Dalton Kane and the Greens

by J. S. Bailey

  “Tell us more about these creatures,” Naomi said, stepping forward with her datapad, which she’d withdrawn from somewhere inside her blazer. “I understand they’re called Greens?”

  “They’re the native wildlife,” Carolyn said. “They stick to the forests and mind their own business if people don’t come near them.”

  Naomi glanced down at the shriveled leaves in the sand. “I see.”

  “They’ve been known to attack and kill, at times,” Carolyn went on. “We’ve been on full alert the past few days after being subject to two random attacks. Our security efforts have been ramped up since then, hence Maxine here being out on patrol.”

  Maxine, whose short, brown hair stood up in random, dusty spikes, dipped her head in acknowledgment. “It’s an honor to serve,” she said, throwing Dalton a glance from the corner of her eye. She wore army fatigues and still toted her flamethrower, looking every bit the soldier.

  Naomi typed something into her datapad.

  “Mr. Fanshaw, why didn’t you report the Greens to anyone the moment you saw them?” Carolyn asked.

  Chumley fidgeted like an antsy child confined to a classroom desk, put on the spot by the teacher. “Because they weren’t attacking anyone.”

  “You had no way of knowing they wouldn’t.”

  “I know, but . . . they were carrying things. Sacks, canteens. One even had a wagon full of stuff.” He gave Carolyn a sheepish grin that she did not return in kind.

  “How many?” Carolyn asked.

  Chumley’s smile faltered. “Pardon?”

  “How many Greens did you see pass by here?”

  Chumley swallowed and tugged absently at his shirt collar. “Not sure.”

  “Why don’t you take a guess?”

  “Erm. Let me think.”

  Dear God, don’t let him say anything stupid, Dalton thought. He could already sense the last fraying remnants of his own reputation teetering at the edge of an abyss, and all it would take was one final, soft push to send it plummeting over the edge.

  Naomi waited with her finger poised over her datapad. Maxine absently traced a line in the sand with the toe of her left boot, and Carolyn’s complexion was rapidly changing from its normal brown into something more like a pickled beet.

  “There might have been a hundred,” Chumley said at last. “Possibly two. Or three.”

  Carolyn blinked. “You’re telling me that you, the new deputy, saw up to three hundred Greens traipsing past you, and you did nothing?”

  “I kept an eye on them. They weren’t like the Greens I saw at the hotel. These just seemed . . . well, peaceful.”

  Dalton put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. His pulse beat out a steady tattoo in his eardrums. Odd, how calm he felt, like a prisoner quietly accepting his fate as he stepped up to the gallows.

  “Mr. Fanshaw,” Carolyn said, “I am placing you on administrative leave so you can receive proper training.”

  “But nothing happened!” Chumley looked to Dalton, pleadingly. “Back me up, here!”

  Dalton opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. None of this could be happening. He was still asleep, in bed, and FCU hadn’t even landed yet.

  “And Dalton, I’m placing you on administrative leave as well,” Carolyn said. “Indefinitely.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” There was no humor in her tone, no kindness, no compassion.

  “How was I supposed to know he was sitting out here watching the damned things?”

  “And therein lies the problem,” Carolyn said. “Maxine, grab as many of those leaves as you can, and meet us all back at my office with them when you’ve finished.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Maxine said, bending down to begin her task.

  “As for you, boys . . . ” Carolyn looked from Dalton to Chumley. “I don’t want to see either of you again for the rest of the day. If you need me, call Errin. They’re more forgiving than I am.” She made a gesture and turned toward town, and Naomi and her lot followed her like a troop of corporate soldiers.

  Dalton felt his shoulders droop as he watched them all go.

  “Sheriff?” Chumley asked, stepping up beside him.

  “Seems kind of silly calling me that now, doesn’t it?” Dalton held out a callused hand, and Chumley eyed it warily before giving it a tentative shake. “Nice to meet you, Chumley. You can call me Dalton.”

  Chapter 10

  Dalton didn’t often spend time in his cellar, but right now it was the closest thing he’d ever get to proper air conditioning. The air down there hovered at a respectable 26 degrees Celsius, a whole six degrees cooler than his living room upstairs.

  “So, what are we going to do now?” Chumley asked from the aubergine loveseat shoved against the far cellar wall.

  “Hell if I know.” Dalton took a swig of his whiskey and stared up at the rafters. “Carolyn’ll feel sorry for me in a few days; she always does.”

  “You don’t seem very angry about it.” Chumley had declined Dalton’s whiskey and instead sipped on an old bottle of champagne Dalton found in the back of the refrigerator.

  Dalton shrugged. He’d drank so much already his fingers and toes were tingling. “Never wanted to be sheriff in the first place.”

  “Then why did you take the job?”

  “Old Man Sondhi was retiring, and I needed something to do. He said it was easy; you just tell people what to do and call it a day.”

  “Don’t you have to be elected sheriff?”

  “Not on Molorthia Six.”

  Chumley tilted his head to one side, or maybe the whole room was tilting. “What did you do before you were sheriff? You never said.”

  “Had a shop. Couldn’t bring myself to run it anymore. Sold it.”

  Chumley was starting to slouch over. He picked up the champagne bottle again and glugged some more of it, spilling a few dribbles on his shirt. “Wish I could nip out for a rolly,” he muttered, plunking the bottle back onto the wooden crate sitting beside the loveseat.

  Dalton straightened. “Pardon?”

  “Cigarette,” Chumley said. “I wish I had a cigarette.”

  “Oh, right. Give you lung cancer.”

  “Give me something to do, more like.” Chumley paused. “Aren’t you from England, too?”

  Dalton’s lips twisted into a frown. “How do you know?”

  “I can hear a bit of it in your voice. Your accent . . . it’s like someone painted over it with American and a few other things.”

  “That’s Molorthia Six for you,” Dalton said. “It’s a melting pot, and England was a long time ago. You should have heard me when we had neighbors from Kentucky. Everything was y’all, y’all, y’all.”

  Chumley offered him an intoxicated grin. “Oh, that’s like when I was living with Gran, and our neighbors were from Yorkshire.” His smile faltered, and he partook of more champagne. “Gran’s parents came from Chandigarh, but my granddad was an Englishman through and through. I was named after him.”

  Dalton’s molasses-slow thoughts had finally succeeded in the tiniest of revelations, and he said, “Hold on a sec. I’ll be right back.”

  He swayed as he climbed the stairs, gripping the banister for good measure. He rummaged through a few kitchen drawers until he found what he was looking for, then returned to the cellar, tossing a half-crushed pack of cigarettes and a lighter to Chumley.

  “They’re a bit stale, but you can have them,” Dalton said, flopping back onto the creaky old armchair. Sudden vertigo made him scrunch his eyes shut.

  “Thanks.” Chumley fumbled out one cigarette and lit it. “Ugh, these are bad.”

  They sat in silence, each consumed with his own thoughts. Once Chumley’s cigarette had burned down to a nub, he sat forward and said, “We should save our reputations.”

  Dal
ton snorted, feeling fractionally more coherent. “Are you going to buy Carolyn a bouquet of flowers and tell her how sorry we are?”

  “It’s my fault we’re both in trouble.” Chumley bowed his head. “I want to make things right.”

  “It’s our fault.” Dalton paused, thoughtful. “What do you have in mind?”

  Creases formed in Chumley’s forehead. “I keep thinking about the Greens.”

  Dalton tensed. “What about them?”

  “I saw the ones that attacked the hotel. They were awful, murdering those people. But the ones outside the other night were different. They had kids with them. Plant kids, I mean, not people kids. And some of them were singing.”

  Dalton could feel his eyebrows shoot up toward his hairline. “You’re out of your fecking mind.”

  “But they were! And it sounded so sad. They all seemed sad. I mean, I’m no expert on plant psychology, but I’ve seen documentaries about refugees, and that’s exactly what they looked like.”

  “They’re running from the fires. Wild animals even do that.”

  “Wild animals don’t pack up their belongings and bring them with them.”

  “You said they had a wagon?”

  Chumley nodded. “Full of things, yes. It had wheels and everything.”

  “Don’t make them sound so human.”

  Chumley’s shoulders bobbed in an inebriated shrug. “Just telling you what I saw.” He frowned, tilted his head again, and said, “Fecking?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You said ‘fecking’ a minute ago. Is that Irish?”

  Dalton slouched sideways in his armchair to get more comfortable. “Did I? Yeah, it’s Irish. We had neighbors from Kill . . . Kill . . . Kilkenny, too.” His vision blurred. “How do you want to save our reputations? ‘Cause I got nothin’.”

  “We can put out the fires so the Greens stop evacuating their land.”

  Dalton found himself sitting bolt upright and feeling almost sober. “What?”

  Chumley’s eyes glistened with a sudden intensity. “You want to protect the town, right?”

  “And what, you and I are going to just walk up to a raging wildfire and dump a few buckets of water on it, call it a day?”

  Chumley bit his lower lip. “Well, not us, specifically. But we can go there and see what’s going on, then come up with a plan based on whatever we see. Does anyone on this planet have a copter?”

  “Nobody in this town does.”

  “We can at least see how big the fires are and hire a fleet of copters to dump water on them.”

  Dalton thought about it. “Carolyn was just asking me the other day if I’d send someone up that way and have a look at things. But how are we going to find a fleet of copters capable of hauling water on Molorthia Six? Hell, where are we going to get water? The Rosa’s been dry for months.”

  “There must be a lake somewhere. Or an ocean?”

  “Not close enough to here for it to make sense.”

  “Frontier Care United, then,” Chumley said, with conviction. “It’s the biggest need here right now, more important than air conditioners.”

  The man was absolutely right. “We need to tell Carolyn what we’re doing.” Dalton rose, and his body remembered that he’d drank a significant portion of alcohol over the past hour. He gripped the arm of the chair and felt the cellar floor rocking beneath him. “Maybe in a while, though. Carolyn sees me like this, she’ll kill me all over again.”

  “This is a terrible idea.”

  “But you said!”

  “I was drunk!” Dalton stood in his living room facing Chumley, who’d changed into a fresh outfit that still smelled like the charity shop from which it had been purchased. “Driving up to the forests is suicide!”

  “But we have to find out what’s really going on up there.” Chumley’s expression remained resolute. “I saw how violent the Greens can be. I also saw how peaceful they can be.”

  Dalton kept shaking his head. “So you saw a group of pacifists. Fact is, you have no way of knowing what you’ll run into up in the forests. You haven’t heard anyone mention anything about Piney Gulch since you’ve been here, have you?”

  “I’ve been a little busy getting the stuffing beaten out of me. Why?”

  Dalton cleared his throat a few times. “Piney Gulch is a small oasis at the bottom of a ravine about twenty kilometers from the southern edge of the forests. It was one of the only places with vegetation that the Greens wouldn’t touch. A hot spring bubbled up in the middle of it, and people built cabins and a playground and a picnic shelter there to attract visitors. Folks who ran it made a killing in rental income.”

  “Right.” Chumley’s brow furrowed.

  “Five years back, people rented out the entire oasis for a big family reunion. They had games, campfires, barbecues, you name it. Everyone was having a grand old time until the Greens showed up.” Dalton closed his eyes and silently counted to ten. “There were forty-eight people at Piney Gulch that day. Two survived.”

  Chumley’s eyes widened. “What happened to the survivors?”

  Dalton coughed, lightly. “The man who survived lost his arm when a Green tore it from its socket and ate it in front of him. He crawled into a tunnel on the playground that the Greens were too big to fit inside, praying for a quick death.”

  “And the other survivor?” Chumley asked faintly.

  “She was using the toilet when the attack started. She heard the screams and stayed inside while she called for help. Her husband and kids were killed while she hid in a stall with her comm unit.” Dalton coughed again. “A rescue team arrived in time to save the man from bleeding to death. The Greens had fled already. He spent three weeks in intensive care, having a new arm grown from his own stem cells.” His shoulder prickled at the memory. “That’s what will happen to you if you go barging like a fool into their forests.”

  A sickly pallor had washed over Chumley’s face.

  “Stay here, in Richport,” Dalton said. “I’ll call around to the other cities; see if there isn’t a copter someone can send out that way.”

  “Maybe that is a good idea,” Chumley said, at length.

  “I’ll go ahead and start making calls.”

  Chumley sighed morosely as he ran a soggy rag over the gray, laminate countertop in Dalton’s kitchen. He’d offered to help clean while Dalton spoke with his colleagues, but he would have much rather been out looking for the remains of his Cube.

  Was he wrong to think the Greens he’d seen marching single-file through the night were of friendlier stock than the ones that invaded the hotel?

  He paused in his work to light up another stale cigarette. He puffed on it thoughtfully and strained to hear fragments of Dalton’s conversation issuing from the gap beneath the closed bedroom door. “ . . . are you sure that . . . but this is urgent! . . . you’re kidding me . . . ”

  There came a click as Dalton turned his doorknob. Chumley made a point of scrubbing very hard at a stain.

  “I’ve got bad news,” Dalton said, stepping into the kitchen. An ashen pallor had settled over his face.

  “No copters?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘none.’ Folks over in Mount Olympus have one they use for aerial tours, but it’s broken down and they’re waiting for the replacement parts to come in from Earth. Only other place that’s got one is Fred, and they use theirs to fly emergency victims to the hospital.”

  “What about airships?”

  Dalton shook his head.

  “Hot air balloons?”

  Dalton scowled at him.

  “What are we going to do, then? Just wait for the next attack?”

  “We’ll talk to Carolyn,” Dalton said. “See if she has any better ideas.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then you and I get to drive north after all
and see what’s going on for ourselves.”

  Carolyn appeared most displeased when Dalton and Chumley stepped into her office later that afternoon.

  She’d appeared even more displeased when Dalton laid out their plan.

  “I’m not sure you two understand what ‘placed on indefinite leave’ and ‘talk to Errin, not me’ means,” she said, standing behind her desk once more. One of Naomi Schwartzman’s FCU cronies sat in the corner taking notes, to Dalton’s mild annoyance.

  “We won’t be doing it in any official capacity. Since we don’t have the means to fly, we wondered if we could acquire a city vehicle. Unless you have a better idea.” Dalton flashed his teeth at her. She didn’t smile back.

  “Lending you a city vehicle is out of the question,” Carolyn said. “Not while you’re on leave. Right now, you’re just another civilian.”

  “Then how are we going to take a look at what’s going on up there?” Chumley asked. “You want to find out, don’t you?”

  Carolyn’s mouth twitched. “I’d already asked Dalton to do something about it, but that was before the Green attacks. There has to be a better option than this.”

  “We can’t fly, that’s for sure,” Dalton said.

  Carolyn remained silent for at least an entire minute, during which Dalton and Chumley glanced at each other with equal parts hope and dread.

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said softly. “I’m just as curious as you are about what’s causing those fires, and it’s important we get to the bottom of this before anyone else gets hurt. Since you can’t fly and you can’t use a city vehicle, you’ll have to find a vehicle of your own to take.”

  Dalton dipped his head. “I understand.”

  “Dalton, are you sure you’ll be able to handle something like this? Because I know your history, and I don’t want this to have a bad effect on you.”

  “This will be surveillance only. We drive in, take a look around, and report back our findings. Should be easy enough if the Greens haven’t learned how to outrun a bus.”

  “Where are you getting a bus from?”