"As you were, soldier," she said. "And don't get too fucked up tonight. Like you said, we've got a big day tomorrow. Don't let anyone else do anything stupid, either."
Zeke sketched a half-salute along with a half-grin, he moved further into the tent to rejoin the team. Bess wondered whether she should play the policeman tonight, make sure that if there was going to be drinking it would at least be moderate and furtive, but decided against it. Zeke would spread the word, and everyone would hold themselves to a nip or two. The consequences of stupidity at this point, only hours away from their target, were too monumental to even mention, and the people along with her on this little jaunt were professionals.
But she'd keep an eye on things anyway. No need for dramatics, but her presence would ensure their better natures prevailed.
She kept the suit on with the hood thrown over her shoulders and walked through the little aluminum archway that separated the 'airlock' from the tent proper, and noted with approval that half her cadre were already sleeping, curled up beneath their suit material staying warm. It had been hot all day-she'd overheard two or three of the scientists chatting throughout the trek, mentioning that world temperatures had gone up an average of six or seven degrees since the alien air processors had begun their work-but it was still winter in Colorado and the night would be chilly.
The remaining team members were sitting Indian-style on the plastic floor of the tent, chatting and occasionally erupting into muted laughter as they exchanged crudities. Bess wondered at this for a moment, knowing that these men and women had seen their people die today, watched as their friends and colleagues had been eaten by monsters from outer space, but she soon realized that this was how humans dealt with pain, anger, helplessness-with humor, with camaraderie, with a few ounces of grain alcohol and the sure knowledge that they were within reach of their goal. So, she joined them.
"Hey, Boss," said Gomer happily, motioning her to take a seat on the hard, uneven ground beneath them. "We were just telling ghost stories and wishing we had a campfire."
"A campfire," said Bess, lowering herself gratefully to the floor, feeling the ache in her calves and knowing she'd be feeling the effects of their long, hard hike in the morning. "That would be a sight, wouldn't it?"
Fire was a no-no in New America, of course. The price they paid for oxygen was so high, the dangers of suffocation so real, that combustion was a matter for serious governmental checks, and usually the only place you could find it was in the laboratory when the scientists were using their burners and torches to perform some dangerous experiment. There was a kitchen fire when she was a girl of seven, and it had been talked about ever since as possibly the most dangerous moment in the caverns' history.
"I've got one," said Mariah, one of the soldiers. Bess didn't know her very well-she'd been conscripted from generator security (a different organization than the police), but they'd chatted a few times and Bess knew her as a pleasant young woman, a hard worker and a gorgeous figure who was in high demand among the men of New America. There were rumors that she'd dealt with a too-amorous suitor once by breaking both of his arms. Bess had never heard any details or, indeed, seen anyone walking around in a double cast, but she could see why those rumors had credence-Mariah's beauty wasn't the plush, curvy sexiness of some women but rather the hard, muscled attraction of a strong female animal in her prime.
"In the early days of New America," she started, a slight grin on her face and a faraway look in her eyes, as though she was seeing those bygone days, "there was a young couple working in the yeast room."
"Fucking yeast room," muttered Zeke, with feeling, from across the circle, several soldiers laughed. They'd all had shifts in and among the food vats, scrubbing tanks and sterilizing pipes, working six-hour shifts in the worst miasma New America had to offer. They would come off those shifts and would scrub for days before the odor reluctantly left their skin.
"This was before Level Six," continued Mariah, ignoring the interruption as any good storyteller would, forcing her words into the hush of the tent. "And Level Five was still underway. The boring machines were balky and broken, most of the time, so the original settlers were, more often than not, digging with shovels, trowels, their hands. Passing rock and dirt back up the new tunnels to be dumped in the garages in what used to be one of the United States' missile complexes."
Bess had seen the piles of dirt and rocks, scree spilling from them in cascades. She had seen the mountains grow in the old Air Force caverns over the years until they finally shut down the rooms as filled. She'd marveled at the industry of those early settlers.
She found a more comfortable position, continued to eat her beans, and listened to the tale.
"Every once in a while, in spite of the best guesses of the engineers, they'd hit a vein of metals or tunnel into an unstable area, and they'd have to pack up their tools and try a different direction," said Mariah, closing her eyes as if in memory. She hadn't been there, of course-none of them had, except for maybe Curtis and Sandford. But it sure seemed as though she were narrating events from her own past.
If only we still had a market for novels, thought Bess, Mariah would write a best-seller.
"This young couple knew about these aborted tunnels, of course," she said. "And with privacy at a premium, they needed some time alone..."
"Four or five minutes, at least," said one of the scientists. Everyone, but Mariah, laughed.
"And so they punched out after their shift was over, and they kind of moseyed on down to Five, and strangely enough they managed to avoid all the patrols..." more laughter "...and they turned on their flashlight and they found one of the tunnels that had been left as a bad bet.
"It was a little spooky down there, of course, what with the walls of rough stone surrounding them and the air thin because the pumps weren't fully on-line yet, the dim light of the torch made the shadows black and blacker, but they were looking for some privacy and they weren't going to let a few shadows and a few low breezes or silly stories about dead miners stop them..."
Bess flashed back to her brother, the tall, handsome Hank. Hank had died in the collapse of Six when they'd happened upon a freak pocket of flammable gas and ignited it with the sparks of the main digging machine. She remembered his casual smile, his hair braided in a long tail down his back, the way he'd rub her shoulders and call her 'sprout' while they watched movies. She remembered his deep, manly laugh and the way the girls would flirt with him. It had taken them months to recover his body, and she'd decided that she hadn't wanted to see him that way, broken and desiccated, and so she'd skipped the funeral. For the millionth time, she wished she'd made a different decision, and for the millionth time she forced his image out of her mind. She blinked back tears, and listened.
"...and so they finally reached their destination." Mariah paused and opened her eyes, looking slowly around the circle at her audience. "They...um...they..."
"They screwed like weasels?" suggested Gomer helpfully and again there was a gust of laughter in the tent. This time, even Mariah smiled.
"They did what they'd come to do," she said as the laughter slowed and died. "then they lay there for a while in the darkness, holding each other, talking about their future and the future of humanity."
Silence for a long moment, as everyone pondered the words. They were fighting for humanity's future right now, miles away from every other human on the planet in a fragile tent on an unsure mission. They listened.
"They talked about children," said Mariah, seeming to look at Bess for a moment before slowly turning to the next person in the circle. Bess wondered whether the news of her baby-her gill baby, was the term-had been disseminated to everyone. "they talked about arming themselves with all the might of the United States arsenal, hidden underground within easy reach, and going back up some triumphant day. Blasting the alien bastards back to whatever galaxy they came from. They talked of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax..."
"...and cabbages," whispered Bess. "and kings." No one heard her.
"Then the girl-such a good-looking girl, just fifteen years old-realized she had to go to the bathroom."
A chuckle or two, but everyone was under the spell of the story, now. The lights in the tent were dim, and a slow breeze stirred outside, moving the heavy air against the plastic of the walls, the crackling sounds as the tent fabric shifted were magnified in the still of the night. Bess noticed that everyone leaned forward to hear, and she realized that Mariah had lowered her voice just a smidge-not enough to make her inaudible, but enough to draw her listeners closer. Bess leaned forward herself.
"She wanted to go back up to Three, but the boy wouldn't have any of it. 'There are plenty of places to piss,' he said, smiling at her, caressing her back, her neck, her butt. 'And the night's young'.
"Well," said Mariah, "she was fifteen. And she was excited and scared and still a little bit horny. But she was also a bit worried. 'What if the Corps gets me?' she asked, only half-joking.
"We all know about the Corps," said Mariah, and Bess saw a couple of nods. "The engineers, the original diggers of New America, who were building silos for our nukes, who were using the might of the American machinery to tunnel a mile beneath the Earth and who constructed NORAD and the other caverns we used for our final sanctuary. We all know about their bravery and skill and brilliance-and we know what happened that horrible day the ground shook and the ceiling crumbled and that squad of men found themselves trapped thousands of feet underground in a cave, with no hope for rescue and a dwindling supply of oxygen."
Bess shivered. It had been an important, often-told story of her childhood, an object lesson for kids growing up underground-the message that the world could shift at any time and kill you without malice or warning.
"The boy laughed. 'You believe in that kind of crap?' he asked. 'Fine, I'll come with you...'
" 'No,' said the girl. 'I'll be right back.'"
Mariah stopped for a second, looking around. "None of us believes that crap, either," she said. "All those stories about those doomed men realizing that there was no way out, and that the only way some of them could survive would be to kill the others, to conserve oxygen. The stories about how they drew straws-well, shoelaces-to see who would live, and who would die. The story about the last man, the guy who'd watched all his friends kill themselves to save him, and then who realized that he himself was going to die...well, they're just bogey stories, right?
"The girl still believed in the bogeyman," Mariah said, and now it was dead silent except for the subtle crinkle of the tent fabric against the dull breeze and the occasional snores and farts of the sleeping soldiers around them. "oh, not really-she knew that the spirits of those miners were long gone, just like the spirits of the six billion humans on the surface who'd had their blood sucked and their bodies eaten by the alien creatures-but she was fifteen. She still believed in God, she still believed in hope, she still half-believed in Santa Claus. And there was a small part of her who believed that the ghosts of the Corps were still fighting their way through the dirt, trying to find air, light and salvation.
"But, fifteen or not, she was a woman, and she didn't want to be patronized or taken care of by her man, no matter how good the sex was or how much she was looking forward to Round Two. So, she laughed, and she wrapped her cloak around her shoulders and went off into the darkness to find a good hole to piss in."
Mariah stopped.
They all sat there in the darkness, leaning forward, watching Mariah. She was silent for long moments, seeming to gaze through the dim air, through the walls of the tent, back through time and space. Finally, after what seemed hours, she continued.
"The girl traveled through the tunnels, this time, alone, making the trip more frightening. The shadows were deeper, darker, colder. She seemed to hear things-drips of water splashing on black rocks, the breath of the caverns soughing around her, almost speaking some low, terrifying language. The echoes of her footsteps. She traveled fifty feet...a hundred feet through the tunnels, her torch light a dim bubble of fragile safety against the crushing, frigid blackness.
"And then she heard a new sound."
Bess leaned forward, her food forgotten, everything forgotten.
"She froze in place. The noise had come from behind her. Had it been a call?
"Had it been a scream?
"She turned back and ran, her bladder bursting but her throbbing heart urging her onward, back into the darkness, toward her lover. She stumbled and fell, her torch skittering away from her and for one horrible, endless moment she was engulfed by the cold blackness, chilly fingers of breeze caressing her like the touch of a dead man, tracing patterns across her face, her back, her breasts-and then she was up, grabbing the torch, bleeding from skinned knees and torn hands and running again, faster.
"She skidded around the last corner, calling her lover's name, knowing in her head that nothing had happened, that he would still be lying there, smiling at her return.
"And yet..."
Every eye in the tent was locked on Mariah as she whispered those words, every breath stopped.
"He wasn't there," she said. "He had disappeared.
"The girl, half out of her mind with terror, half hoping against hope that he was just further back in the darkness, playing some cruel joke on her, moved forward, whispering his name. She played the torch along the ground, seeing the thin blanket they'd carried down with them, crumpled on the rock from their lovemaking. She saw the boy's torch set carefully on a ledge in the wall. And she saw...she saw..."
Mariah stopped and looked around the circle, looking each member of her audience in the eye in turn, her face still and slack. She sighed, and blinked, and shook her head slightly.
"On the ground, where she'd left her lover, was a shoelace. A long shoelace. The same shoelace, perhaps, that had been drawn by the lucky last survivor of the Corps. The shoelace that had saved his life-and made him witness to the death of all his friends. She moved closer, now fully crazed with fear and grief. She bent over, and picked the thing up.
"It was soaked with blood. Warm, fresh blood."
Silence.
"Jesus, Mariah," said one of the scientists, finally. "You're a twisted woman, you know that?"
Mariah looked at him for a second, her face still pale and unmoving, her eyes still hazy with what seemed memory-and then she smiled. "Absolutely," she said. "I'm as twisted as they come. Just a bit of advice, though: later, when you go to sleep? Don't think about my story. Don't wonder if the Corps is still down there, still fighting their way through the dirt, looking for warm life to extinguish."
Bess laughed, the spell partially broken. Around her, conversation started again, people finished up their food or snuck swigs of booze. Bess stood up and stretched. Gomer joined her.
"Nice story, huh boss?" he asked. "A regular put-you-to-sleep kind of story."
"If you're psychotic, maybe," she said. "You been drinking?"
"Nope," he said. "That comes after we set off the device. I may have a snort or two then."
"I'll join you," she said. "Care for a quick walk around the perimeter?"
He looked at her curiously. "I was getting ready to hit the sack," he said. "You worried about something?"
"No," she said. "I'm just feeling a little restless. We're so close right now..."
"Kid before Christmas," he said, smiling. "Sure, I'll come with you."
"No, get some rest," she said. "I'll just go check on the Bomb, make sure Curtis and Sanford are okay out there."
"I'm coming." said Gomer firmly, pulling his hood over his head and starting to attach his mask. "Remember Mariah's story? You know what happens when little girls go out on their own."
"Thanks, dad," she said, but she smiled as she said it. "I'll feel much safer with a big strong man protecting me."
He snorted. She could kick his ass, and they both knew it.
Around them people were settling in for the night, stretching out as much as possible in the cramped space of the oxygen tent, packs beneath their heads, guns and bows laid out next to them, atmosphere suits serving as blankets. Bess and Gomer finished zipping up and headed for the door just as one of the soldiers turned down the lights to sleeping levels. She looked around at her team, satisfied that they had done good work today. Tomorrow would be for the big prize, and she felt good about their chances.
The two exited the tent and ignited their torches, the sudden light throwing the barnyard into relief, the doors of the barn gaping like a monster's maw. Bess flashed back to the gigantic Digger that had eaten Chet. She shuddered a little, but Gomer didn't notice. They moved across the ground toward the ARM, toward Curtis and Sandford, who were doing some kind of maintenance on the machine. As they neared, Curtis looked up.
"Problems?" he asked.
"No," said Bess, moving up to the Bomb, looking with interest as Sandford manipulated some dials and made notes on readings. "How about here? This thing ready to go?"
"Absolutely," said Curtis, and Bess thought she detected some kind of repressed emotion behind his politician's voice. Pride? Sadness? Whatever it was, it was gone when he next spoke. "and I should thank you for making us all come to town, Bess. We found a county map in one of the houses, and apparently there's some kind of road that'll take us right to the alien facility-it wasn't on any of our atlases back in New America because it was too small. That'll save us a lot of time and energy tomorrow."
"Good," said Bess. "We're down some people now."
"I know," he replied. "We've paid a price today. But it'll all be worth it, I promise."
"Yeah," she said. "Tell me-what's it going to look like?"
"What?" he asked. "The ARM?"
"When we finally buck this bad boy to ground zero and turn it on, will we be able to tell it's working?"
"Oh, you'll be able to tell," he said, his voice serious. "I can promise you that."
"When..." she started, but suddenly stopped. "Did you feel that?"
"Oh, shit," said Gomer, looking around. Bess could see his eyes wide and wild through the plastic of his mask. "Incoming!"
The ground rumbled and suddenly buckled, sending Bess and her rifle flying in opposite directions. Her torch fell to the shaking earth and jittered around, sending its beam in a wild dance, making a chiaroscuro of the barnyard. She heard Curtis and Sandford cursing and fought to her feet as Gomer tried to run toward the tent across the undulating ground. Then the screams began.
"Everyone suit up!" she yelled as loudly as she could, looking around desperately for her firearm. She finally saw it and scooped it up. Another tremor struck, tossing her up into the air. This time, she managed to hold onto the gun, she landed on one knee and one hand, and was quickly up again and following Gomer. "Get the hell out of there!"
Curtis and Sandford, at the Bomb, trained their lights on the tent and Bess saw it shaking with sudden activity, as though it were a beehive humming under a sudden swat of a child's stick. She wondered if the seals would hold long enough for everyone to get their suits on-but that speculation was instantly rendered moot as the Diggers exploded up, from beneath it.
They weren't as big as the monster that they had faced earlier, but that was small comfort since there were three-no, four of the hideous things bursting through the ground, two of them tearing through the prophylactic plastic of the tent's walls. Human forms spilled out into the alien air, some of them half-dressed, some of them still moving, struggling to get their masks on. Many were already dead, and as Bess neared she saw rent torsos and severed limbs flying through the air, blood shining black in the harsh lights of the torches. She screamed with rage and frustration as a head came hurtling toward her. She dodged and averted her eyes, she didn't want to see who it was. She raised her rifle, preparing for battle as she ran.
Bullets whined through the thick air, splatting into the flesh of the Diggers as she and Gomer fired, blasting pieces of the things off in great, gooey lumps. Her shadow, cast from behind her, made it hard to see in detail what was going on, but from what she could see it was a complete massacre. The monsters dove onto humans and plunged into the ground, shaking the entire farmyard with every impact. Bess kept firing and watched with satisfaction as the head of her target crumpled beneath the fusillade, its body spasmed and jerked in death throes. Behind her came a horrifying creaking sound. She whirled in time to see the barn, that rickety structure that had managed to maintain its integrity for so many years, begin to buckle in a chorus of groans and cracks as the lumber snapped. The whole thing began to lean forward. Bess watched in horror as Curtis and Sandford frantically worked to release the wheels on the ARM's cart to escape the inevitable collapse and save the bomb.
Bereft of the light from their two torches, she could see only writhing figures at the tent-the wormlike silhouettes of the Diggers, horribly twisted and alien. The last few humans were struggling to escape the monsters and trying to get to any source of oxygen. Bess fired off another burst just as one of the creatures grabbed one of the survivors, causing human and Digger to blow to pieces. She screamed in anguish at what she'd had to do. What she had to do next was worse.
"They're yours, Gomer," she shouted, turning and sprinting back to the ARM. The ground had settled with the death of two of the monsters, but every couple of seconds another whoomp would occur as one of the Diggers slammed back into the earth. Bess found herself skip-dancing across the barnyard like a marionette being yanked by a spastic puppeteer. The barn was seriously leaning, still groaning in protest into the night. When she finally reached the Bomb cart she heard an ominous snap as some support beam finally gave way.
She threw herself as hard as she could at the cart. Curtis was on one side of it and Sandford on the other. The two men were heaving at the handles in rhythm, each surge giving them a few inches of ground. When Bess hit, the contraption jerked a half a foot, the wheels digging into the dirt but rolling. She saw that they'd need another foot or so before the ground started to slope down and to safety from the collapse. She planted her feet in the soil, crouched and grabbed the back of the ARM. Screaming with effort, she tensed and heaved, tensed and heaved in time with her fellow soldiers.
The cart moved another two inches. Then another. The sound of gunfire was still loud and she was comforted that Gomer was still attacking, still alive. The sharp, deafening reports were drowned out by the barn as it finally succumbed to gravity.
Something hit her in the back and her first, panicked reaction was to wonder if whatever it was had broken through her suit. She had no more time for any rational thought as the timbers of the falling barn slapped the ground next to her with Digger-sized impact. Dust and debris rose in a sudden cloud. Her panic and terror gave her instant strength. Though every fiber of her being screamed for escape, she kept pushing the cart, kept pushing, screaming again...
Finally, the cart started rolling downhill.
More wood crashed around her and she heard a surprised yelp ahead of her, the dust and dark prevented her from knowing which of the men had cried out. Adrenaline coursing through her body, she chased the cart, moving faster and faster away from the chaos. When she got far enough to feel safe, she took a quick glance up the hill.
The barn was flying apart and scattering in all directions, but the main mass of the thing had missed them. There were still boards, nails and random bits of detritus coming from the building like fleas from a dead animal. The Bomb was safe. She stopped pushing and ran to help Gomer.
It was hard to make out details in the dim light, but what she could see, looked like the aftermath of a war zone. There were craters everywhere and she stumbled into quite a few of them. Body parts were strewn around like fruit in some macabre garden. The haze of gunpowder mixed with the yellow air.
No sounds except for a low-pitched wheezing.
"Gomer!" she yelled. "Where the hell are you?"
Nothing.
"Dammit, man! I can't see you! Where are you?"