Earthbound (21 page)
Authors: Joe Haldeman
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #General
She got a plastic map from the table drawer and he unfolded it. He rubbed it for magnification, but, of course, nothing happened.
“Lucky it has a picture at all,” he muttered, and put a thick finger down in the middle of nowhere. “You follow the gravel road about three mile, where it makes a T with a two-lane. Go to the right, and it takes you into Holstock. Urgent care is there on the main street. Don’t know what you gonna pay with.”
“We’ll sort that out with them,” Roz said. “From there we go south?”
“Not unless you’re a bird. Crossroads in the middle of town, that’s County 2031. You might want to go north, to the left. Right would take you down to Yreka. I heard gunfire there and turned around.”
“But left goes up to the border.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to go that far.” He leaned close to the map, where he had his finger down. “Black dotted line here, that’s a fire road, gravel, won’t be marked. You follow it eight or ten mile, you get to the autoway, 241.”
“Which is where we took off from, this morning.” Paul studied it and pointed to where a blue line crossed 241. “That’s the river that goes by Funny Farm.” It was about an inch away. “What is that, fifty miles?”
“Forty, anyhow. Pretty hilly.”
“We have a lot of empty jugs,” I said. “Mind if we fill them up here?”
“Course,” she said. “You have food up at Funny Farm?”
“Eighty acres planted,” Roz said.
“Well, you can take some of ours to get there,” she said, “but you remember us, right? We might be knocking on your door one day.”
“We’ll remember,” Roz said. “I guess that’s the way of the world now.”
“The Lord helps them that helps themselves,” she said, staring at Roz. “But we are all His instruments.”
We emptied the plane wreck of everything that would be of value to us or our hosts. We pried out the executive folding bed from behind the cockpit for them; besides the water, they gave us a box of dehydrated emergency meals, enough to feed us all for several days. After that, I guess we’d have to shoot a deer or catch some fish. Germaine gave us some line; both Namir and Dustin knew something about fishing.
Paul insisted that I not help with the grave-digging, and I didn’t protest much. My palms were raw. Elza had snipped away the flaps of skin and dressed them with gauze.
I helped wrap Alba and Rico and Stack in blue NASA blankets, while the others used pick and shovel to carve holes out of the root-laced soil.
There was some grisly discussion of the riot gun and Alba’s thumb. For it to fire, it had to read her thumbprint on the pistol grip. We didn’t know whether the sensor would work without power. Namir studied it, though, and used a screwdriver and hex wrench to disable it. The thing would only fire single-shot, but how many shots would you need?
She had been Christian, so we improvised a cross marker and Germaine read from the Bible. Rico and Stack were atheists, but Roz quoted Buddha for them, for their journey.
Our own journey shouldn’t be long delayed, but we were all exhausted, and the sun was going down. Elza and Dustin, with their broken bones, got Germaine’s discarded bed. We gave Card the pallet Germaine had made for Dustin. Elza had managed to stitch up his head wound one-handed, with my help.
Card didn’t seem too badly hurt, but he hadn’t said two words, and he didn’t seem to follow conversations. Maybe he was dwelling on his other personalities, still as dead as Alba and Rico and Stack.
I took a cup of tea out to where he was sitting alone on the cabin porch. He didn’t respond when I set the tea down next to him.
“Almost too much to handle,” I said.
“Almost?” He made a ghastly smile, a grimace. “I thought that nothing I would ever do would be crazier than Mars. Maybe it wasn’t Mars, though—maybe it was
you
. I had a nice, quiet life until you came back into it. Now everything is completely fucked up and confusing and people are dying left and right!”
you
. I had a nice, quiet life until you came back into it. Now everything is completely fucked up and confusing and people are dying left and right!”
“Drink the tea, Card.”
“But it’s true! If you hadn’t stumbled on the Martians they’d still be hiding underground, and we wouldn’t have the Others fucking with every fucking thing.”
“They were right next door. If I hadn’t stumbled onto them, someone else would.”
“But someone else didn’t. You’re to blame for the whole fucking shooting match.”
It’s not as if I had never followed that line of reasoning myself. “So what do you suggest I do?”
He wiped away tears. “If you had a time machine, you could go back and kill yourself before it started.”
“Sure, that would work.”
“This might.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a revolver.
I jumped back. “Card!”
“Oh, don’t worry.” He put the muzzle of the gun to his temple and laughed. “Watch.” He pulled the trigger and it made a loud click.
“You should see your face.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say or do. He took out a box of bullets and fumbled six into the cylinder, dropping two but ignoring them. He put the gun back into his pocket and, tears streaming past a smile, started up the path toward the wreck and the graves.
For a couple of minutes I stood there on the edge, waiting for a single shot. Paul came out onto the porch.
“Where is your brother?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not his keeper.”
13
About halfway through my second watch, I saw something curious. At first I thought it was a bright, slow meteor among all the streaking lights. But it didn’t go out. It shone steadily until I lost it in the trees to the north. An old satellite?
Card didn’t come back that night or the next morning. I told people he’d seemed depressed, but didn’t elaborate. Paul obviously knew there was something more to it, but didn’t press me.
When Paul woke up, I mentioned the light I’d seen in the sky.
“Wouldn’t be a satellite,” he said. “It was going south to north?”
“I’m sure of it.” It was in the Big Dipper when it disappeared in the trees.
“Can’t be an artificial satellite; they’re all long gone. Maybe an Earth-grazing asteroid; they can have eccentric orbits.” He explained about the plane of the ecliptic, and I sort of understood. “More likely, it’s something that belongs to the Others. Something rocks bounce off, or protected by a force like a floater’s pressor field.”
“That would work, up in orbit?”
“Who knows? No way to get up and find out.”
“Maybe it came from Mars,” I said. “If the Others didn’t take their power away.”
Elza was listening. “Or maybe it’s from Heaven. Baby Jesus finally decided to step in and help us out.”
“If Mars had power and could send a ship to Earth,” Paul said, “why would it be over here? They’d send it to Washington or London or someplace.”
“We’re here,” I said. “Martians.”
“But there’s no way for them to know that,” Elza said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with hoping.”
We waited until the sun cleared the mountains to the east. “Card knows where we’re going,” Namir said. “We mustn’t wait any longer.”
I wasn’t going to disagree, and after his scene at the wreck, I probably wasn’t alone in hoping we’d seen the last of him. And none of the others had last seen him down the barrel of a gun.
We still had the NASA mail cart, though it wasn’t very efficient on gravel. We had to cull through the books, leaving half of them with the Lerners. The ones we kept leaned heavily toward children’s books and general references like the Britannica set.
In exchange for all the books, they gave us one of the shovels, a folding campers’ model called an entrenching tool. I hoped we wouldn’t need it.
We did carry all the ammunition, and enough weapons so everyone had at least one. Namir carried the riot gun and a pistol. Elza, with only one arm functional, carried the other pistol and two bandoliers of machine-gun ammunition for Paul’s weapon. I had an assault rifle and a machete.
I hoped we looked too dangerous to attack. More dangerous than I felt. Besides the rifle strapped across my back and the machete bumping my leg, I had two gallons of water hanging front and back, and the encyclopedia from CAM to FRA, three volumes, in a cloth bag under my right arm. From CAMera to FRATERNITY I couldn’t be beaten, though in a gunfight I might be a little slow.
The cart made noise, crunching through the gravel, and it really took two people to haul it along efficiently. So we wound up moving it in shifts: two of us would stay with it, along with another guard, while the other three, plus Germaine, moved quietly forward. They would signal when the coast was clear, and we’d drag the load up to join them. Then switch teams, Germaine always in front, in case we met neighbors.
It actually wasn’t too inefficient, with everybody resting half the time and moving pretty fast otherwise.
We picked up speed when we reached the T and turned into a paved road. We made steady progress for about an hour, and then ran into people.
We saw each other from a long way off. They stopped and waited for us, nervous, outnumbered and outgunned.
Two men, two women, and a baby. One of the men was old and the other looked worse than Mr. Lerner, radiation burns on both bare arms and face. Haggard and ill-looking.
Paul spoke to them as we approached. “Hello. You were caught on the border?”
The older man was leaning on a rifle, perhaps trying to look casual. “The boy here was. He drove home, but now the car doesn’t work.”
“Where you headed?”
“Yreka. Place in Holstock said they didn’t have anything for radiation.”
“Going the long way,” Germaine said.
“They told us not to take 2031. You’d best not, either. Some gangers got the road blocked.” Good thing we were headed the other way.
“Goddamn Crips,” Germaine said. “Think they own the road.”
“Huh uh,” the young man said. “This is a car gang. If it was Crips I could walk through.” He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal an elaborate dragon tattoo on his chest.
That must have meant something to Germaine. She nodded. “No radiation meds in Holstock?”
“Sent us to Yreka.”
“I’ll come along, you don’t mind. My old man got burned, too.”
“I know you,” the man with the rifle said to me. “You’re that woman from Mars.”
I almost said yeah, people say I look like her, but the NASA clothes were kind of conspicuous.
“Does us a lot of good,” Paul said, facing the man.
He nodded slowly, perhaps taking in Paul’s munitions. “Sure, come on along,” he said to Germaine.
“Good luck getting home,” she said to Roz, and gave me a confused look. Woman from Mars? They walked away slowly, not looking back.
It took another hour and a half to get into Holstock. We encountered two other small groups, though others may have watched from hiding. Those two saw us and ran into the woods.
The residential area of the town was a few blocks of individual homes mixed with condos, along with hotels and guest houses. The commercial part of town began abruptly, stores with a curious uniformity of design and apparent age. Germaine said that was because about a generation ago, most of the town was consumed in a runaway forest fire.
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