Cold Allies (20 page)

Pelham pushed him into a chair.

“What’s wrong with him?” a female voice asked.

The colonel’s reply was an angry shout. “That’s fucking classified information, major! Get him something! Now!”

Gordon heard steps hurrying away.

“I can’t,” Gordon said, rocking back and forth in the chair. “God. I can’t.”
I can’t deal with this.

Pelham was calm now. “There wasn’t any way you could have helped them, son. There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

Gordon opened his eyes and saw he was in the clinic.

“You okay now?” Pelham asked.

“No,” Gordon whispered.

A woman major in a white lab coat came back with a syringe. She pulled up Gordon’s sleeve and plunged the needle into his arm.

“The syringes,” Gordon said dully. “I should have remembered the syringes.”

“It wouldn’t have done them any good,” Pelham replied.

The doctor looked at them both.

“Get out,” Pelham told her.

“We better put him in bed,” she said. “As much Valium as I’ve pumped into him, he’s going to fall out of the chair in a minute.”

“Out of here, major.”

After a hesitation, she obeyed.

“I want you to get some rest,” the colonel told Gordon. “Take a day or so. Toshio will command your unit.”

The drug was saturating Gordon’s body with lethargy. He blinked and remembered the lieutenant’s wide blue eyes. When had he realized she was dead? He’d been trying to keep the mask on her face, the rubber skirting of it around her head like the petals of an olive-green flower. Then she wasn’t seeing him. She wasn’t seeing anything. And never would again.

Gordon shuddered.

“Cold?” Pelham asked;

Cold,
Gordon thought.
Cold to the marrow.
There was a lump of ice in the pit of his stomach.

“We’ll have you up and running again in a couple of days.”

Gordon shook his head. Afternoon sunlight flowed over the linoleum like spilled honey. “No. Not the CRAV again,” he said. His lips felt thick, his tongue awkward.

“You don’t want to command a CRAV?” Pelham was surprised. “Why?”

The only part of Pelham in Gordon’s vision was the colonel’s sinewy, folded hands. Strong, brown hands. “Alone,” Gordon said.

“What?”

“Alone.” Gordon had been alone all his life. In
high school. Through college. All the time he’d sat in front of the Nintendo screen.

And in the CRAV he was the loneliest of all.

He hadn’t known that. Not until now. The diamond-hard armor of the robot had kept out more than rockets. It had kept him from bullets of humiliation and heartache.

Gordon suddenly saw how dangerous that armor was, and how destructive the fantasy of computer games. They had made him so self-absorbed, he had become an adult without understanding consequences.

“You’ll change your mind,” Pelham said.

“No,” Gordon said without taking his eyes from the sunlit floor. “I won’t.”

IN THE LIGHT

Past the pane of window glass, so old it had gone slightly wavy, stood a low, circular stone wall, its center filled with winter-brown leaves. Beyond that was a rusted swing set, its childless swings rocking in the wind.

Rita turned. Light trickled through the grand floor-to-ceiling windows, caressed the stacks, the books. Against one wall of the library a fire crackled in an ornate stone hearth.

“Hello?” she called. Her voice was absorbed into the thick, cool air. Silence dropped like dying birds from the fourteen-foot ceiling.

“Hello?”

No one answered.

“Read me your book,” a voice said.

She whirled. The person standing by one of the stacks looked like Dr. Gladdings, her old professor of anatomy. But when she looked closer, his face swam, as though she were seeing it through one of the antique windowpanes.

“I’m dead,” she told him.

“You know a lot about death,” he said. “That’s why I’ve asked you here. Read me a book about it.”

If she were dead, she shouldn’t be afraid. She shouldn’t be wanting to run. The thing that looked like Dr. Gladdings took a, step toward her. She blundered back, fetching up against the chill of the window.

There was a book in her hand. She’ looked at the cover.

Gray’s Anatomical Book of the Dead.

With a spasm of fear she tossed the book away. It hit the, marble floor, making a musical, languid clatter.

So this
is
what the brain experiences in the moment of extinction,
she thought. She had always wondered what those, final synapse firings would be like. Now she wondered how long they would last.

Dr. Gladdings was at her shoulder, so close-that she could feel the cold radiating from his skin.

“You always were a curious girl,” he said.

She swallowed hard. Probably she should say the Act of Contrition now, but it was too late, as late as the gas mask, as late as the atropine. Beyond the glass in the windows she could hear sleet beginning to fall, rattling on the dead leaves, tapping on the empty playground swings.

“Did it hurt?” Gladdings asked with an odd, flabby smile.

“I’m sorry?”

“Death,” he said. “Did it hurt? You always wondered about that.”

Death had breathed at her through the gaps in the barn roof. It had sidled through the narrow breaches in the boards and clapped invisible hands over her mouth. With a grimace she recalled, her terror. It
hadn’t lasted long. Fatal within, seconds.

“Hurt?” she said. “No. Not much.”

“Good. That’s good.”

Then he was sitting behind the librarian’s desk: The sleet crescendoed. As he looked at her, his head began melting into his shoulders. His eyes. Oh, His eyes were doing something strange.

My God,
she thought.
What huge eyes he has.

Dr. Gladdings smiled an eerie, shapeless smile. “The better to see you with, my dear.”

CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

The next morning, Gordon was awakened by two MPs. They told him to get dressed, that Pelham wanted to see him. He put on his fatigues and followed them out of the clinic.

It was when he was walking across the foggy yard that he began to wonder how his CRAV was and who, if anyone, had taken it over.

Oddly, he didn’t care. Not really. Not as he cared before the deaths in the barn. Funny. Now that his life had been revealed for the comic-book fiction it was, he realized that if he had any sense, he wouldn’t go back in the unit.

But people were always doing things that weren’t good for them, weren’t they? They didn’t watch their cholesterol. They didn’t exercise enough. They smoked.

Gordon’s vice was that he loved the soft edges of illusion.

He’d taught himself to view life through a television screen. The program was comfortable, and he’d been watching it so long he wasn’t sure he knew how to change channels. Or even if he wanted to.

The MPs left him at Colonel Pelham’s door and walked away without a word. Gordon hesitated, then turned the knob and entered. Pelham was standing; a stranger was seated in his chair. The sight of the four-star general was so astounding that for an awkward moment Gordon forgot to salute.

“As you were,” the general said.

Gordon glanced at Pelham. The colonel looked ill
at ease. The general looked pissed-off.

“Sit down, sergeant,” Pelham told him gently.

Gordon sat

The general was a small man with a balding head and cat-yellow-eyes. “What happened to Captain Beaudreaux?” he asked.

“Sir?” Gordon asked in alarm. Looking from the general to Pelham.

“The captain who was with you in Pons,” the general snapped.

It was easier looking at Pelham, so Gordon did. “She was killed, sir. If she was at Pons, she was killed.”

“Bullshit, sergeant!” the general roared.

“Just answer the question, sergeant,” the colonel said in a soothing voice.

“I want to know what the aliens are doing with her,” th
e
general said: “I want to know what their intentions are.”

‘The aliens, sir?”

“The blue light!” The general’s face was cherry red with anger. “Goddamn it, sergeant! The blue light took her away!”

SEO DE URGEL, SPAIN

Wasef stepped over the bodies of the elderly couple. On the wood stove a pot of coffee was boiling over, filling the kitchen with its burnt reek. A roll of Spanish sausage, a slab of cheese, and a loaf of crusty bread sat on a counter. The pair must have been about to have breakfast when his men shot them.

He took the pot from the stove and set it aside. On the wall, a canary sang in a wooden cage, oblivious to the deaths of its masters, unaware that it, too, would soon die. Wasef picked up a paper bag and spread some seed at the bottom of the cage. After a moment’s thought, he opened the cage door.

The bird didn’t fly out. It cocked its head and stared at him with its glass-bead eyes.

Wasef opened the back door to the sunlit, enclosed garden. If the bird decided to save itself, Wasef saw, it would have company. In the garden, a lark trilled from the dark green depths of a blooming laurel. By a thicket of climbing roses, grasshoppers sang.

Leaving the door open, Wasef turned away. The small house was immaculate except for the splatters of blood and brain. He looked down at the old woman. Her black skirt was up to her knees. The soles of her feet were clean.

Before he left the kitchen, he made himself a sandwich, using his one good hand. He took a jar of home-pickled olives from near the stove, stepped over the bodies, and left the house.

A few of his men were lounging under the dense shade of a cork tree, sharing bread, oranges, and cheese. Finishing his own looted sandwich in four huge bites, Wasef trudged up the hill to the bivouac area of Infantry Battalion C. On the way he passed Gamal Rashid, who was sitting by himself, reading. Wasef stopped, seeing the cover of the book.

Gamal was reading about the blue lights.

“Captain!” he shouted.

Gamal nearly dropped the book. His eyes widened with alarm.

Putting the jar of olives down, Wasef snatched the paperback from the captain’s hands.
The Eridanian Way,
the cover read.

“Not a scientific text,” Gamal was prattling in embarrassment, “but then not much scientific is published about UFOs.”

“Damn you,” Wasef said under his breath. Steadying the book between his cast and his stomach, he tore off the cover and stuffed it into the dirt of a nearby potted fern.

A blush turned Gamal’s dark neck maroon. “I was hoping to find out ...” he began.

Wasef threw the book at him. Gamal caught it. “Don’t show interest in such things. The men distrust you already, and where will you be, Mr. Future President, when your constituents turn away?”

Gamal bit his lip. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

Something else to feel guilty for, Wasef thought. Such a number of choices: the dead he had left in the buttercups of Bagnères-de-Luchon; the old couple here in Seo de Urgel whose blood brightened their terra-cotta floor. Now he must do penance for the death of this young man’s aspirations.

“My father laughs at me, too:’ Gamal told him. “He says I don’t have a political mind.”

“You don’t.” Wasef sat, dug his hand into the jar, and brought out a palm full of dripping, brownish purple olives. “Here,” he said, offering them to Gamal. “Eat and forget about the future.”

The captain frowned at Wasef’s hand. ‘We can’t forget about the future.”

“Food,” Wasef said, lowering his mouth and sucking up three of the slick, small olives. He chewed the bitter meat from them and spat the pits into the cobblestone road. “Food is the future. If you want your constituents not to fight with each other, you will promise them food and hide the fact that you are an intellectual. They don’t want a smart man to lead them, Gamal Rashid. Only a shrewd one.”

Gamal eyed him.
“You
are a shrewd man.”

“Ah, yes,” he laughed. “Perhaps I will be President.”

Gamal didn’t smile. “Perhaps you will.”

Taken aback by the captain’s somber expression, Wasef blinked. “It was a joke; I have no interest in what happens after the war.”

“You must,” Gamal retorted. “Listen to me, colonel. In a few months we will be handed the responsibility for the world. If we must drag conquered Europe down into fundamentalist ignorance, I would rather lose than win this war.”

Lose or win the war.
The phrase seemed made of nonsense words. Wasef knew logically that wars had their endings, but his heart told him otherwise. There was only strategy and killing, the hollow thuds of artillery and the squeak of tanks.

“ ‘As you are, you are led,’ ” the colonel recited with an acid grin. “Perhaps we get the leadership we deserve.”

“I do not listen to the mullahs. You know, colonel, the prerequisite for being a Muslim should not be stupidity.”

Dig into Gamal Rashid deeply enough, and the softness was gone, Wasef saw. He had struck iron. The boy was staring at him, chin high, mouth set in a firm line. He looked Presidential.

“You are a one-man revolution, captain,” he said kindly. “Wait until you have someone to fight with you.”

“Don’t tell me to wait,” Gamal huffed. “We Arabs have been waiting eight centuries for enlightenment and freedom to return.”

Wasef caught a flicker of yellow out of the corner of his eye.

“A canary,” Gamal said, his own head lifting in wonder.

“Look! It is a canary.”

Somehow the bird had made it out of the house to perch, singing, on the branch of an olive tree. Had freedom lured it from its prison, or did the smell of death drive it out? It wouldn’t live long, Wasef knew. The lessons of survival were too quick and hard for a caged bird to master.

“A miracle,” Gamal said, grinning.

The captain did not know the deaths from which this miracle had sprung; nor did he stop to think that in death the miracle would end.

Despite the heat of the midmorning sun, Wasef felt a chill. Gamal was wrong about the eight centuries of waiting. Only death, not the Arabs, would be so patient.

“You are going?” Gamal asked as Wasef got awkwardly to his feet.

“We must get some rest before sundown.”

The boy’s eyes were still shining. “A good sign, don’t you think, colonel? Don’t you think the canary is a good sign?”

“Perhaps.”

From the olive tree the bird trilled a series of liquid notes. Wasef looked up at the branch in dread. The canary’s song fluttered in his heart as though wings of darkness beat there.

IN THE LIGHT

Justin walked up the slope of the grass and into the shadowed stand of pines. A few yards into the forest he stepped out into his sunny Florida backyard.

Lemons hung on the tree like Christmas ornaments. Clouds, soft and gray as rabbit fur, scooted across the rain-scented sky. At the corner of the house, Harding was waiting for him, standing in the chill chatter of the palms.

“Did you like your visit?” the XO asked.

Harding’s face was sagging under the weight of gravity. His eyes were sliding down his cheeks. Justin looked away, not wanting to see the eyes slip off his chin and fall to the ground like fat, blue tears.

“We have to talk,” Justin told him.

They were in the kitchen, his mother sitting across the table from him, her hair going from gray to brown to black.

“What did you want to talk about?” his mother asked.

“I don’t want to be here,” he said.

The rattle of the palms grew to thunder.

“I want to go back. I think you should send me back now. You’ve learned everything you can from me.”

“Not everything,” she replied, “Sit down, Justin. Sit down and have some milk and cookies.”

“Don’t do this to me!” he screamed.

Suddenly they were all there: his mother, the bus driver, and Harding. Their eyes were huge, startled, and black.

“I know where I am now, don’t you see? I know what’s happening. Stop pretending to be something you’re not!”

Time froze. Outside in the yard the clamor of the palms diminished to a breathless hiss. For an instant Justin was afraid, more afraid than he’d ever been in his life, certainly more afraid than he’d ever been during battle. Maybe he didn’t want to see. Maybe the illusion was better.

A cold, wet wind blew in through the open window, soothing the tension in the room.

“I think he’s had a bad day at school,” his mother said worriedly.

Harding nodded. “Maybe he wants to drive the bus again. Maybe he’d like Ann to come back. Maybe he needs some milk and cookies.”

The bus driver reached out and put cool jellyfish fingers on Justin’s arm. “Why do you want to go back if you’re so afraid to die? What are you most afraid of, Justin?”

Justin leaped from his chair, ran out the door, and sprinted to the safety of the pines. On the other side of the grove of trees it was night again. He watched a young, swarthy-faced Arab captain amble out of the trees and cross to the corrugated metal boathouse. The officer opened the door, hesitated, then entered.

When the Arab was gone, Justin trotted down the sloping lawn. “Hey, kid,” he said.

At the end of the pier, the boy looked up. “We have to get out.”

The boy reeled in his line and selected another sinker from the red tackle box.

“You hear me?”

“I hear you,” the kid said. He tied his tackle and cast the rod. In the still moonlight, the reeds were clinking ice-music, broken-glass chords.

“They take you where you want to go,” the kid was saying, angry, “but you don’t give ’em no never mind. They listen to what your heart tells ’em, but you don’t give a shit. They wouldn’t have took you if you didn’t want out. All they want to do, damn it, is make you happy.”

Justin stared at the back of the kid’s head. God. He hadn’t wanted out of war that badly, had he? Had he been so afraid, even more afraid than the other pilots, that the aliens sensed the difference? The alien sat, a lump of clay, next to the boy.

“What makes you think that?” Justin asked.

The kid’s eyes were moss-green in the glow of the dock light. “I got it figured, and you would, too, if you had any sense. This is the genie in the bottle. This is the three magic wishes.”

Justin said, “This is just some damned dream.”

“It’s a dream,” the alien agreed in a doting-father voice, a voice perfect for little-boy confessions or for going to sleep in laps. We want to know your dearest wish. It’s wishes that call us.”

Tap-tap-tap. The sound from the reeds was tender now, the noise of gentle rain- on leaves.

“I want to go back,” Justin said.

Its lips bubbled up into an ironic smile. “Do you?”

Yes,
he told himself, hoping that he was thinking hard enough and sincerely enough so that the alien would hear that answer and not the treacherous
No
of his fear.

CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

Gordon watched the video, sitting bolt upright in the chair, the nails of his right hand scratching the skin of his left so hard, it raised welts. On the screen the small lieutenant was dying and pigeons were tumbling from the rafters.