the eastern plains to betray her stealthy approach to the jousting field. The nights were short in the summer and she had lost too much time replacing her bike and finding the message at the “Will Call” booth. She knew she was already late, but the revealing light forced her to move even more carefully, more slowly in approaching her target. Not only that, but the stupid tourist map of the park had no discernable scale, so she was a bit unsure how far to circumnavigate around the grounds, before cutting in to her critical rendezvous with the Lieutenant. Still, she could not be reckless—for all she knew this place was a ConFoe staging area. It would do no good for them both to be prisoners of these treacherous, unholy fiends.

  Finally, she cut through a brushy thicket of bushes and trees toward the park, itself, surrounded by wooden stockade fence. She scuttled through a hole in the fence and looked about. The meager flutterings of a tattered banner tangled and twisted around a pole—a pale reflection of the gaily-colored pennants pictured on the map—caught her attention and verified her position. The jousting grounds lay below her in a shallow hollow, overgrown with weeds nourished by the natural fertilizer they had received long ago. She saw no movement, so moved somewhat more quickly toward the spot indicated on her map.

  The rendezvous and escape would have to occur quickly—the sun was rising inexorably and the Lieutenant’s captor might take her soon into firmer custody. She raced as quickly as she dared toward the appointed spot and braved a loud “pssssst” toward the nearby stables as she approached.

  * * * * *

  “I’m over here,” said Maria quietly to her traveling companion, strolling from behind a post, one of the park maps partially open in her hands. “I was just looking about a bit.”

  “Yeah, well, breakfast is in the works,” replied Derek with an obvious tone of relief. “I think I remember the ticket booths or whatever at the entrance having barred openings, didn’t they?”

  “I guess,” she replied, her mind racing to determine whether this was yet another test, whether he knew she had been to that place during the night. “What about it?”

  “If you can get one off, they’d make a great grill for the meat. See what you can do, will you? I’ll finish cutting this stuff up in the meantime.”

  “Sure,” she said, turning down the lane towards the entrance with relief. She had dared not stay far from the smithy and the SolarFord as dawn approached. She had almost been away too long as it was. The bicycle scout had never arrived, maybe never even received or understood her hurried message. She would probably never know. She headed back to the entranceway, tucking a faire map and the pen hidden within its folds back into her pocket.

  * * * * *

  No one answered Kelly’s obvious signal. No one stepped out of the shadows. She looked quickly about the place, her eyes darting from one spot to another, confirming her location, checking for threats, searching desperately for the Lieutenant, and assessing each thing, each tiny item, to determine whether it might be a clue, in case this might be some kind of warped scavenger hunt or dangerous road rally—each clue leading only to another clue, another place, another rendezvous.

  There, there, leaning up against the center post for the railing on this side of the jousting field was another park map, one corner buried into the loose dirt to keep it from blowing away. She dove for it in the now bright sunlight, her eyes darting through its contents, seizing the information contained in it as quickly as she could.

  * * * * *

  The first thing Maria noticed as she arrived at the ticket booths was that no map fluttered from the wooden box at the “Will Call” booth. She walked casually toward the booth, as if assessing whether this was the best set of bars to remove for Derek’s grill. She did not see the map she had left, even on the ground nearby. She, however, did see tracks in the gravel dust that coated the hard, bare earth which had been trampled and compressed by heavy traffic in the years gone by. Her unknown contact was here and had received her message.

  She looked up from the dirt and dust at the barred window of the booth itself. The bars were hinged to swing open into the booth. She reached between the bars to turn the latch, releasing the left-hand side of the grate, then used a few upward thrusts with a fist-sized rock to loose the hinge-pins on the right-hand side. The barred grate of metal clanged noisily as it fell inside the booth, but Maria quic
kly retrieved it by kicking in the door on the side of the booth and grabbing the grate off the worn wooden floor.

  Emerging back into the sunlight, she headed toward the SolarFord inside the Festival grounds, saying loudly, “Well, I’d better hurry up and get this back to Derek. He’s waiting for it.” She hoped it would sound as if she were talking to herself and it would dissuade her fellow Believer, who might well be listening nearby, from contacting her recklessly.

  But even as she spoke it, she realized it didn’t at all sound like she was talking to herself. It sounded stilted and contrived and obvious.

  Fortunately, no one was listening.

  * * * * *

  Unfortunately, no one was listening. For the first time in more than half a century, no one had listened. The dawn broke over the high desert plain, quickly outshining even the brightest stars, and silently bestowed upon the earth another helping of warmth and light and power. The magnitude of the sun’s voice would, as always, drown out any siren song of the lesser lights, feeble and far, far away, but today it didn’t matter, because mankind had stopped listening.

  Hank and Ali finished their journals and their organizing the evening before and had spent the night sitting on a blanket, leaning up against the inert mechanism of their nemesis, number eight, and watching the night sky. Ali had brought an old iPod with a dual set of earpieces and they had listened this night to ancient MP3s of classical music while they counted shooting stars and each talked about where they would go from here.

  The music was wondrous and melodic and inspiring, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

  * * * * *

  A reddish trickle flowed down the corner of Derek’s smiling mouth; he liked his steak a bit rarer than Maria favored. The two gorged themselves to bursting, then wrapped up most of the cooked remains in one of the ubiquitous Festival maps. They would finish that off later in the day in the truck.

  “Time to mount up and move out,” said Derek after wiping his mouth with his sleeve. He leaned forward to push the leftovers they had not wrapped up—more than they could eat before it turned bad—into the coals of the fireplace.

  Maria reached forward with her hand and stopped him. “Leave it,” she said simply. He looked at her in mild confusion. “The animals will get it one place or the other,” she continued smoothly. “Why dirty it up for them?”

  Derek smiled broadly and shook his head in wonderment. Only a mal would worry about the quality of life of an unknown forest critter on a soon-to-be uninhabited planet. But, all the same, he stopped and leaned back instead.

  “You’re not one of them nature freaks, are you?” he said with a minor chuckle.

  Maria looked at him, then looked down at the small pile of steak bones next to her. “I think even a ConFoe could figure out I’m not exactly a vegetarian.”

  Derek’s brow creased momentarily. “So, you’ll kill ‘em and cook ‘em, but you want them to have a nice time before you do?”

  “God gave us dominion over the earth and its creatures. They exist for our benefit. It’s just . . .” She stopped, embarrassed.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s just that if you have some respect for lower life forms, it makes it easier to respect your fellow man, even if you don’t much care for him on a personal level.”

  Derek would never have thought of it that way on his own, but she had a point. The ConFoes had no respect for animal life or nature in general. They killed anything that moved, destroyed anything in their path, and burned houses and forests with pyromaniacal glee. Their treatment was much the same for mals, any mals. The ConFoes couldn’t respect them and do what they had to do. That’s why the instructors in training class always told you to move quickly and efficiently to orient and then kill or convert a captured mal. If you talked to them too long, if you became friends, if you began to respect them, you wouldn’t be able to do what had to be done.

  Isn’t that what had happened to him?

  He didn’t want to think about, much less talk about it, any more. It would either confuse or depress him.

  “Fine,” he said, getting up and moving towards the truck with what little remained to be packed. “Leave it for whatever might be around.”

  “Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  Derek turned back to look at Maria, as she gathered her loose items to carry to the truck, her eyes avoiding him.

  “I’m . . . I’m not mad. It’s just that . . . whether you’re nice or not nice to whatever critter comes along here next . . . it isn’t going to make a bit of difference to what happens to either one of us in the end.” He turned back toward the truck and walked slowly away, looking down and shaking his head slowly.

  “God works in mysterious ways,” Maria muttered to herself and she followed him and clambered aboard the SolarFord. The moment she slammed her door shut, the truck lurched forward and out of this place of olden times and values long past and barely half-remembered.

  * * * * *

  The slamming car door wrenched Kelly away from her reading.

  Immediately upon finding a detailed message on the map near the jousting field, she had set about reading it, as any messenger would. First she scanned it quickly, both for any further instructions or clues as to a more comprehensive communication or rendezvous and for broad content. The quick scan was protection against the fear that at any moment the precious information would be, could be, taken from her and she would only have those nuggets of information she had been able to rapidly imprint upon her own mind.

  The Lieutenant had obviously known what type of person would be reading this, had perhaps even once herself performed or been trained to perform the type of intelligence and messaging tasks that Kelly was now assigned. In writing, the Lieutenant had also protected against interruption, putting the most critical information in brief up front and only getting to the details and the less important later on in the missive as time allowed. The most important items were quite clear from the beginning of the surprisingly lengthy and detailed writings.

  “NEVER GO INTO DENVER: RADIOACTIVE,” it read. “DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RESCUE ME OR ATTACK COMPANION.”

  The rest of the paper contained the whole story—the death of the ConFoe squad, the confrontation at Kyle’s cabin, the Lieutenant’s efforts to glean intelligence and lure the remaining ConFoe far, far away before shooting him (although how the Lieutenant intended to manage that piece of military action, the message gave no clue), the ConFoe’s justification for the use of lethal force, the permanent sterilization of the major urban centers with high-yield radioactive waste from Yucca Mountain, and the Lieutenant’s ultimate plan to return alone with the SolarFord.

  Kelly did not quite understand what else the Lieutenant hoped to find out from the ConFoe—the location of their regional base, perhaps?—and why she just hadn’t killed him during the night. Obviously, the Lieutenant had not been tied up or anything—else she would not have been able to leave the clues and information she had. Kelly screwed up her face momentarily, perplexed by the whole situation. All that was for others to figure out. Her job was to get the information to Sanctuary.

  She heard the crunch of the SolarFord’s tires on gravel as it departed the Festival grounds, though it was out of sight from her here at the jousting field. She quickly decided to make her way back to the mountain bike by going through the Festival grounds and out the entrance, just in case the Lieutenant had left any further information for her.

  When she came to the smithy, she found a platter full of cooked meat awaiting her. The sign of the fish scrawled in the dirt nearby persuaded her that it was not a trap, that the meat was safe to eat. There was also an arrow in the dirt pointing to a nearby rain barrel full of clean water.

  Kelly prayed, then ate and drank, preparing herself for the long journey ahead. Before leaving she scuffed over the signs in the dirt and remembered to fill her plastic water bottle. But as she did all this, her mind reeled in wonder. How did the Lieutenant, a ca
ptive of the ConFoes, manage to leave her food and drink under the very nose of her enemy?

  It was like manna from heaven.

  “God works in mysterious ways,” she said to herself as she gorged quickly on the still warm, red meat. Except for the time it took to eat and the few minutes she took to scratch with elk blood and a finely-sharpened stick on a clear spot on the map a brief report of her own activities, Kelly did not rest. Instead, she headed back to the mountain bike and doggedly pushed off for the long journey back to Sanctuary before it was emptied for the planned attack. Though she was no longer hungry or thirsty, she was tired and, this time, the last part of the trip would be all uphill.

  Chapter 17

  Given her long night and the surfeit of food, Maria fell asleep less than a half-hour outside of Larkspur, as the SolarFord hummed steadily onward, soaking up the sun’s power as quickly as it expended it.

  Derek cut to the east for a bit, ducking under I-25 and picking up the flat, straight ranching roads of the plains. He stuck to these side roads, methodically choosing to go south at every opportunity and, when that was denied him, heading east enough to avoid the mountains as they traveled. Cheyenne Mountain, in particular, down by Colorado Springs, had once hosted NORAD, the United States government’s air defense command center, and he couldn’t be sure that the nuclear-hardened facility didn’t still sport a few ConFoes controlling satellites or ready to protect earth from alien invaders or somesuch. In any event, there was no reason to go closer than necessary to the place.

  Other than that tactical decision, his route did not bear much thought and the road certainly did not require his full attention. He occupied his mind, instead, with the mechanics of his plan to fool the ConFoes into allowing him to convert before the end of his tour, while still giving Maria an opportunity to escape.

  Right now they were headed towards the ConFoes’ southwestern headquarters near Phoenix, Arizona. The high proportion of elderly residents in Phoenix had made it one of the earlier ghost towns in the early days of conversion. A sizeable ConFoe presence in those early days had also ensured that the relatively modern facilities were not notably scarred by riots or looting. Sure, it was hotter than blazes during the summer, but the whole city had been an early adopter of solar technology, so the ConFoes had plenty of access to power for cooling the few buildings they actually used.