Hard-Eyes ran after him. Someone on his left shot at him. He felt a tightening sensation at the left side of his head: entirely psychosomatic; that was the place he imagined the bullets would hit him. Anticipating the sickening crack of a bullet impacting. Jenkins was about ten feet ahead, running with a wallowing motion, with poor coordination, looking as if he’d like to throw the encumbering rifle away.
And then the brush was sweeping past and Hard-Eyes felt a surge of relief as he turned the bend in the trail. For the moment he was out of their line of sight. Up ahead the trail stretched straight for a ways. That would be a good place to get shot in the back.
“Jenkins!” he hissed. “Hey—go find the instructors, I’m gonna be here in the brush on the left side, left side going this way, don’t shoot in it when you come back even if you hear gunfire in it ’cause that’ll be me!” He couldn’t be sure Jenkins heard, but Hard-Eyes thought he saw him bob his head in response.
Hard-Eyes angled left, then pressed close to the brush, turned to move back up, parallel to the trail. The brush here hooked in a question-mark shape, roughly, and he was moving up the stem of the question mark toward the inside of its hook. The pack was on the other side of the hook. He was breathing hard as much from fear as exertion, his breath smoking out white in front of him, and he thought, What if they see my breath steam above the brush; they’ll know my position…
He heard a babble of voices in French. He pressed into the wall of brush at the hook of the question mark, biting his lip to keep from yelling when a twig stung his right eye, other tiny jags raking his cheek and neck and hands.
He turned sideways to elbow deeper into the brush, thinking, Maybe this is stupid, maybe the brush will just hold me in place and I won’t be able to run, and they’ll see me in here and shoot into it till they get me.
He scrunched down, so that the thicker part of the brush was over him, and he felt better about it, because he could move here, the branches making arches over him. He heard voices and footsteps. He began to worm between the thick, horny stems of the bushes toward the bottleneck in the trail, dragging the rifle in his right hand, trying to keep dirt out of it. Pulling himself along on his elbows. The cold ground sent an ache up through his elbow bone. His cheek itched fiercely where the twigs had lashed him. His eye burned where it’d been scratched. It hurt when he blinked.
He could see the trail through the screen of brush now. He brought the rifle up and wedged it into firing position against his shoulder, about thirty degrees out of alignment with his body, his elbows planted, the breech propped in his hands, and sighted at the trail. And then he heard the French voices again and knew they were arguing. Some wanted to go down the trail into the brush. Others thought it might be too dangerous. Then three of them trotted down the trail, in a formation neat as bowling pins. He angled the rifle up a little more and then thought, Shit, I didn’t put another clip in it! Idiot!
He laid the gun down, quietly, carefully, as they drew abreast of him. The front man was just fourteen feet away, ten feet beyond the screen of brush. Hard-Eyes reached behind him, fished in his pack. The angle was awkward. He ground his teeth in frustration. The man was walking past. Still fishing in the pack, Hard-Eyes felt something metallic cold under his fingers. He drew it out and looked at it. A full clip. He ejected the other clip and slapped the full one in—and heard a shot. Someone was bending to look in the brush. A rifle barked and a piece of twig lopped neatly in two, fell delicately across his rifle barrel.
Hard-Eyes sighted on the guy crouching in the trail. He took a deep breath, let it out, and when it had gone out of him and his body was still before the next breath, he squeezed the trigger—and at the same time the other man fired. Something sizzled past Hard-Eyes’ right cheek. The man who’d shot at him did a little dance of frustration, dancing backward—no, that’s not what he was doing, he was staggering back as Hard-Eyes’ assault rifle stitched three rounds into his chest. Hard-Eyes expected to see bloodied holes but the places the bullets struck looked like black dots. The guy fell. Hard-Eyes kept firing, raking, centering the sights on the silhouettes of two other running men…
The rifle kicking his shoulder, acrid blue smoke clinging to the arching brush just overhead. A twig smoldering from muzzle flash. His ears aching with the detonations, the vibrations.
The men had stopped running. Were all, like him, on the ground; but they were on their backs. One of them making a mewling sound and a pedaling motion with his feet. Another turning to vomit blood. Hand clawing the ground. Twitching. Then not moving at all.
Hard-Eyes waited, but no one else came down the trail. After a while, when his hands were going stiff with cold, his elbows aching, his cheek throbbing, he heard Jenkins shout something. And then French voices behind him, and he knew one as the petulant voice of one of his instructors.
There was another sound: wham wham wham wham wham wham. After a moment he realized it was the sound of his heart pounding. He was amazed that he could hear it so clearly.
He wormed up, thrust head and shoulders out of the brush just enough to look down the trail both ways. He saw no one either way, except the dead. The three men he’d shot were all dead now. They weren’t silhouettes anymore. But he couldn’t help noticing that one of them was just a boy. Maybe fifteen. A boy with a rifle gripped in his white hands.
He stood up and brushed thorns and dried leaves off himself, feeling dizzy but energized.
Thinking, with more wonder than regret: They were just hungry. That’s really all it was.
His instructors came around the bend in the trail, their rifles raised.
“Hold your fire!” Hard-Eyes yelled. Or tried to. The words came out mush because his mouth was numb from cold. His right ear felt cold too. Funny: just the right one.
They slowed, looking at him. They were frowning. He knew they’d have some complaint about how he’d done it. Jenkins was right: They didn’t like Americans. But Hard-Eyes knew he’d mostly done it right.
Jenkins came lumbering along. He stared at Hard-Eyes open-mouthed.
“Your ear,” he said. “You lost an ear.”
Molt was walking down the corridor, thinking he’d got off at the wrong level. It felt like Level 02. He felt heavier here than he should.
The corridor was deserted, which he thought was strange, too. It should be work time in this section. Wilson had said they’d meet on Level 00. He was sure of that. He was sure he’d pressed 00. But he saw a coordination indicator, Level 03, Corridor C13—no indicator for function.
He was in a part of the Colony he’d never been in before. The walls were the same kind of utilitarian studded gray metal you found down in Recycling or around a power station.
I pressed 00, he thought. I’m sure I did.
He turned to go back to the elevator. A section of the ceiling four inches wide slid down to become a wall, in front of him, ceiling down to floor. Zi-ip: that fast. It was a transparent wall, plastic but thick, and he knew he’d never be able to break it. He stared, feeling a panic of the sort he hadn’t felt since having his first really bad childhood nightmares. He touched the wall to be sure it was real.
He looked around, gut clenching with a growing suspicion.