“Roger that, Delta. Okay … confirmed, no boats, no bodies, no live ones, nothing. Nearest I’ve seen to clean. Cleared out, unless they’re all piled up in the huts for some reason. I’ll take a look and see if they’ve just moved inland. That many people leave some kind of visible track, usually.”
“Wouldn’t they take the junkers?” Dom asked.
Marcus climbed into the ’Dill. “Not if they left by sea. Let’s make sure they’re gone. I don’t know how these people share information, but if they know what happened to their buddies, then they’ve got one more grudge with us.”
Baird took the ’Dill down the narrow track that led from the inland cliff and stopped a few hundred meters away from the settlement. Cole thought that was extra-cautious, but they’d been caught out once too often in the last week. Gettner was right. It looked tidy. That was a damn odd thing to say about a burning shantytown, but it was true. The flames had already died down and the place simply smoked and smoldered, stinking of burned plastic and unburned fuel. The houses here had just been flimsy huts and shacks, quick to catch fire and crumble into ash.
Cole realized why it looked so clean when he passed the first charred wooden frame of a house. Fires didn’t always burn every last scrap, and all kinds of lightweight stuff got scattered around in the drafts, sad little bits and pieces that said something about the folks who’d lived there. But there was nothing like that here. The shacks looked like they’d been picked clean of everything the Stranded could carry.
Marcus ducked his head down to look inside one of the buildings that still had a roof.
“Don’t go in, man,” Baird called. “The roof might collapse on you.”
“Just looking.” Marcus walked across to another house where there was no sign of walls, just a big sheet of corrugated metal on the ground—probably the roof, all that was left. He lifted the edge of the sheet and peered underneath. “Nothing. No bodies.”
It was sometimes hard to tell charred bodies from other stuff, but Gears had learned to do that pretty well over the years.
“Looks like they did it themselves,” Cole said, scuffing through a pile of ash. The sky was still clouded with smoke. It was so much like the places he’d had to pick his way through back on the mainland that his gut still said grubs, but he knew it wasn’t. That still didn’t stop the reaction. “Looks too orderly. Not enough burned stuff here.”
Marcus nodded. “These guys just wanted to destroy everything they couldn’t take with them.”
Marcus had said it, so it was true, and Cole felt it was safe to breathe again. “Trouble is, I can never see anything for what it is anymore,” he said. “I see a damn ugly fish and I think it’s grubs. I see a pall of smoke and I think it’s grubs.” He tapped his skull. “The war ain’t over up here.”
Baird snapped his goggles into place. “Peace hasn’t broken out, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
There was something else that bothered Cole now. Most of the Stranded from this camp had taken amnesty. Most of those who hadn’t—the ones who seemed to have made a run for it—were the menfolk. That meant an awful lot of families had broken up, or else there were plenty of women and kids who were expecting to see their old man back again sometime. Either way, that didn’t sound like a happy foundation to become a loyal citizen of the COG.
Nothing got sorted out cleanly anymore. Baird was right. Peace hadn’t started yet. They were all in limbo. Nobody could come up with an instant cure for all the problems the war had left behind.
“Wasting all that fuel just to stop us using their shitty wood and plastic,” Baird said, pausing to examine a melted lump in the ash. “Asset denial. Like we’re goddamn grubs or something.”
Marcus squatted to touch the remains of a length of water pipe like he expected it to still be hot. Some of the metal in the ruins was. He picked it up and hefted it in his hand.
“Imagine that,” he said.
VNB, 1800 HOURS, FOUR WEEKS LATER.
It was always the dumb-ass little things that started Dom off.
Today, it was walking through the locker rooms and catching someone singing his head off in the shower—nothing out of the ordinary, but it was a song that Maria loved. Even off-key and mangled by a Gear, the lyrics hurt like hell. He found himself heading blindly out of the barracks just to get away from that song, looking for a quiet spot where he could think in peace, but privacy was getting harder to find every day; the base was full. Every spare building had been turned over to accommodation, and it was going to stay that way until new housing was built.
He walked to the dockyard walls, up narrow brick steps to the old sentry points where men had once stood guard with muskets. It was a hell of a view of the sea. Nobody would look twice if an off-duty Gear went up there and stayed for a while. People who’d spent way too much time underground needed to see open, infinite space.
Dom folded his arms on the granite blocks, rested his forehead on them and just let the sound of the waves below erase everything.
How long was it now? Nearly fifteen weeks since he’d found and lost Maria forever in a matter of minutes. He bounced between wanting to go on living because something good had to be around the next corner, and a sense of loss so bottomless that he thought he’d never be able to breathe again. His up days were getting better and more frequent. His down days still left him worse then empty.
She wasn’t around for ten years. What sort of Maria did I recreate in my imagination in that time?
He took out his pack of photographs. On some days, he hadn’t been able to look at Maria’s eyes. That was how he gauged his progress. It wasn’t even pulling the trigger that haunted him now; it was everything he didn’t know. Ten years. He knew now that she’d been one of the Stranded. He couldn’t kid himself that she’d been killed soon after she went missing, or taken by the grubs right away—because nobody could have survived that long in grub hands. He knew how Stranded lived, the miserable lives they had, the scum in their own communities who preyed on them. Now he couldn’t stop himself filling in the blanks, hoping Maria had been with people like Dizzy but terrified of even thinking that she might have stumbled into the likes of Massy. It was a terrible thing to add to imagining what the grubs had done to her to make her into that shell he found. He hadn’t even realized it until the last few weeks, when his mind was squarely on Stranded.
My wife was a Stranded.
She survived ten years because someone looked out for her. She wasn’t like Bernie. She wasn’t trained to survive. She couldn’t have done it alone.
Somebody else must have cared about her.
It was obvious now, but he just hadn’t thought it through before. Somehow, even though it was yet another unanswered question, it lifted him like nothing else had. One of the underclass he tolerated—didn’t love, didn’t respect, just tolerated—must have helped Maria. Maybe a whole group of them did. Now every Stranded he met who wasn’t an obvious bastard would look very different to him.
It was turning out to be a pretty sunset again. Dom watched a patrol boat heading out, a black speck on choppy amber water. It might have been a radar picket ship, or it might have been joining the trawler fleet as fishery protection. But whatever it was, this felt routine and normal. Life went on if you wanted it to.
I do. I know I do.
Boots scuffed the steps beneath him. It had to be Marcus, or at least Cole or Bernie. He knew they still kept an eye on him, which was comforting, but his moments of wanting to die had melted down to not caring if he lived, and then to accepting he was staying around and so he had to make things work. He turned around, ready to tell Marcus—or Cole, or Bernie—that he was fine.
But it was Hoffman.
The colonel looked a lot smaller out of armor. He was still the squat wall of muscle he’d always been, but in fatigues he looked built to a more human scale. He took off his cap and leaned on the wall.
“I like it with more purple bits, myself,” he said, squinting into the setting
sun. “Few more clouds for contrast.”
“It’s nice and peaceful.”
“Well, make the most of it.” Hoffman checked his watch. “They’re testing the sirens again in a few minutes.”
Dom waited to find out what had really brought Hoffman up here. The guy was his old CO, still with a mental list of Gears who were his, chief of staff or not.
“It’s working out, isn’t it, sir?”
“I do believe it is. How about you?”
“Yeah. This place feels solid. Port Farrall never did.”
“I meant how are you working out.”
“Doing better. Thanks.”
Hoffman was building up to something. Dom could see his jaw clenching. “You know how I lost my wife, don’t you?”
“She couldn’t get back to Ephyra before the Hammer strike.” Dom had heard other things, that the checkpoints had been told to turn her back to the city because she’d stormed off, but he didn’t want to unpick the private misery behind that. “You know what it’s like to pull the trigger. Is that what you were going to say, sir?”
“No. I was going to say that Prescott managed to tip off his secretary to get her sister back to Ephyra, but I played by the rules and never warned my own wife. And I lost her. I did it wrong at every stage, and she’s dead because of me.” Hoffman gave Dom that I-can-see-your-soul look. “I don’t know what her final moments were like and I wasn’t there to make them easier. But you were there for Maria. Nobody can ask any more of a man, Dom.”
Hoffman glanced at his watch again. Dom was still trying to think of some response when the air shook and he thought someone had rammed nails into his eardrums. The emergency sirens wailed all around the base, a rising and falling scream of a noise that instantly churned human guts on a primal level. Even if you’d never heard that sound in your life, it made you want to run for cover. And the sentry post was positioned right over one of the sirens.
Hoffman just put his hands over his ears and waited, still looking out to sea. Dom tried to block out the noise, but his sinuses vibrated, he was sure of it.
The silence that fell was sudden. Dom’s ears still throbbed.
“I think we can hear that okay, sir,” he said.
“Combine that with the radar picket, and everyone feels reassured. Time I was going. The sergeants’ mess is officially open tonight, and I’m expected.” Hoffman turned to make his way down the steps again. “Thanks for listening, Santiago. It never got to me in Jacinto. Now it’s like someone took off a tourniquet and the feeling’s come back. Every time I look at a line of ’Dills here, I can see those burned-out cars.”
Dom stayed at the sentry post for a while after Hoffman left, knowing damn well who had actually done the listening, even if Dom hadn’t been the one talking. Hoffman was okay. Everyone—everyone—had done crazy, out-of-character things in this war, and the war before that, but it didn’t mean they weren’t fundamentally decent.
It was definitely time for that drink. An invite to the sergeants’ mess was something tribal and special, not about getting shit-faced at all. It was hospitality. It was also a symbol of normal life making a comeback. Andresen and Rossi had gone to a lot of trouble to fit out the place, and not showing up when invited was bad form. He’d have to go.
The mess was a cramped space even before a lot of bodies tried to squeeze into it. Dom worked out from the plumbing and drains in the stone floor that it had been an ice store in the days before refrigeration, although how they got the ice there was anyone’s guess. A stack of ammo crates served as the bar; a couple of grub cleavers hung on the wall behind it. There was beer, or what passed for it, and something piss-yellow and evil-smelling, dispensed from a steel drum by Dizzy. One of the engineer corporals stared into its depths before tipping back his tin mug.
“Shit, that’s nasty.” He drained it on the second gulp, eyes screwed tight shut, and held it out for a refill. “We can rig some better distillation kit for you, Diz. Let’s discuss design.”
“That’s my finest vintage,” Dizzy said. “You just gotta let it rest some and get some bottle age, that’s all.”
“Mataki did the catering, guys,” Rossi yelled above the noise. “Those things on cocktail sticks are not meatballs, okay?”
Everyone was laughing their asses off. People needed to find something to celebrate, and being alive in a clean, dry, warm room—a stiflingly warm room now—with a drink and all your buddies around you was as good a reason as any. Dom couldn’t see Marcus, but Hoffman and Anya were there, and Bernie held Baird in a playful headlock while Cole guffawed and made no attempt to rescue him. “Who’s a clever boy?” Bernie pinched his cheeks one-handed. Dom had never seen Baird tolerate her like that before. “Who made the guns work? Did you get the big guns working? Did you? Clever boy! Granny’s proud of her clever boy!”
“What gun?” Dom asked.
Cole wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “The cannon, baby. The naval base defensive guns.” He shook his head and started laughing again. “He’s been helping the artillery guys. Shit, there’s nothing Baird can’t fix.”
Humiliated or not, Baird looked pleased with himself. Dom felt guilty for ever thinking of him as a cocky, selfish bastard who didn’t belong in Delta Squad. It was that kind of evening. He decided to stick to one beer in case sentimentality got the better of him again.
Eventually, the door edged opened, and Marcus stood on the threshold of the mess like he was preparing to charge a grub position. Dom was sure he would have closed the door and walked away if someone hadn’t seen him and hauled him in by his sleeve.
“I’m still on duty, Dom,” Marcus said, holding up his hand to fend off a mug of beer. “Just being polite.”
“It’s your mess, Sergeant Fenix.”
“So it is.” He had his earpiece in place. Dom couldn’t remember seeing him without it lately, on duty or not. It was too easy to keep the comms net open the whole time just in case, and Dom couldn’t work out if Marcus did it for distraction or because he still felt personally responsible for fixing the world’s problems. “You know that shit makes you go blind.”
“All quiet out there?”
“Couple of drunk Stranded had a fight. That’s all.”
“They’re not Stranded now.”
“Okay, then two drunk assholes had a fight.”
Marcus was doing a discreet scan of the mess, and Dom knew damned well that he was checking where Anya was. Yeah, she’s over there with Hoffman, buddy. Do something about it. Then Marcus’s gaze settled across the room, target acquired for a moment, before he looked Dom in the eye again. It tipped the balance.
“I swear I’ll never stick my nose into your private life again,” Dom said. “But shit or get off the pot, okay? I saw your face when you thought she was dead. And I know what too late feels like.”
Marcus didn’t even shrug. He looked paralyzed for a moment, then put his finger slowly to his ear. Dom thought he was just avoiding the issue again until the chatter and raucous laughter around them was drowned in a noise that began like some huge animal gulping air. The gulp turned into a bellow that rose to a scream and fell again. The base alarms had gone off. They waited, but the siren showed no signs of stopping.
“Is nobody going to kill that goddamn siren?” Hoffman yelled. Dom could just about hear him. “How many times do they have to test it?”
But Marcus still had his finger pressed to his earpiece. His attention was somewhere else.
“Hey, not a drill, people,” he shouted. “Listen up—we got an incident. A raid on Jonty’s farm.”
The mess fell silent for a moment. “What kind of raid?” Dom asked.
“The farmhouse and barns are on fire. One of the Ravens called it in. First six duty roster squads—get moving.”
The mess emptied and they pounded down the passage to collect weapons and armor. As Dom jogged toward the ’Dill, he could hear the whine of Raven engines as pilots did their pre-flight checks. Cole listened in to
the voice traffic.
“I’m not convinced that siren is a good idea.” Marcus pushed past Baird and climbed into the ’Dill’s driving seat. “Scares the civvies too much.”
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Dom said.
“Stranded settling scores?”
“Yeah.”
“Does that mean more landed?”
“Maybe they never left.”
Marcus headed off through the base and waited in the holding area near the main gate for the rest of the vehicles. There was a storehouse near the gates that had been converted to temporary accommodation, and when Marcus opened the ’Dill’s hatches, Dom could hear a bullhorn echoing. He got out to look. Someone was driving around the civilian quarters, repeating a message that there was no danger, and that there would be further instructions if the situation changed. Yeah, the siren system needed a rethink.
Dom could guess immediately which civilians were from Jacinto and which were locals who’d relocated. Jacinto people opened their windows to listen to the announcement, then closed them and got on with whatever they were doing. The locals were coming out into the roads, stopping any Gears they could see and asking what the hell was going on. They were terrified; Dom could hear their panicky questions. They were convinced they were going to die.
His guess was confirmed when a window flew open and a woman leaned out.
“Get a grip, for goodness’ sake,” she called out. The Pelruan civilians looked up to the window. “Whatever it is, it’s got to get past every Gear in the COG. What’s wrong with you people?”
The locals stared up at the window long after the woman had slammed it shut. Dom decided not to get involved, and climbed back into the ’Dill.
“Our civvies believe in us,” he said. “It’s kind of cute.”
Cole grinned. “That’s ’cause we’re so damn good, baby.”
Marcus switched the comms over to the ’Dill’s radio and listened to Control while they waited. Anya was back in CIC. Three ’Dills and a very old fire truck rolled up behind them. It was just like old times. The gates opened, and Marcus drove out in the direction of the farm.
Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant Page 41