The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (72 page)

“That’s it, we can do it!” Georgiev shouted. “Come on, get up, let’s start over!”

The men were so absorbed in rocking the bus that only Max noticed it slowing or saw the headlights of the dustskimmers outside. The bus braked to a stop as a row of floodlights cut through the barred windows, freezing the unshaven, sunken-eyed faces of Max’s fellow prisoners in a harsh light.

Guards ran over, the locks clattered to the pavement, and the door flew open. “Congratulations, that’s an impressive effort, good work, men,” the guard said. “Who’s the senior officer here?”

Georgiev squinted as he squeezed forward through the men. “Major Benjamin Georgiev, enlisted regular service in six-four. What we’d like —”

The guard shot him, discharging enough bolt to knock down two men beside him and pimple the hairs on Max’s arms a couple seat rows back. One of the kids shouted, tried to rush the guard, but the blue crackle from the gun just missed his head as the men near him dragged him to the floor.

Angry shouts from the second compartment were silenced by the sound of broken windows and a barrage of fire.

“Do we have another senior officer in here?” the guard asked. Vasily and a couple others looked towards Max, but he shook his head.

“Do we have someone else in charge?” the guard asked. When no one spoke, he said, “Good, because I’m a big believer in individual responsibility, and if anything else happens, I will hold each and every one of you individually responsible. Do I make myself clear?”

He grabbed Georgiev by the back of his shirt and dragged his body, face first, down the steps and outside. Other guards, nervous, guns up, shut and locked the doors again.

Vasily slumped down in the seat beside Max, his face a pale mask of disbelief and despair.

“Don’t worry,” Max said. “Georgiev is probably just faking it.”

The bus started rolling again, this time the skimmers flanking it in clear view. The city shrank behind them, and in moments, dust and grit came through the window, getting in Max’s eyes and under his tongue. Elsewhere in the darkened bus, someone coughed. A couple others whispered that they should have prepared weapons from the broken glass and jumped the guard. Retrospect always gave you a better plan.

Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw one of the kids stand up toward the side of the bus and unzip his pants to relieve himself.

“You might want to save that for drinking later,” Max shouted. Some of the men around them laughed; some didn’t.

“I got nothing to save it in,” the kid shouted back, which was true. “You want to come over, use it like a drinking fountain?”

Max smiled, and his lips cracked. “Nah, don’t think I want to touch that handle.”

Beside him, Vasily rubbed his throat. “I would do anything right now for a bathroom,” he whispered. “Hell, I’d personally murder Mallove for something to eat or some water to drink.”

Max’s own throat was parched and his stomach had been growling for hours. With a glance around, he unrolled the stolen fruitein bar from the waist of his pants. He tried to tear it open with his hands, couldn’t, ripped it open with his teeth. After breaking the bar in half, he said, “Sh,” and pressed half into Vasily’s palm.

“What? What’s —”

“Sh!” Then softly, Max added, “Eat it slow.”

He saw the blue shadow of Vasily’s hand shove the whole thing into his mouth. He tried to chew it slowly, but swallowed before Max ate his first small piece.

“Is there more?” Vasily whispered.

“No, that’s all.”

Later, while Max finished the last piece of the bar, Vasily asked, “Why did you share it?”

“Because where we’re going, I’ll need friends more than I need food right now. Can we look out for each other?”

“Yeah, of course,” Vasily whispered. “Whatever you need, whatever I can do, I’m the man.”

Max nodded, as if a contract had been signed, and Vasily dipped his head in return. Such a slight gesture in the dark. Vasily’s stomach rumbled and he crossed his hands over it. As the bus rolled on through the dark, Max searched his lap for crumbs, licking them off his finger, one by one. Wind coursed over the flatlands and through the broken windows, carrying a hint of salt and moisture.

All that was missing was the smell of compost and blood to complete the reclamation camp stink. As a political officer, he’d visited them more than once.

Men around him shifted, tried to sleep, but Max stared straight ahead into the rushing night.

Sunrise, harsh and unrelenting, cast brightness on their squalor even through the unbroken, tinted windows. The bus smelled of urine, shit, and sweat. Get used to it, Max told himself. His back ached and his legs were stiff from too many hours in the unyielding seat. In one corner, someone sobbed.

“That’s Machete Ridge,” Max said, pointing to a sharp line on the horizon. Vasily leaned across Max to look. “Do you see that bump, up there beside the road?” Max asked.

“That’s the reclamation camp,” Vasily said.

“That’s Faraway Farms. It used to be a reclamation camp.” Twenty years ago, Faraway Farms was the end of the line. Now it was just one more extension settlement on the coast, a few thousand people occupying rows of low brown buildings built around a series of narrow field-ponds.

“Maybe we’ll stop here,” Vasily suggested.

“Be wary of hope,” Max warned quietly. “It’d be too hard to guard everyone here. Too many other people, too much access to boats and skimmers.”

Still, an hour later, when the bus pulled over to the fresh water cisterns outside of Faraway, even Max had to fight against hope.

When he saw the guards hooking up a fire hose, he gave up hope and clawed his way over the benches to reach one of the open windows first. For a few blissful seconds, Max’s face was drenched as he opened his throat to gulp down the blast of water. Then he was fighting the weight of men on his back, crushing him for a drink. He was saved when the hose moved along to another window and the mass of bodies tumbled over the seatbacks after it. Everyone got at least a trickle of water, all except for two men too sick, or weak, to move, who lay moaning at the front end of the car. Max thought they were the ones caught by the shot that killed Georgiev. Men stretched their arms through the bars, begging for more, as the guards moved to the next car.

Max returned to his bench – he thought of it as his bench now, every man had marked out his two square feet of bus – and grunted as he sat. His whole body ached, needing exercise, a chance to stretch. Normally, he’d walk, if only to pace the aisle of the bus, but the aisle was filled too. A few men had stretched across the bench backs, feet on one seat, hands on another, to do push-ups, and others did chin-ups on the hanging straps. Max would do that soon, if he had to, to keep his strength. Of course, that was a hard choice too: spend his energy, not knowing when he’d eat or drink next, or save it in reserve.

Vasily plopped down, hair plastered to his head. He was scraping drops of water off his face, pushing them into his mouth. “I wouldn’t treat animals this way,” he told Max.

“That’s rather the point,” Max said, imitating him, feeling the scratch of his unshaven skin under the droplets.

“Your face is cut up pretty bad.”

“Is it?” He tasted the sharpness of blood on his fingertips, saw the bright red. “Must have been some glass shards in the window, got blown out by the blast of water.”

“When will we stop?”

“We’ve been on the road maybe twelve, fourteen hours. I forget where all the camps are now, but we’re not even halfway there.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Vasily said.

In the old days, during the schism, the men sent off to the reclamation camps for their religious beliefs – or disbeliefs – would pray to God. Max prayed to Drozhin. During the purge, Intelligence would be desperate for information. Obermeyer would check the dropboxes, realize Max was out there, and start looking for him. Survive long enough to give them time to find him: that was Max’s sole faith.

“I can’t believe they’re sending me to the reclamation camps,” Vasily said. “I didn’t do anything to deserve being treated like a murderer or a rapist.”

“So don’t let them turn you into one,” Max said. “Besides, the worst crime is still having the wrong beliefs.”

“But I did everything I was supposed to do, I enlisted in the government after my mandatory service, I —”

“Get over it. Keep your head low, do what you need to do to survive.”

“Do what I have to do to survive,” Vasily said, letting out a deep breath. He seemed like a decent guy, Max thought, not used to thinking, but thinking hard now. “Why did we have a revolution?” he asked. “I thought it was supposed to put a stop to this.”

Max remembered those days. The church schismed, and different groups insisted that they had the only true beliefs. With life depending on limited resources, each side wanted everything for the true believers. Even after the terraforming increased their yields, the two sides had been willing to kill each other to prove who had the direct word from God. “The revolution bought us twenty years.”

“What?”

“It’s been twenty years since we had this kind of purge,” Max said. Sure, there were individual murders here and there, usually arranged to look like accidents or poor health. But that was politics as usual anywhere. “We bought twenty years of peace where we hadn’t had it more than three years in a row for two generations. You grew up in peace, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“The revolution bought you that. So it was worth it. And if this purge buys us another twenty years, maybe it’ll be worth it too.”

Vasily shook his head. “I don’t know if I can think that way. I don’t know if I can ever think that way.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” Max said, but doubtfully.

The bus continued all day, stopping only to relieve the drivers and escorts. Sometime that night, while they shivered to keep warm, one of the sick men died. The man next to him must’ve noticed he was cold, called his name, saying, “Pete, Piotr, aw, man, Pete, wake up, man, aw, I can’t believe this, aw, Pete, aw, man.”

The body had a noticeable reek, even above the stench of piss and shit and sweat that permeated the bus. By the time the sun came up again, all the men were collapsed in a mixture of exhaustion and depression. There were no more push-ups or chin-ups. The wind blew sand in through the broken windows, turning everyone a dusty brown. Max had grit in his eyes, his hair, in every wrinkle in his clothes and body.

With the hot sun baking down through the windows as they drove north toward the equator, Max leaned against the wall, listless, conserving his energy. An impromptu morgue was formed under the seats at the front of the bus, the corpse shrouded with what was left of his clothes, pulled up to cover his face. The next row back remained empty, even though there weren’t enough places to sit.

Max was light-headed, weak from lack of food and lack of water. They’d gone so far. But then the reclamation camps had to be isolated. Only after the new one was turned into a settlement, like Faraway, would they fill in the space between with cistern stations and rest spots.

Terrafarms. That’s what the first colonists had called them. Until the prisoners changed the name to terrorfarms. He closed his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Vasily shook his arm.

“Fine,” Max said.

“No, I mean, just now, I thought you were a corpse.”

“Funny,” Max rasped. “Back in the space fleet my nickname was the Corpse, because I always look this way.”

“Look, I’m counting on you,” Vasily said, leaning over earnestly, speaking low. “I don’t want to end up dead.”

Max felt sorry for him. Trying to swallow the dust in his throat, he said, “Here’s the thing you need to know to survive —”

He started coughing then, the grit in his dry throat damming the words, and he couldn’t stop. He needed something to drink, just a sip, and it would be fine, but there was nothing. Not even sucking on his shirt, which had been soaked, gave him any moisture, just more dust, the taste of salt, and more reason to cough.

Up front, one of the men screamed, roared in senseless rage. Within seconds the gangly redhead flung himself at the walls of the bus, one side, then the other, then kicked and stomped and slapped the men scattered on the benches and the floors, demanding that they do something, ordering them to get up and do something. The dustskimmers zipped in close, flanking the sides of the bus.

“Make him shut up,” Max yelled hoarsely between hacks. “Hold him down.” Others said the same thing from the safety of a similar distance.

At first, the men close by just tried to get out of the berserker’s way, but he grabbed one and began beating his face. Others tried to pull him away, but he lashed out at them, demanding water, demanding to be let off, demanding justice – things none of them had to give him. The more they held him, the harder he thrashed, until finally one of them lost it and punched him, telling him to “Shut up, just shut up,” and then they all started hitting him until they tumbled in a crushing pile to the floor.

One of the older men, a paunchy bureaucrat in his thirties, began pulling men off, ordering them to stop the beating. When they did, the berserker lay still in the aisle. Men went back to their seats, ignoring him; after a while, some came and checked on him, and later two of them dragged him up to the morgue at the front of the bus.

Vasily held his stomach. “How long is it before someone suggests we start eating the corpses?”

“Won’t happen,” Max said, hoping it was true.

He was thinking that another reason for having the reclamation camps out so far was that bodies could be dumped into the compost pits, and then the prisoners reported escaped and missing instead of being sent back for burial. The families got a letter saying their loved one had escaped, please report to the authorities if he shows up: it gave them hope and the dead man some dignity. But prisoners marked as escaped were always dead.

“It’ll be worse when we get to the camps,” he said.

The camps were still a couple hundred kilometers away. Sometime during the night, Max reached that stage of hunger and sleeplessness where he drifted in and out of consciousness, caught in the no-man’s land between the minefield of his hallucinations and the barbed-wire of reality. With his face against the cool glass, eyes half-lidded, and a heavy weight pressing on him, he first mistook the smell of rotting algae for a dream. Then he snapped awake.