To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  Panic rose in Karadjian. He was back at Koto-ri, with the Chinese pouring over the forward positions, a tide of men in the moonlight that the machine guns hadn’t stopped and the artillery hadn’t stopped, and he knew that his rifle and bayonet wasn’t going to make no difference but the training took over and he mechanically loaded and fired and then when the platoon sergeant pulled them back by squads he did as he was ordered and somehow they survived …

  Training took over again.

  Treat the f—ing bulletproof walker as a tank, he thought, and get out of its way.

  He pointed urgently at the jeeps.

  ‘Patrol! Fall back on the front jeep! Steady!’

  When he was satisfied they were moving right, keeping the line, and weren’t going to stumble together, he shouted again.

  ‘Opportunity fire! Nice and slow, take your shots, watch your flanks!’

  The walker kept going as they shot at him, five M1s and a .45 shooting as steady and true as any sergeant could wish, and they kept shooting till he got too close to the rear jeep and Karadjian shouted to cease fire.

  In the immediate quiet, they heard another noise, one that had been drowned by the gunfire. A noise they didn’t want to hear, shrieking out of the rear jeep, the high squeal of a recently issued, almost-brand-new Detectron Geiger Counter, even more terrible to hear because it’d been turned right down, the background squeaking a pain to listen to on the long patrols.

  ‘Stay back,’ croaked Karadjian. ‘Don’t nobody move.’

  The guy didn’t stop. He just went on walking, straight toward the inner cordon, and the next fence, two miles to the east. The bullets had shredded his robe or habit or whatever it was, and it looked like he was naked underneath, only he was caked in dust or mud or something. Karadjian holstered his pistol, fumbled for his binoculars, and got them up and twiddled the focusing knob, his hands shaking so much he couldn’t get a good look till he clamped his elbows in and then he saw the flash of a thin, scrawny leg slide out of the shredded robe. It was red, all right, but it didn’t look to him like it was from mud or dust.

  Karadjian lowered his binoculars. The men were looking at him, the Detectron was easing off its scream but was still loud, too loud to be anything but bad news.

  ‘Back up twenty yards that way,’ ordered Karadjian. He pointed along the road. Away from the jeeps. Away from the path of whatever was inside that robe. ‘Keep a look out, see if there’s any more of those guys.’

  ‘More!?’ muttered someone. Probably Breckenridge.

  ‘Shut up and move!’

  Karadjian lit a cigarette and coughed. His throat was dry. It was always dry in the desert but it was even drier now.

  ‘What we going to do, Sarge?’

  ‘Pass the shitty buck,’ said Karadjian. He threw the cigarette down and ran to the lead jeep. The Geiger counter in the backseat of that was screaming too, only not as loud as the one in the other jeep. The sergeant snagged out the field radio and ran back and, thinking about it, moved everyone back another hundred yards, so the shriek of the radiation detectors wasn’t scaring him so much he felt like taking a dump right there in front of everyone and he had to suck air and try and think of other stuff to stop himself.

  Karadjian had been on the Proving Ground security force for three years. He talked to the scientists, particularly the troubled ones, who roamed around at night and wanted to talk, and wanted to hear him tell them about Korea, and how they needed the Bomb and more and bigger and better bombs because when it came down to it there were billions of Chinks and Russkies out there and there wasn’t anything else that was going to stop them. But the scientists talked about other stuff too, and so did the guards, and all of them had seen what it meant to die of radiation poisoning, and anyone who’d been slack early on was dead now, or wished they were.

  The radio worked, which Karadjian hadn’t been sure about. He’d bet the one in the other jeep was fried, but that’s why they had two, that was the Army way, only you could never be sure if the gear was any good in the first place, so often you had two pieces of crap that didn’t work instead of just one.

  He called in a contact report, not that it was like any normal contact report. He could tell they thought he was drunk or heatstruck or something, so he put Anderson on, the College boy, and then they thought he was drunk too and there was a stupid little dance with every guy taking turns on the radio to tell the looey, then the captain, then the colonel, all telling the same story over and over again while the f—ing superman guy was walking in toward the test site without anybody doing anything about it.

  The radio died while the Colonel was still asking dumb questions. Karadjian put it down and they backed up from the jeeps again, till they were three hundred yards away, and he wondered if that was enough. He put the men into all-round defense, a little circle of green on the rocky desert ground, and they propped there and smoked and watched. He didn’t let them talk. It wouldn’t help and would only crystallize the fear they were all keeping a lid on.

  Half an hour later, a helicopter went over pretty low, a CH-21 Shawnee heading toward the test site. A couple of minutes later they heard its machine guns firing. Karadjian stood up with his binoculars and watched the bird do a figure eight and come back into a slight backward hover, the guns still firing.

  Then its engine cut out. It was too low to autorotate and just smacked into the ground and blew up. The gunners kept firing pretty much till it hit; it happened so quickly they probably hardly knew what was going on.

  An hour after the helicopter crash, when the oily column of smoke from the crash was hardly more than a crematory wisp, Karadjian saw a convoy coming up the road, five jeeps, two with .50-cal mounts, and four deuce-and-a-half trucks loaded with what looked to be everyone who could carry a rifle from the base, including the cooks and the laboratory techs.

  Half a mile in front of the military vehicles, Karadjian was more pleased to see the blue ’57 Chevy Bel Air convertible of Professor Aaron Weiss, the chief scientist. It would be quicker explaining everything to him than to the White Streak of Shit, which was what everyone called Colonel White behind his back, or very occasionally just ‘Streak’ when he could overhear. He thought it meant like lightning and indicated speed and power and the healthy respect of the men.

  Karadjian waved Weiss down well before the jeeps. The professor must have heard the radio traffic because when he got out he had his gloves and overshoes on and was carrying one of the Geiger counters with the long probe. He stretched it out and ran it over Karadjian at four inches away, watching the dial.

  ‘You’re somewhat hot, Sergeant,’ said Weiss. ‘Not too hot. Portable decontamination’s coming up, you might as well do stage one here. Strip and pile everything over there, and I mean everything, from dog tags out, it’ll all have to be buried. You say this man in the robe walked over there – past your jeep? You fired at him to no effect?’

  ‘Yes, sir, the jeep behind. He just walked in a straight line, in from the desert and on toward the test site. I put six shots into him myself, and the boys at least fifty, maybe sixty rounds. We saw the tracer going through, but he just went on walking. He just went on!’

  Karadjian could feel the hysteria rising, and fought to hold it back. Only now could he recognize that he had survived something that might have killed him, or maybe not survived it, because ‘not too hot’ might be a kindness, not a real accurate appraisal.

  ‘Stay away from everyone but the decontamination team,’ said Weiss. ‘I’ll make sure the Colonel understands. When did this all happen?’

  ‘Seven oh eight,’ said Karadjian.

  ‘And he was walking at a normal speed?’

  ‘I guess so. Steady. He never slowed down or speeded up.’

  ‘He’ll almost be at the site by now,’ said Weiss. ‘Presuming he continued on.’

  There was a moment of silence between them. They both knew the test was scheduled for noon. Everything was set for it to fire; normally the only
delay would be if the wind changed direction and blew hard toward civilization.

  ‘Bullets couldn’t hurt him,’ said Karadjian. ‘They went straight through. His skin was dark red like dried blood, oh, mother of Christ, it was—’

  ‘That’s enough, Sergeant!’ snapped Weiss. He looked over his shoulder. The convoy was close now, and the White Streak would soon be exerting his military authority all over the place, without pausing to think first.

  ‘Get your men ready for decon,’ he ordered, and walked toward the second jeep, holding out the Geiger counter’s probe and watching the dial. The needle edged up as he approached and then jumped as far across as it would go when he got near the rear wheels. A year ago, he would have scurried back like a cockroach caught in the light, but since he was on borrowed time following the accident in Lindstrom’s lab he didn’t bother.

  He crossed backward and forward a few times, confirming that it was indeed the track of the man that was still intensely radioactive some hours after he passed. The actual footprints were hotter still, impossibly so – it was as if a chunk of pure uranium was buried in every faint indentation in the ground.

  Weiss got back in the Chevy convertible as Colonel White’s jeep pulled in behind. The White Streak jumped out before the jeep stopped rolling and ran up to the window as Weiss gently moved his foot over the accelerator, but he didn’t press it down.

  ‘Professor!’ shouted the Colonel. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘The test site.’ Weiss smiled. ‘Keep everyone back. There’s a trail of very high radiation. Run a phone line to the nearest junction and I’ll call in from the site.’

  ‘What? You can’t go in alone! We’ve lost a helicopter, we don’t know what that thing is. Those morons at Groom Lake won’t say if it’s something of theirs but I tell you whatever it is we’ll finish it off with that goddamned A-bomb if we have—’

  ‘Good-bye, Colonel,’ said Weiss. He let his foot pivot forward from the heel, and the Chevy accelerated away, TurboGlide smooth through the gears. Weiss jinked the car around the jeeps and then off the road, plumes of dust spurting up as the rear wheels spun for a moment in the loose roadside gravel before getting traction on the stony desert floor.

  Weiss sang as he drove, Puccini’s ‘E lucevan le stelle.’ In his head he could hear the clarinet solo, repeating over and over again, no matter what part he sang. He did not want to die, but it could not be helped. It was only a matter of time. Perhaps in the next few hours, but if not, then in the next few weeks, a horrible and painful death.

  There was no obvious gap in the inner fence, no way for the walker to have gotten through. Weiss swung the car around and reversed through, wincing as the barbed wire scratched the beautiful blue paintwork and shredded the folded-back roof of the Chevy. He ducked down and avoided being scratched himself, only to wince again as a thick strand of triple-barb scraped across the hood.

  Closer to the test site, he let himself wonder what he was following. Before the first test, way back in ’45, he had been an atheist. Since then, he was not sure what he believed, but it certainly included things that could not be immediately measured or similarly known. He knew of no scientific reason why a man could be immune to bullets, or would leave a radioactive trail, but that did not mean that no scientific reason existed. He was quite curious to find out … anything, really.

  Colonel White obviously thought it was an alien, for there were inexplicable and possibly alien artifacts under study over at Groom Lake, but they were sad remnants for the most part and did not include anything alive. Unless the Air Force had been hiding them from the atomic scientists who had assisted in some of the early investigations, which was possible.

  Weiss saw the robed man shortly thereafter. He was climbing the tower that held the Pascal-F device. A ten kiloton bomb, suspended in place and fully prepared to fire in … Weiss glanced at his watch … forty-nine minutes. Unless he called in to stop it, he supposed.

  The professor backed the Chevy in by one of the instrument stands. He left the engine running. With the car pointed west he could reach one of the observation bunkers in ten minutes, or the trenches dug by the Marines who’d been the subject of last month’s test.

  Not that he was entirely sure he’d bother. He took one last look at the Geiger counter. The walker’s path was more radioactive than before. Getting closer to the cause of that trail would in all probability be lethal, particularly the way the dust was kicking up, carrying the radiation into his lungs.

  ‘Hello, there!’ Weiss called up when he reached the foot of the tower. He didn’t suppose the fellow would feel like talking after being shot at so much, but as it hadn’t stopped him, perhaps he wouldn’t mind. At least he had evidently reached his destination. ‘Mind if I come up?’

  There was a moment when Weiss thought there would be no answer. Then an answer came, in a harsh, guttural, and strangely accented voice.

  ‘Come if you wish. You are aware my nature is antithetical to your own?’

  ‘Yes,’ called up Weiss. He set his foot on the ladder and reached for a rung. ‘I am. I don’t suppose you know how swiftly it will kill me?’

  ‘Should we touch, you would die instanter,’ said the man. ‘But stay beyond arm’s reach, and you may live to see another season.’

  ‘My name is Weiss,’ said the professor as he gained the platform. He took care to stay as far away from the walking man as possible, and kept the bulk of the bomb between them. ‘Professor Weiss. May I ask who you are?’

  ‘A sinner,’ said the man, ‘who seeks to make up his last accounts.’

  He stood and pushed back his hood. Weiss stared at the dark red, large-scaled flesh and the blue, human-seeming eyes that were set so strangely in their reptilian sockets.

  ‘I see. Ah, what planet … what distant star have you come from?’

  ‘No star, no far planet,’ muttered the man. ‘Yet from the far side of this world, I have come.’

  ‘From the far side of this world,’ repeated Weiss. He kept looking at the man. Was he some sort of mutant? But it was not biologically possible to be so radioactive and continue to live.

  ‘I have sought such a thing as this for many, many centuries,’ said the man. He indicated the bomb. ‘Yearning for it as I once yearned for love, or wine. Yet even now, I delay, when at a touch I might have release …’

  ‘You know what this is?’ asked Weiss. ‘An atom bomb. It is set to explode soon and it will kill—’

  ‘Aye,’ interrupted the man. ‘It is a hope made real. I learned of it from a woman who came to my cave in Cappadocia, as so many have done, seeking the healing power of my inner fires. She died, but it was a slow death, and she told me many things, and taught me more of this tongue we speak. I had learned it once before, a long time past, but had forgotten it.’

  ‘Cappadocia?’ asked Weiss. ‘In Turkey? You come from Turkey?’

  He couldn’t help but smile a little as he thought of the strangeness of this interview. Perhaps his mind was already affected, maybe this was all a morphine dream, the result of treatment begun to ease him through the horrors of death by plutonium poisoning.

  ‘As it is now called,’ said the man. He licked the dust from his lips with a long, forked tongue, and sighed. ‘But I am no Turk. I was a good Christian, long ago, in the service of my emperor. Ah, how I long to shed this vile form, that I may join him in heaven!’

  ‘Your … vile form,’ said Weiss. ‘You were not always—’

  ‘Always thus? I was not. Once I was as well set-up a fellow as any might see … but so long ago. My own face is lost to me, gone so long I cannot see it, even in my mind’s eye …’

  ‘How did you become … whatever you have become?’ asked Weiss. He looked at his watch. Thirty-three minutes to detonation. Perhaps he had given up on life too early. It was not too late for him to have a genuine and great discovery to his credit, something truly remarkable, not just an accretion on top of the work of other, more gifted scientists. If
he could study this altered man, learn the secret of radioactive life … Others would have to continue the work, but if he could publish even the preliminary findings it would be a famous memorial of … or perhaps … perhaps he might even learn how he could live, learn some secret to purge the plutonium residue from his blood and bone …

  ‘How did I become what I am?’ said the man. ‘I have told the story before, but perhaps none lived to repeat it.’

  ‘I think I would remember hearing about someone like you,’ said Weiss. ‘Maybe we would be more comfortable down on the ground? I mean if it’s a long story—’

  ‘The story is long, but I shall tell it short, and as the end lies here, it would not be meet to leave it.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Weiss. He looked at his watch again. Eleven twenty-nine. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was an officer of the Empire, a high commander,’ said the man. ‘Of a good family, loyal to the Emperor, successful in war. This was in the reign of … you would say … Heraclius. I was a simple fellow, wishing only to do my duty, raise a family, have sons to rise to even greater glory … but it was not to be. It is strange, that this I am to tell you was so long ago, yet it is ever clear to me, when more recent times are but clouded mud, and I could not tell you what I did for a hundred years …’

  The minute hand on Weiss’s watch moved to the six.

  ‘It was summer, the end of a long, dry summer. I had gone to the mountains, to escape the heat, and hunt. The days were very long, and the evenings were of a gentleness that I never felt again … with the wind coming soft and cool from the snowy heights and the earth still warm from the sun. On such an evening, I saw a star fall, and it seemed to me to have fallen close, beyond the lake where my summer house stood on its oaken piles. I had my house slaves ready a boat, and they rowed me to the far shore, or almost to it, for there amidst the burning reeds was a great boat of shining silver. The slaves were frightened and backed their oars. Startled, I fell into the water. I called to them, but they were too afraid, and their fear made me angry, and braver than I should otherwise have been. I swam ashore, and seeing a hinged door open in the side of the silver ship, I went inside.