No More Lonesome Blue Rings Read online

a little.

  But the border stones had moved? How? The staff, even the medical agent back on Earth, had all been explicit. The stones are the negotiated border. Don't go past the fence. Human territory was about twenty miles across.

  The ground shook and a rumble crept through the air. I thought I heard a very faint scream.

  ALL PERSONNEL TO FORTIFIED POSITIONS.

  Was the clinic a fortified position? I lurched myself forward, wobbled on my feet, almost fell, and slowed to recover myself and tried to take a deep breath, but the chlorine taste made me cough before I could finish.

  As a rule I try not to bemoan my fate, but dammit, I was an invalid. I shouldn't be in a war zone.

  I needed almost an hour to get back to the slope overlooking the clinic. If I'd had to stagger through underbrush I never would have made it, but Montague has their mowing robots trim everything except the trees down to an even inch. I approached from the hilly side, staying among the trees to try to conceal myself as I tried to catch sight of the day clinic.

  The day clinic was a single story, with an enclosed park on one side, containing spacious recreation rooms for patients and a row of individual treatment rooms. Now the cinderblocks on one side, and the metal roof over them, had run and sagged like warm frosting, exposing interior walls and wiring and lighting. Doors lay on their side, incongruously intact but sunken in molten metal and stone. The gut-high cyclone fence surrounding the play area was gone, leaving holes in the ground where the posts had stood. I smelled hot metal and burnt insulation, but none of the horrible fleshy stinks I expected after a battle. Not that I knew what a battle smelled like. The front door stood barricaded in an untouched wall.

  I didn't see any Townies, though. Or any staff. A few patients wandered aimlessly, their gray clothes muddied. I also didn't see any bodies, human or not. Torn between hiding and going down, I watched for a few minutes, then forced my legs to carry me down the hill. None of the Red Bands said anything as I passed between them and entered the day clinic.

  Nobody was inside the clinic. The walls and floors bore scattered fire damage, some ten or twenty feet long, but the fires were gone. The overhead fire extinguishers hadn't gone off. I thought some holes in the wall looked like bullet holes, but I didn't see any bodies inside. Or blood.

  I came back out to see Richard staring in the gap where I'd entered. Richard is a Red Band, but not too badly deteriorated. I'd played a few simple games with him, kicking a ball back and forth and such. While CJD stripped a lot of people down to angry frustrated assholes or giggling exhibitionists, Richard had retained a vocabulary and a fondness for his family. I think the doctors caught him early, too. One of the staff mentioned that Richard's wife divorced him when he came through the Portal, to protect herself and their kids, but Richard had no memory of that. We'd played cribbage on touchscreens with big friendly buttons instead of cards. I can still add to fifteen. Richard can't, but he'd played before he'd fallen ill and still remembered that a face card and a five equaled good. The computer kept score. Two pathetic shells of human beings, friends in our feeble way.

  Richard said "Sherry. What happened?"

  Shrugging, I raised my eyebrows.

  "Will they be back?"

  Had the staff taken the other patients? Or had Townies taken the staff somewhere? Or just swallowed them whole? I gave a tight smile and shrugged again.

  "Glen didn't look happy. They had to drag him. He kicked. A lot."

  Glen was the staffer who set up our meals. It had to be Townies. I nodded, trying to reassure Richard, then stepped past him. At least they hadn't just killed everyone. Then I shuddered even more than usual as my brain conjured worse possibilities. To distract myself I looked at my phone. No signal. Had the Townies blown the tower?

  "Hey, where you going?"

  I pointed across the asphalt road. The patient dormitory across the way had deliquesced just as badly as the day clinic, but behind a couple hills stood the Portal, Montague housing, the complex, and all the stuff the Montague Corporation gave a damn about.

  "Can I come too?"

  I waved my hand for him to follow.

  We'd hardly started when the siren sounded.

  "That's bad."

  Evacuation? Returning to Earth meant a painful slow death, but I had no idea what staying meant. I tried to break into a trot and fell to the road. I gasped as the asphalt skinned my face, and the smell of hot tar blotted out the chlorine stink.

  Richard put his hands around my arm. "It's okay. No biggie." His warm hands sent a flush through me. I don't get touched much any more. The staff was all too terrified of prions, and there really wasn't any patient I'd like to get that close too. Richard pulled me gently to my feet and held my quivering arm as we quick-stepped down the road towards the Portal.

  The occasional sound of gunfire trickled tendrils of fear down my spine. I hadn't walked this quickly in years. I had to concentrate on every step. Richard just kept walking in a straight line, the poor bastard, so I also had to keep tapping his shoulder and pointing him around each bend of road. We staggered across the campus like damaged dented drunks.

  I heard screams and shouts. The distant terror seemed to fill the holes in my mind. I tasted smoke and ash. We moved around buildings marked by fire, by explosions, and every one marred with the melted concrete and slumping metal of the Townie attack.

  We passed the ugly blockhouse of the power station, finally bringing the Portal building into view. It was the tallest building in the complex, six windowless floors, and shone in the sunlight. Nobody stood near it, but I still felt warmed by seeing our destination. We'd only taken a few steps when an impossibly loud noise squeezed my entire body, like being engulfed in giant balloons of warm water. I felt my feet involuntarily leave the ground. Between beats of my heart the noise faded to a merely monstrous rumble, then I toppled to the ground atop Richard.

  I lay stunned for a moment. What had happened? How was I supposed to deal with whatever this new debacle was? Tears blurred my vision. I'd shredded a strip of skin the size of my hand. Blood seeped around the tiny bits of gravel and dirt embedded in my flesh.

  Richard thrashed beneath me, and I rolled to my hands and knees. He sat up. "Ow." Fresh blood welled from his forearm.

  I frowned and cocked my head in sympathy. The clinic staff would be scrambling for extra protective clothing right now, face masks and thick gloves, anything to avoid Richard's prion-contaminated blood. I fumbled for his hand and squeezed it, licking my lips, and tried to repeat his words. "No biggie" came out like "Na-ma-na," but at least the tone was soft and gentle. He smiled, blinking away tears.

  "Look at the smoke," he said.

  I turned to follow his gaze.

  A thick column of black and gray smoke rose from where the Portal building had once stood. I stopped, shocked. It wasn't that flames poured from the windows. The walls were gone. I could barely see the shape of a mound of rubble beneath the pillar of smoke. The Townies?

  No, I realized, the Montague staff had to be responsible. The Townies must have gotten into the Portal building. Montague as a company might be in this universe for the money, but all the Portal staff were ex-military. Dedicated, stubborn, disciplined. Back home I'd seen more than one report on how the Portal teams were dedicated to protecting Earth, how they'd die before letting any natives from any universe come the other way. The Townies must have penetrated the Portal building, so someone hit the big red button.

  The only way back to Earth, gone.

  Beside me, Richard said "That's a biggie."

  I shifted back to my knees, so frustrated and angry that I couldn't help pounding on my thighs and shouting obscenities that came out in a long string of meaningless sound, which only made me more angry, until finally I devolved into pure incoherent screaming, eyes clamped so shut that tears couldn't bubble between the lids, my shoulders shaking, tasting copper and chlorine in the tightness of my throat, shuddering and quivering.

  Then I had to take a
breath or faint, and sagged, staring at the ground, suddenly aware that my knees ached from kneeling. My chest burned. I smelled ash and smoke and dust from the explosion, even though the wind from the ocean carried the cloud inland away from us.

  I forced myself to take a deep breath, then another. My mind turned back towards Tai Chi, and I made myself visualize the beginning of the First Loop. By the time I reached the first Ward Off, my eyes had stopped watering and my breath came with no more tremor than usual.

  Richard nudged my shoulder. "Biggie. Biggie now. Biggie."

  The light stung my eyes. My breath wobbled, then steadied, as I took in my surroundings again. Asphalt road. Smoking ruins. Trees that looked just wrong enough to remind me I wasn't on Earth, was in a subtly different universe.

  And a Townie.

  He came from the direction of the Portal building, walking in a loose-jointed jaunty gait. From a hundred yards off he looked human, but his joints moved too widely, his head too large, his shoulders too broad. He ignored the curve of the path in favor of walking straight at us.

  I pushed myself up, one hand on Richard's shoulder for leverage. I tried to tell him we had to run, but only grunts came out.

  Richard started to get up, then cried out, crumpling down. "Foot! Biggie!"

  The Townie was getting closer. I glanced between Richard and the Townie, then worked my way around to Richard's injured side. With gestures, I