Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled.

  “Sure you do.” She tousled his hair, ran for the door, paused just behind it.

  A needle of red light, so brief it almost wasn’t there, lanced through the cabin, leaving a small charred hole in the front wall, and another at an angle to it in the back.

  “Laser pistols,” Fletch snorted. “Kiddie weapons!” She was gone.

  Three more needles of light laced the cabin. Keith threw himself to the floor to the rear, as directed. Whatever weird weapon Fletch was handling made high, almost whistling shrieks. There was a small explosion, followed by the chatter of Bear’s machine gun.

  Keith suddenly remembered the rifle, lifted it, pointing its muzzle up and through the window. He squeezed the trigger and the window exploded outward, in a fountain of glass and casement splinters. There was a deafening boom as the projectile went supersonic, and the stock slammed into Keith’s shoulder, numbing it, half rolling him over. He fired again, sending a shot through the roof. Another incredible roar.

  Plaster, earth, bits of wood showered down. There was a hole the size of a giant’s fist in the ceiling.

  Four threads of laser light winked in and out of existence, one after the other. Keith’s eyes flooded with tears as he realized how right Bear and Fletch had been to leave him behind. He was confused, almost panicked, of no use in a battle that required keeping one’s wits.

  Somewhere both Fletch and Bear were running, shouting. Their weapons clattered high and low. An incendiary grenade went off, turning night to day for an instant, and there was a hideous, garbled scream.

  Blindly Keith fired shot after shot, just barely remembering to aim above the horizon. A laser burst struck the hanging alcohol lamp, exploding it, spilling a gout of alcohol over the wood stove.

  With a whoomp, the alcohol was ignited by the hot iron stove. Flames reached up toward the ceiling, licked against the wall. A dribble of alcohol running across the wooden floor went up and Keith tried futilely to beat it out with slaps of his jacketed arm. The flames grew and spread.

  Time and again laser bursts pierced the walls but, as promised, they were always too high. The cabin was heating up now, and smoke gathering below the ceiling. Some of it slipped out the hole in the roof, but more was generated than left. The cabin was filling with smoke. Keith gasped and choked. Assassins or no, he had to get out.

  He crawled to the door, peeked out at floor level. He could see nothing. It was quieter outside now. There was a short burst of weapons fire, then silence. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He drew himself into a crouch, and ran.

  The front wall was burning now. As the cool night air hit him, Keith was involuntarily reminded of a time from his childhood, when a bunch of neighborhood kids had torched a house in an abandoned section of Philadelphia. They’d ringed the building, standing with sticks and old baseball bats, waiting for the rats to come out. Then, when the rats were forced out, maddened with pain, their fur ablaze, they’d methodically clubbed the animals to death.

  Keith ran downslope, flung himself to the ground. He peered into the darkness, circles swimming in front of his eyes as they adjusted. He thought he detected motion there and down there.

  He snapped his rifle toward a sudden bulking of shadow downslope, and almost fired before he recognized the silhouette as Bear. A sliver of light passed neatly through Bear’s head, and he fell. At that same instant, an incendiary grenade went off, briefly illuminating a Mummer assassin. He was on his feet, running, and he twisted in surprise at its sudden glare. Awkwardly he fell on his gun hand, the laser pistol skittering into the night.

  Keith shot at the man, not taking time to aim. It made a hell of a noise, and probably hit nothing. His nerves crawled, but there was no answering fire.

  Something hulked to one side. “Kid ...”

  He whirled and made a snap shot, almost from instinct. The projectile went supersonic with a shattering crash, and the moon broke free of the clouds, briefly flooding the hillside with dim light. He saw Fletch.

  He saw her mouth open and neck arch back, as if in the throes of sexual agony. Her blond hair flew forward, back, lashed her face. Her arms thrashed like a rag doll’s, impossibly fluid, each broken in several places. She toppled over backward, and he knew even before he fell to his knees beside her body that she was dead.

  He reached out gropingly, touched her face with his fingers. They came away warm and sticky with blood. Fletch had another—final—nosebleed. Keith squeezed his eyes shut, let them fall open again. There were no tears. What kind of cold monster have I become? he asked himself. He felt vacant, disbelieving—totally without emotion.

  Fletch was dead.

  One pocket of her kaftan bulged, the corner of a leather case sticking out of it. For no reason at all he picked up the case, leaving bloody fingerprints across its surface, and opened it. Her binoculars. For whatever purpose, perhaps unconsciously, she had scooped them up in the cabin. Holding them in his hand, he felt strangely moved by the binoculars. They affected him in a way that her corpse could not. They had been hers. She had touched them and used them and left them briefly to his care. Her spirit was in them.

  Keith broke down in great, racking sobs, his tears totally out of control. He threw back his head and gasped for air, greatly salty drops of warm fluid running down his cheeks, and along the seal of his nucleopore.

  The tears came in a gust, and when he fought them down he was empty again, cold and dry inside. You killed her, he told himself harshly. You shot her because she ditched you and ran off with Bear. Because you felt rejected and spiteful. But he couldn’t gauge the emotional truth of the words. It might have been pure reflex, nerves drawn out to the point of panic and no more. Honesty forced him to admit that he did not know.

  Downslope he heard a coughing, mechanical noise—the sound of an engine starting up. Keith was on his feet instantly. He ran down through the trees in long, rapid strides, heedless of the risk of falling. Branches whipped across his face, leaving raw welts, and he did not notice.

  Keith burst through the trees and was beside the buggies just as the engine caught. A short spring brought him beside the right vehicle, and he was shoving his rifle into the frightened face of a Mummer assassin.

  “Cut it off,” he said quietly. The Mummer obeyed. Up close Keith could see that the assassin was just a kid—twenty or twenty-two at most, no older than Keith himself. Thin-faced and very, very ordinary. Keith couldn’t fix the features in his mind. His subconscious demanded a gargoyle, an ogre, and reality refused to provide. If I closed my eyes, Keith thought, I wouldn’t recognize him when they opened again.

  “How many of you are left?” Keith asked. He held the rifle’s muzzle directly on the kid’s face. Scared eyes tried to focus on it.

  “None, mister, just me,” the kid babbled. “I’m the only one.” Keith said nothing. Unnerved, the kid began again. “You killed all them. I can show you the bodies. You killed the captain ...” He broke off when Keith moved the rifle gently, massaging the boy’s cheek in a small circular motion.

  “Good.” His voice was still quiet, preternaturally so. A part of his mind was occupied pushing thought of Fletch’s death aside. Like shoveling back the ocean. “Now we come to the good question. Why?”

  The kid blinked. Sweat covered his forehead. “Why?” he echoed, bleakly.

  “Yes,” Keith said sweetly. “Why? Why did you and your friends kill Bear and Suzette Fletcher? Why were you trying to kill me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said feebly.

  “That’s not good enough, Jocko!” Keith’s voice rose to a scream, and he jerked back his rifle. He lifted it as if he were about to club the boy in his face, and only controlled the motion at the last instant. “You don’t kill people just for the hell of it, you have a reason. You have a god damned good reason! And I . . . want ... to know.” He punctuated the last sentence with short, angry jabs of the rifle. The Mummer, sure he was going to die, began to cry, small quiet tears that
squeezed out of the corners of his eyes and slid silently down his cheeks.

  “Honest, mister, I don’t know. The captain knew. But he didn’t tell us. He just said we had to bang the woman. He said to get anyone that was with her, but that the woman was the dangerous one, and we had to bang her.”

  “Kill her,” Keith said. “The word is ‘kill.’ Let’s hear you say it.”

  “Kill her,” the kid choked out. “But that was all we were told, mister, that was all I knew.”

  “You didn’t kill her, though,” Keith said. The kid looked at him. “I did.” The kid said nothing.

  Keith still held Fletch’s binoculars in his left hand. He dumped them on the Mummer’s lap. “Tell that to your owners. Give them her glasses for proof, and tell them I did your dirty work for you.” He stood back two paces, said, “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  The kid’s hands fumbled with the ignition. The motor caught and he pulled out onto the road like a bat out of Hell. Keith stood watching him, his eyes filling with tears again. He wrapped an arm around a pine tree to keep from falling and once again wept uncontrollably.

  ~ * ~

  By dawn he had dragged both Bear’s and Fletch’s bodies up to the smoldering remains of the cabin. He laid them side by side, then hesitated. It seemed like a violation of the dead.

  But he had to have an answer.

  Keith opened Fletch’s robe and deftly undid the buttons of her shirt. The flesh underneath was an ugly black, massive bruising that had followed her death. Tucked into her belt, protruding over her stomach, was a leather portfolio. He lifted it out, flipped her robe shut.

  Standing away from the corpses, his back not quite turned to them, he examined the portfolio’s contents. They were handwritten manuscripts, clearly stories Fletch had been working on, cluttered with marginal notes and corrections. They were wrinkled from being carried under Fletch’s belt and sewn into the lining of her saddlebags before that, but readable nonetheless.

  Keith riffled through thin bundles of paper labeled “Reactorville,” “Mutations/Disease,” “Mutagenic Offspr.” and the like. Halfway through, he hit pay dirt: a bundle labeled “Phila/Drift.” He returned the other papers to their sheath, and began reading.

  It’s the best-kept secret in Philadelphia. The infant mortality rate is not a matter of public record. People disappear into the hospitals and the word filters out that they died of “pneumonia” or “flu” or “superflu.” Not a person in a thousand suspects that Philadelphia lies within the Drift.

  Keith stopped reading. Here was his answer and it didn’t make him any happier knowing it. Philadelphia within the Drift! It was the kiss of death for the city, once the word got out. Philadelphians had a deep, almost superstitious fear of the Drift, and had imbued their home city with mystic faith in its ability to protect them.

  A single, thicker piece of paper was enclosed in the bundle. Keith thumbed it out idly. It was a copy of the map of the Drift that had been drawn up almost a century ago for the first official reports on the Meltdown. Long, curving oblongs had been drawn around the reactor site, the outermost just barely grazing Philadelphia. Fletch had jotted a dozen radiation counts onto the map and redrawn the outermost line. There was no doubt that she had done her homework, no chance of her being mistaken.

  Keith tried to imagine the damage this article could do. There were over a million people in Philadelphia—it would be the biggest panic evacuation since the Meltdown. He tried to picture a million people, most of them on foot, streaming out of Philadelphia, clogging the bridges to New Jersey, swooping on the lands beyond like a plague of locusts. The United States was not a rich country the way it had been. It had lost a third of its territory in the turbulent post-Meltdown years. There wouldn’t be refugee camps set up for the survivors. There would be, instead, men with guns to mow down the new threat to their economic stability.

  It was literally unimaginable. Better to concentrate on matters at hand. Keith checked his rifle, paced thirty yards downhill, and raised it to his shoulder. He aimed at the hillside just above the ruins of the cabin. One after the other he shot the projectiles into the earth, until the clip was emptied, and the hillside—whether from the projectiles themselves or from their thundering reverberations—collapsed over the bodies of his former companions.

  He dropped the papers on the ground, started to trudge down past the corpses of the fallen Mummer assassins. He hadn’t gone far before a thought occurred to him, and he returned to scoop up the stories again.

  He weighed them in his hand. There was power here if he knew how to use them. He didn’t kid himself. Politics and the acquisition of power were total unknowns to him. But he could learn.

  As he started the buggy, Keith became aware again of the irritation his nucleopore caused. He pulled it off, dropped it on the seat beside him. It hardly mattered now.

  He shifted gears, began the long trip home to Philadelphia.

  ~ * ~

  Mummers Day was sunny and blue-skied. Keith stood in the crowd, slapping his arms against his jacket from time to time to keep warm. He was not surprised when the Center City Fancy band stopped in front of him, not at all anxious when King Clown strode straight at him.

  The Clown’s gloved hands rested on his shoulders, and Keith looked straight into the man’s bloodshot eyes. There was a still instant, then whapwhapwhap! he had been tapped out, and King Clown was striding away. The crowd cheered.

  He joined the ragtag band in mufti strutting happily after the troupe. He was a Mummer now.

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