by Rick Partlow
McKay stood there, his palm still frozen at shoulder-level, watching through a haze of pain and lingering rage as the bodyguard collapsed in a heap, eyes rolling back into his head, a thin trickle of blood issuing from his nose.
“Mericon.” He spun at the malediction and found himself staring into the bore of his own pistol, held in the shaking hands of Miguel Huerta. The farmer cum revolutionary had recovered from the blow to his throat and taken possession of the weapon after Jason had dropped it during the fight.
Jason was tensing for a desperate leap at the man when Huerta stiffened, an explosion of breath escaping his lips and his face twisting into a mask of agony. One hand left Jason’s weapon to feel around behind his back, and then the pistol seemed to become too heavy for his other arm. It slipped from his suddenly-nerveless fingers and struck the floor with a plastic clatter; a heartbeat later, Huerta joined it, the breath going out of him as he crashed to the ground like a felled oak. Imbedded in his spine up to the hilt was his own knife, and standing over his lifeless form was Valerie O’Keefe.
Jason just stared at her for a long moment, mesmerized by the wide-eyed, savage visage into which her face had been transformed. With her hair tangled in a spikey mess and her clothes in tatters, she brought to mind some ancient Amazon warrior just stepped through a time machine.
“Are you all right?” he asked her. She didn’t reply, staring at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. Jason staggered a step, feeling his pulse echoing in his pounding head. “We’ve got to leave,” he told Valerie, trying to penetrate the trance into which she’d fallen.
“You can’t leave me here!” Carmella Mendoza ran up to him, clutching at his arm so violently that he almost fell over. She motioned at Huerta’s body. “Their friends will come. They will kill me and my children as a lesson to the others. Do not leave us here to die!”
Jason looked her in the face, searching her eyes, curious as to the ratio of self-interest to concern for her children. In the end, he found it didn’t matter; either way, he couldn’t fault her.
“All right.” He sighed, grinding the gears in his brain as he tried to plan their next move. “Get together all the clothes you’ll need, and as much water and food as you can carry, and meet us outside in fifteen minutes.” She nodded gratefully and hustled back to the kitchen to gather supplies, while Jason turned back to Valerie. “Are you okay?” he asked her again.
“I’ll be fine,” she told him quietly, making a futile effort to straighten her ragged clothes. She looked far from fine to him; as a matter of fact, she seemed to be teetering on the brink of a complete breakdown. But he wasn’t a psychologist, and they didn’t have the luxury of therapy standing in a house full of dead bodies.
“Why don’t you go pull the rover around next to their vehicle,” he suggested. “We can decide which one we’re going to take and take the fuel from the one we leave behind.”
She stepped over Huerta’s body like it wasn’t there, and headed for the door.
“Wait a second,” he said, holding up a hand. Bending down, he retrieved his pistol and handed it to her. “Just in case,” he explained.
She nodded, hefting the weight of the weapon in her hand for a moment before she stepped out the open door into the night. Jason watched her go, shaking his head slightly, then went to work scavenging weapons and ammunition from the bodies. He hoped that Huerta had been correct about the Invaders pulling out—he had to pray he was, because there was no way they could stay in the Wastes now. Carmella had been right about that: Huerta had been the leader of the revolutionary movement, and he wasn’t without friends.
There was only one place they could go now, if he was right. And God help them if he was wrong.
* * *
Shannon Stark cried out sharply, snapping a punch into the face of an imaginary foe, then sweeping the motion into a downward block and following through with a spinning kick. The spin brought her around to face the gym’s mirrored wall, and her face darkened at the reflected image. She was, appropriately enough, fighting herself.
She’d tried to avoid the others in the days since the attack on the spaceport, keeping to her room and taking her meals alone. Thankfully, there wasn’t really anything for her to do: they didn’t have the forces left to permit even a basic recon, much less any kind of attack. But she’d grown claustrophobic and restless, so she’d waited till everyone else had gone to bed and ventured out to the small workout room constructed near the back of the shelter.
Maybe, she had thought, running through a few katas would help her to break out of the depression she’d sunk into since the raid. Taking a breath, she fell into a deep stance, judging her style critically in the mirror. Dressed in a halter top and loose shorts, she could see the muscles playing in her long legs as she settled into her stance, but she felt a slight tightness in her hamstrings—she hadn’t been able to work out enough the last few months.
Depending on how long it took for a rescue ship to reach them, though, she might have plenty of time to get back into shape. Or, she thought soberly, if the Invaders found them before the Fleet did, it might not make a difference.
Shaking her head clear of such speculation, she tried to empty her mind and let the flow of the kata carry her motions. Launching into the next form, she tried to snap the kicks and punches cleanly, hoping to connect with her ki and purge herself of the negative emotions that burdened her. But with every punch, she saw the faces of Gunny Lambert and Bobby Comstock and the rest of the Marines; with every kick, she experienced anew the spear of despair as the orbital missiles intercepted their vehicles. And with every labored breath, she could hear her inner voice screaming the accusation at her: “You killed them, Shannon! It was your fault!”
Rage and futility crowded the focus and concentration from her mind, and her strikes became more desperate and uncontrolled. The sequence of the kata fled her thoughts, the punches and kicks running into each other with no order or design. She lashed out sloppily at her memories and her own image, her crisp “kia”s devolving into mindless screams, the out-of-control moves throwing her dangerously off balance. Finally, in the middle of a spinning crescent kick, she lost it: her plant foot flew out from under her and she landed hard on her back. The wind went out of her with a pained grunt, and she stayed where she lay, not able to move.
When her breath came back to her, it was in quiet sobs that shook her shoulders; and the tears she’d held back for days finally poured down her cheeks. The tears racked her body, coursing through her spasmodically like electric shocks, almost painful with their violence. Eyes squeezed shut, senses deadened, she was only vaguely aware that strong arms were enfolding her, cradling her gently, hands stroking her hair.
It was minutes later before she regained enough control to pry open her tear-sealed eyes and realize that the one holding her was Nathan Tanaka. Seeing that she had stopped crying, the Japanese bodyguard produced a handkerchief from his hip pocket and offered it to her. She took the rag without comment, pulling away from him with a little embarrassment as she wiped her face.
“Thank you,” she finally said, not meeting his eyes.
“There is nothing to be ashamed of,” he told her frankly. “It is a natural thing to grieve for fallen comrades, Lieutenant Stark.”
“I’m not ashamed of my grief,” she corrected him. “I’m ashamed at my failure.”
“Why was the failure yours to bear?” Tanaka wanted to know. “Your plan was sound, and its objectives were achieved admirably. Your troops knew the risk, and they accepted it as their sworn duty. As should you.”
“And what if I can’t accept it?” she snapped, throwing down the handkerchief and springing angrily to her feet. “What if I can’t accept throwing good people—Goddamned teenagers—into a furnace like they were disposable, replaceable pieces of machinery? What would the perfect, all-knowing ninja have to say about that?”
“I am no ninja,” Tanaka replied, coming to his feet and facing her. “I am
just a man, and far from perfect.”
“Oh, sure,” she sneered cynically. “You don’t seem to be too hesitant about giving me advice. You’re the one that always knows the right thing to do, the right place to be.”
“These lessons are harshly and painfully learned.” Tanaka ran a finger unconsciously along the scar along his jawline. “Yet learned they must be for those who choose the path of the warrior, Shannon. I knew a young man once—not even a man so much as a youth, though one trained from childhood in the ways of the warrior. He was of a clan that could trace their history to feudal Japan. They had survived by evolving with the times, first marketing their skills to the Emperor, then to the yakuza, and more recently as personal bodyguards to government officials and corporate executives.
“This young man had finished his training and received his first assignment: guarding a Republic senator and his family during a trip to visit the wife’s family in Czechoslovakia. It was considered a fairly safe assignment. Yet no one had foreseen the ill feelings toward the Republic among the neo-Marxist factions in Prague. A home-made bomb was thrown from the crowd. Our young bodyguard saw it, but the Senator and his young daughter were separated by several meters from the wife, and he only had time to pull one or the other to safety.
“The young man did the right thing, what was his duty: he threw the Senator and his daughter to the ground and shielded them with his body. They survived. The wife was killed instantly.” Tanaka took a deep breath, the impassive expression on his face twisting into something darker for just a moment before the mask fell again.
“And what happened to the bodyguard?” Shannon asked, knowing the answer yet needing to hear the words from him.
“He lived, though badly injured. He pledged his life to guarding the Senator’s daughter in hopes of redeeming himself for his failure to save the little girl’s mother. And he kept one scar out of the many wounds as a constant reminder of that commitment.” His hand dropped away from the white keloid along his jaw to hang limply at his side. “And as a constant reminder of the price of failure.”
“That sounds like a lonely life for a young man,” Shannon commented softly, moving a step closer to him. All the anger and pain were gone now, replaced by something softer and warmer… something not entirely surprising or unwelcome.
“You would be surprised what a man can adjust to over time,” he replied evenly.
“Just what kind of a name is Nathan Tanaka?” Shannon wondered. “For the son of such a traditional Japanese clan, ‘Nathan’ seems awfully untraditional.”
“My father, Heideko Tanaka,” Nathan explained, a nostalgic smile playing across his face, “met and married an American girl while he was on assignment guarding a senator from Georgia. She was a staunch Southerner, and insisted that if I was to be raised in the ways of the clan, that she at least have a say in my name. So, my birth certificate reads: ‘Nathan Bedford Forrest Tanaka,’ if you can believe it.”
“I love it.” She laughed, a sound filled with more joie de vivre than she’d felt in a week. “She sounds like a strong-willed woman.”
“Oh, she is.” Nathan agreed. “She is a redhead like you.”
“Mother,” Shannon said, giving the word an Irish lilt, “said that all redheads shared the same two weaknesses. The first is a bad temper.” She traced the fingers of her left hand gently over Nathan’s scar.
“And what,” Tanaka asked, finding himself, to his amazement, a bit breathless, “is the second?”
By way of an answer, she covered his lips with hers, feeling his strong arms slipping around her once again, but this time for a purpose far beyond comfort. Without another word, Nathan lifted her in his arms and carried her back down the darkened hallway to his room.
It was, he thought with a quiet chuckle, the traditional thing to do.
Chapter Eleven
“Manhood is the ability to outlast despair.”
—James Jones
Kennedy was dead. Even as the thought passed through his mind, Jason realized the dark humor of it, but it was an accurate statement. Looking out from his rooftop perch over the burned-out, looted wreckage that was once the largest and fastest-growing city in the star colonies, McKay felt the weight of isolation pressing down on him.
He remembered the look on Valerie’s face when he’d left her and the Mendoza family in the rover behind a repair garage at the outskirts of the city.
“Take this,” he’d said, handing her the autorifle they’d taken off Filipe back at the farmstead.He’d decided to leave the weapon with her and keep one of the autoshotguns with him, since he didn’t have too much confidence in the ability of the scattergun to take out one of the Invaders and he didn’t want to leave them helpless. It was bad enough he had to leave them at all.
“Do you have to go?” she’d asked him again. He’d looked at her sitting in the front seat of the rover, his overshirt drawn around her, and a shiver had gone up his spine. The words, spoken in that context, should have been a plaintive appeal, full of the fear and apprehension he knew she felt at being left alone. Instead, the plea had been delivered in the same flat monotone she’d fallen into since the fight at the farmstead.
It was her eyes that really got to him: they’d become as dead and lifeless as one of those Invader trooper’s. If he didn’t find a place for them to rest soon…
He’d just said: “I’ve got to.”
“But what will happen to us, Senor McKay?” Carmella Mendoza had beseeched him. “What if you don’t come back?”
“I’ll be back,” he’d promised, shutting the driver’s side door and turning to leave. Behind him, he could hear the quiet sobbing of Carmella’s children, a haunting sound that still echoed in his mind as he leaned against the roof parapet high over Kennedy.
He’d come up there, to the highest building in Kennedy—an hotel, ironically—thinking that he might catch sight of some kind of human activity: that some of those who’d fled during the invasion might surely have returned now that the Invaders had pulled out most of their forces. But the only thing moving in the debris-littered streets were aimlessly wandering bands of abandoned Invader troopers. He’d narrowly avoided being spotted by one group of them on his way into town, and had watched from the cover of a shadowed doorway as they opened fire at a wind-blown piece of paper.
They were out of control and unguided, and he was only now beginning to appreciate the extent to which the troopers were some kind of automatons, rather than fully-sentient, autonomous beings. The fact that they weren’t independently intelligent didn’t make them any less dangerous if they spotted him, though. They seemed to him like maggots infesting the body of the rotting corpse that was Kennedy: moving about the dead streets, through the hulks of buildings already picked clean of anything useful, down to the holographic signs over the doors.
Feeling suddenly depressed and very vulnerable, Jason backed away from the edge of the roof in a crouched duckwalk, holding the autoshotgun across his chest. This, he thought bitterly, had been a waste of time, just like every move he’d made since the invasion. Now, they had no choice but to head for one of the other, smaller towns and repeat the process.
Far enough away from the edge to avoid being seen from below, Jason straightened and turned back toward the stairwell, mind still full of dark hopelessness. So preoccupied was he with their predicament that he nearly ran smack into the chest armor of the Invader trooper advancing up those same stairs.
“Jesus!” McKay jerked the trigger of the CAWS reflexively even as the trooper started to bring its rifle around.
The scattergun bucked wildly in Jason’s unprepared grasp and he staggered backward as the three-round burst caught the Invader in the chest. Most of the charge ricocheted off the hard armor plating, but the impact rocked the Invader back, leaving it balanced precariously on the first step of the stairs.
Realizing the uselessness of his shotgun, Jason dropped the weapon and threw himself into a flying side kick that caught the troo
per full in the faceplate and sent both of them careening down the first flight of stairs, arms and legs akimbo. With the hard surface of the first stairwell landing rushing up at them, Jason somehow managed to land feet-first on the Invader’s stomach, bending his knees to absorb most of the impact. Rolling off the trooper, McKay ignored the blossom of pain in his left knee and ripped his pistol from its shoulder holster, pumping a double-tap through the Invader’s faceplate before the thing could get to its feet.
As Jason was rising from a crouch, a chattering barrage of rifle fire from the landing below punched into the wall just above his head, spraying him with stone chips and sending him diving to the floor. Another pair of Invader troopers were advancing up the steps abreast, hosing the landing above them with their assault rifles as they came. Hugging the floor, Jason shoved his handgun out in front of him and fired down the stairwell, emptying the magazine at the troopers.
Two of the slugs caught the left-hand Invader in the throat, jerking it backwards down the stairs with a crash of metal, while the rest of the rounds ricocheted off the other’s chest armor at an angle and tracked downward, finally impacting the receiver of the trooper’s rifle and shattering the bolt assembly. Scrambling to his feet, Jason threw a body-block into the Invader, grabbing the railing at the last moment to avoid following the armored trooper down the flight. The out-of-control Invader flailed wildly as it flew head-over-heels to the landing below, smashing into the plasticrete beside the corpse of its comrade.
Not waiting to see if the trooper survived the fall, McKay reloaded his pistol on the move, taking the stairs three at a time despite the flare of agony in his leg. He knew one thing from watching the Invaders from the roof: they tended to congregate in large groups, as if searching for some purpose to their continued existence. He had to get out of the hotel before the gunfire drew dozens of them and cut off his line of retreat.