Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  Fletch removed her mask, stowed it in a kaftan pocket. “This valley’s one of the clean spots I told you about, but you should keep your mask on anyway. Just in case. When we go inside, though, take it off. These people are touchy. Say as little as possible. Don’t criticize anything. Don’t start any fights.”

  “Some friends,” Keith snorted.

  Fletch raised the rifle so that its barrel rested against her shoulder and its muzzle pointed skyward. She led the way down.

  ~ * ~

  The cluster of buildings had once been the industrial core of a small mill town. Over the years the outlying houses had been torn down, bit by bit, for building supplies, for firewood, sometimes just for the sake of doing something. Now all that remained was a miscellany of old factory buildings bordering a small, swift-running river. Sheds and stone additions choked the narrow streets, making the whole a combination windbreak and maze.

  There were flickers of movement in the higher windows as they walked past, faces that appeared and were gone, like goldfish coming to the fore of their bowls and whisking away. “There must be a hundred people in this warren,” Keith whispered, awed. “What do they all do?”

  “Whatever they have to. Now shut up!”

  They turned a corner, came face to face with an ancient gas station. Its windows were boarded over, and towers of old tires almost obscured it from view. Keith wondered what possible use anyone could have for them, did not ask. A bell over the door jangled as they went in.

  The interior was a packrat’s fantasy. Dimly lit by alcohol, lamps were clutters and tangles and piles of fishing equipment, furniture, musical instruments, wood stoves—a thousand items, all battered and old, all obviously looted from homes abandoned during the Meltdown. A pale, pockmarked face appeared in the shadowy rear. “You after girls?” it asked.

  “Hell no,” Fletch said. She slid the rifle into its sheath, almost unbalancing Keith with the sudden weight in the saddlebags he still carried. The face advanced, became a tall, vacant-eyed man with a slouch belly. She threw him a silver nickel, and he snagged it out of the air. “I want two beers and whatever slop you’re serving today.”

  The man stared at them silently. “Tables to the rear,” he said, and was gone.

  Fletch went back to sit down. Keith remained standing, poking through the mounds of objects. He came across a mirror, wiped the grime from it. His reflection was grim. Mean lines around the mouth, a scowl creasing his forehead. He blinked, trying to erase the wildness in his eyes. No good. A smile was gobbled up by his mask. He pushed it down. A red triangle of chafe marks remained. He touched them lightly with a fingertip, pushed the uncombed hair back from his forehead. Still he retained the look of a hunted animal.

  Keith took a deep breath of air that rushed into his lungs so readily he felt momentarily dizzy. To hell with it, he decided; he was not going to put his mask back on until they left.

  “Susie!” A gigantic, black-bearded man exploded from the rear of the room. He rushed forward, flung his arms around Fletch, lifted her into the air.

  Keith had instinctively grabbed for Fletch’s rifle, but drew back when he heard her laugh happily. “Bear, you old pirate!” She hugged him, thumped his back vigorously.

  They sat at the table. Keith drew up a chair and joined them. “But what are you doing here?” Fletch asked. “Didn’t you have business”—she lowered her voice—”along the coast?”

  “Haw! It was a setup. They’ve got a new administration that’s cracking down on smuggling, much good it’ll do them. But I’ve got friends, yes, and they warned me away.” He shifted his head toward Keith. “He’s okay, right?”

  Fletch nodded, performed introductions. Bear was about Fletch’s age, perhaps a little older, and he had a bit of a paunch that bulged over the table whenever he leaned forward. “We met when I was covering the Northern Liberation Front,” Fletch told Keith. “The guerillas set up their camps in the Drift because the government troops wouldn’t go sifter them.”

  The pale man brought their beers and two bowls of watery-looking stew. Bear waited for him to leave, then said quietly, “Listen, Susie. I can see you’re planning to rest here a day or so, but I think maybe you and your young friend here should come stay with me in my cabin instead.” A stray beam of light glinted on a single gold earring in his matted hair.

  Fletch was all serious attentiveness. “Why?”

  “I was here two days ago, visiting the”—he looked embarrassed—”the girls in back. And some men came in, asking questions about you. So I decided to hang around, in case you might need some help maybe. But they looked like killers to me. Six or eight of them. Southern accents.”

  ‘‘ Philadelphia accents?’’

  “Yeah, I think.”

  “Damn.” Her finger tapped the table. “Finish your beer, Keith. Bear, have you still got your buggy?”

  “Out back. I’ve got my own fuel still, too. I’m a rich man!”

  ~ * ~

  The buggy was an open-pit four-wheel drive, and Bear drove it like a madman. Huddled between Bear and Fletch, Keith concentrated on keeping warm and worried for the first time about frostbite. The others chattered happily over his head, ignoring him and his misery.

  “We’re here!” Bear roared finally. He drove the buggy along a nearly nonexistent road, across a rough stretch of meadow, and under a stand of gnarled elms. While Bear was covering the vehicle with a tarp, Keith looked about for the cabin. He couldn’t see it.

  “Back this way.” Bear led them up through the trees and gestured with a mittened hand. “How do you like it? Not much, but it’s home, hey?”

  The cabin was built into the slope of a steep hillside. A log wall with one window and a door and a bit of wood-shingled roof were all that showed.

  Bear scooped an armful of wood from a stack beside the door, led them inside. He talked rapidly, as if trying to make a good appearance for a cabin that looked like nothing much. “Built it myself,” he said. “Dug it into the hill, so the earth kinda evens out the temperature. I scavenged a lot of styrofoam, packed it between the walls and the earth. Doesn’t need much heating wood. Leave it alone and it stays about thirteen-degrees C constant. Summer and winter.”

  “Very nice,” Keith said politely, not meaning it.

  Fletch studied the cabin judiciously, thumping the walls with her fist. She came to an inside door, raised an eyebrow. “Root cellar,” Bear explained. Fletch smiled.

  “So this is your fabled cabin,” she said admiringly. “I never thought I’d actually be here.” She examined the shelves crammed with boxes and sacks that covered two walls, while Bear pulled out prodigious amounts of bedding from several trunks.

  He spilled a final armful onto the floor, then stopped and looked ruefully at the mound he’d created, as if seeing it for the first time. “That may be a bit much,” he mumbled embarrassedly.

  “Do you really think so?” Fletch asked innocently. Their eyes met and they both laughed in a warm and comfortable way. Their laughter died down, but they remained staring into one another’s eyes.

  “Keith,” Fletch said. “Maybe you should run outside.”

  “I—“

  “That’s a good idea,” Bear said. He thrust Fletch’s binoculars into Keith’s hands. “Play with these for a while.” He winked in a warm, conspiratorial fashion, gently pushed Keith toward the door.

  Keith stumbled outside. Someone kicked the door shut behind him. He heard the beginning of an intimate chuckle and hastened away.

  It was cold outside. A wisp of smoke rose from the cabin’s flue and disappeared a few feet up into the gray sky. Keith wandered off to one side and came up against a bramble-choked ravine. It was unpassable; he chunked a rock down it, but didn’t hear the splash of water.

  Choking with rage, Keith slammed a fist against a gnarled tree trunk. Wood crumbled away, leaving a bite-shaped gap in the tree. He felt sick and confused. Could he really be jealous of a man twice his age? Not long ago he hadn’t e
ven been sure he wanted to make love with Fletch a second time. They had made love only once, and then under special circumstances, with death nipping at their heels; Fletch had shown no interest since. He had told himself repeatedly that she was too weary or that she had a low sex drive and required the spice of immediate danger to arouse her. But the tryst with Bear disproved both theories.

  There was only one answer: Fletch had used him. He held no sexual interest for her; she’s needed a way out of Philadelphia, and she had bought it.

  Well grow up, kid, he told himself. Welcome to the real world. But unbidden memories arose in his mind, of her flesh, of their vigorous coupling, images that were at once compelling and newly repulsive.

  Keith stumbled away from the ravine, trying to control his thoughts. He raised the binoculars to his eyes, scanned the horizon in an attempt to distract himself. Beneath the amplified image of dead and winter-barren trees, something moved. A needle. Set inside the binoculars was an unmarked graduated scale, with a small red pointer that sprang up when the glasses were raised to the horizontal.

  The needle pointed to a position barely on the scale. Keith shifted the binoculars and the reading held steady. Raise the glasses to the sky, lower them to the ground, and the needle sank below the scale. Hold them steady and the position was constant, wherever they were pointed, at rock or hillside, at darkness or light.

  The view through the binoculars misted over and was replaced with an involuntary inner vision of Fletch and Bear pleasuring each other on the cabin floor. Keith blinked angrily, shoved the glasses back into their case, stalked on down the slope a way. His feet were growing numb. He stamped them against the ground, wishing the two would hurry up and get done.

  Some time later, Fletch appeared in the doorway and waved him in. He entered sullenly, made straight for the wood stove, and hunched over it, holding his hands to the warmth and rubbing them together. From the corner of his eye he could not avoid seeing Bear pulling his trousers up. The man’s pubic hair was black against his pale skin, and Keith had to admit inwardly that Bear was better endowed than himself. This helped things not one bit.

  For the rest of the afternoon and on through the evening, Bear and Fletch talked avidly of politics in the Greenstate Alliance up north and of goings-on within the Drift. Keith listened quietly, having nothing to contribute. He learned a little, but, for the most part, the dialogue relied on knowledge of previous events that he lacked and was absolutely meaningless to him. He fell asleep to their bright, relaxed chatter.

  ~ * ~

  Something roared at the foot of the hill, a great bass noise that peaked and fell and slowly grew less as it became more distant. Keith’s eyes flew open. It was late night, and the cabin was flooded with gray shadow. “Fletch?” he said. “Bear?” The cabin was empty.

  Keith went to the door, stood shivering in the cold. Downslope there was no shadow where Bear’s buggy had been. The distant noise dwindled, faded away. He had been abandoned.

  Stunned, he went back inside, built up the fire, lit an alcohol lamp. What did he do now? He was somewhere within the Drift, with not the foggiest idea of what roads led out and an unknown number of Mummer assassins scouring the countryside looking for him. His eye was suddenly caught by a square of something white.

  It was a sheet of paper. Fletch had left her saddlebags behind, open and partially emptied, with a note atop them. The inner seam of one bag had been ripped open and something—it must have been thin and flat and slightly flexible to be hidden there—removed. The rifle was gone too. Keith picked up the note. It began without preamble.

  Heading for coast—Bear thinks he can get me on a ship for Boston. Suggest you keep heading north. Am leaving you most of my supplies & yr partner’s gun. Binocs contain ionization meter—don’t sleep anywhere that registers over halfway mark. I put a checkmark on map where Nameless is. If you can’t figure it out, Bear should be back in a day or two & can help.

  Angrily, he crumpled the note and threw it on the floor. “God damn you to hell, Suzette Fletcher,” he said aloud. The words seemed foolish and childlishly spiteful even as he said them. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself.

  To his surprise, it was not all that difficult. There was a certain grim satisfaction in knowing the worst: that he had been used and then discarded, that Fletch felt no more than a passing affection for him at best, of the sort one might bestow on a stray dog without the least intention of bringing it home. In a way, the knowledge was easier to handle than the sullen suspicion of it had been. He knelt to take inventory of the saddlebags.

  He worked briskly, shoving back inside those items he might need and tossing aside those he saw no use for. He lacked a knife and plundered Bear’s possessions until he found one—an Arkansas toothpick with a leather sheath— and clipped it to his belt. The ionization counter would come in handy. He set the binoculars carefully beside the bags and began studying the map.

  Keith had about decided he could make his way out of the Drift if only he could retrace his way back to Nameless, when he heard another noise. Dousing the lamp, he picked up his pistol and went outside.

  There was a deep growling beyond the hills, a changing chord of four bass lines that rose and fell independent of each other, one growl significantly louder than the rest. Crouching in the cold, Keith tried to place its direction. East? West? It echoed and rebounded, rose and fell, so that there was no hope of getting a fix on it. A pale moon floated high in the sky, visible at rare intervals through gaps in the clouds. The noise grew.

  Below and to his left a stretch of road was visible through a break in the trees. A shadow slid across it. Keith shifted position, moving behind an outcropping boulder, and waited.

  A buggy careened to a halt below, and two figures jumped out. They were immediately running up the slope, one with long graceful strides, and the other lumbering after.

  Three gray shadows slipped across the distant roadway. The roar of engines peaked briefly, treble notes coming together in a high, angry whine.

  Keith drew a bead on the leader of the two coming up the hill, wondered whether he’d actually be able to shoot, to kill a human being in cold blood.

  “You’d better have some damn fine weapons up there,” the lead figure called over her shoulder. Fletch. Keith lowered his pistol.

  “Weapons I got,” Bear shouted back. “Miracles I’m fresh out of.’’

  “We’ll make our own.”

  They ran past him, Fletch sparing a single cool glance in passing, and into the cabin. Shoving the gun into his belt, Keith followed.

  Bear was wrestling a large chest from one of the shelves. “I’m pretty sure I nailed that fink from back in town,” he grunted. “You can bet they wouldn’t’ve been waiting for us without his help. Bastard! If he got away, I’ll go back and finish him.”

  Keith smiled sardonically. “Welcome back, Fletch.”

  “Later. What’ve you got?”

  Bear rummaged through the box, yanking things out and tossing them across the floor. “Incendiary grenades. Bandoliers. One of those Israeli machine guns from—what was the war again?”

  “Before my time.”

  “It’s a museum piece, anyway. But it’s in perfect working order, so maybe I’ll use it.”

  “Got into a little trouble, did you?”

  “Give me that,” Fletch said, reaching for a new weapon Bear had uncovered. “I’m pretty good with those.”

  Keith’s coolness faded as the two armed themselves, steadfastly paying him no attention. He was not at all sure that he was on Bear’s and Fletch’s side, but he knew that the Mummers would consider him so.

  The growl of approaching vehicles died. Bear grabbed his weaponry, bolted for the door.

  “I’ll take the left,” he threw over his shoulder. “Tell the kid how to provide some distraction, and take the right.”

  “Gotcha.” Fletch took her rifle and thrust it into Keith’s hands. It felt odd. He realized that he didn’t even know
how to fire it. She flipped something on the side of the stock. “Okay, now the safety’s off The rifle’s ready. I want you to lie down flat in the back of the cabin—they’re shooting uphill, so they’ll probably fire over you. Shoot at the sky, understand? Don’t try to take any of them out when I’m somewhere in front of you—just provide distraction.”

  “Dammit, I can fight too!” Keith said.

  “Like hell. Now, this thing’s a compression launcher. The projectiles are small rockets; they ignite about halfway up the barrel, so the thing has a hell of a kick, remember that. The needles hit at supersonic velocities, and the shock wave ruptures every internal organ in the body. If you have to, don’t shoot fancy, aim at the middle of the body. Anywhere you hit is lethal. You’ve got a hundred shots, and don’t forgot to save the last for yourself. You stick the muzzle in your mouth and aim up. Got all that?”