“Excuse me?”
She turned and looked into him then, those engulfing, all-encompassing eyes that reached out at her, and she felt the touch for the first time, the touch of those exposed to the creature at the center of the world. He was in bloodied battle dress, dirt-caked face the perfect canvas upon which his blue-white eyes were painted.
She was horrified to find her voice locked up just as her hands often would, and she stumbled over nonsense syllables before she finally found her eloquence again. “What?”
He grinned. He was holding something in his hand, two somethings that she identified as envelopes. Letters. Dirty white envelopes held in outstretched soldier grasp.
“I’m sorry, but…Could you mail these for me? I don’t know if—”
The concussion of the explosion threw them both to the ground as shrapnel tore apart the storefront beside them. The transport that had been driving by had been hit by a rocket. Helen was screaming, her eyes useless because of warm liquid copper pouring into them from a gash on her forehead. Other transports screeched to a halt, able-bodied soldiers pouring out, weapons raking the building from which the rocket had been fired. Another explosion down the street, another transport torn apart before the sniper was dispatched.
He helped her to her feet, wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped matted hair back from her face. She smiled through the shock, and he returned in kind.
“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”
She reached down, picked up the blood-spattered letters. “I’ll—I’ll mail them as soon as—”
He took the letters from her, wadded them up, threw them into the street, into the tumult of soldiers and fire and corpses.
“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”
The street was a tumult of activity in the aftermath of the rocket attack. The trucks had stopped rolling along its length, now mostly abandoned as the boys from the war searched the building from which the sniper had struck. His body was thrown from the window and made a hideous splash of vitality on the pavement below.
Helen wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped, kept wiping. The young man with the letters was holding her up, her legs threatening to buckle with each hesitant breath she took. Shouts, gunfire, the world becoming confusion. She wanted to sleep, but he held her.
“Medic!” She heard him shout from somewhere out there, somewhere that was on fire and silver. She also heard the barked reply that alluded to forces first, civilians second if ever. He held her, held her up, and her eyes swung back, forth, back in an arc that she could not control, finally settling on a vision from across the street, a man with a wound not unlike her own, extending a pistol and
firing three times, the satisfying ratcheting click shuddering through his outstretched and locked arm as nickel needles tore through the mind and soul but mostly the skull of the sniper’s wife. She fell to the sidewalk, lifeblood a geyser that went well with some child’s chalk Picasso attempt, washing over it and dissolving that morning’s pre-lunch activity.
Jean Reynald turned the gun to the two children, the older boy holding his brother before him, their faces tear-wet and blank at the sight of impending end. He could dispatch them both with one shot, the way they were standing. He could have, and he should have, but he did not. He holstered his weapon.
“Take them in. Send them up.”
He noted with a disconcerting satisfaction the widening of the older boy’s eyes as he heard his fate. He seemed to grasp the younger boy even tighter, and the younger boy responded by crying loudly, confused and alone and about to be sent to the stars.
Reynald surveyed the city street before him, soldiers running hither and thither, civilians peering from doorways and storefronts and more cautiously from apartment windows on the second third eighth seventeenth floors. Men were talking to him, but he was not listening. The medic was trying to press a bandage to his head, but he did not feel it. He saw his second Windham across the street, tending to a wounded civilian girl. He saw the remains of the shattered troop transport and its inhabitants smeared across the street. He thought it was a beautiful time of day, the street itself mostly in shadow from the angle of the sunlight, and he thought about another time and another place, somewhere he had never been but somewhere that he could always remember, a beach, kneeling in the sand, shaking his fist up at some shapeless black thing
He reached up to where the mark should have been, that design of scar and black, and he did not find it. Closed his eyes, struggled to maintain, felt the medics lowering him to the ground, felt his hand touch the puddle of blood emanating from the head of the sniper’s wife. Tacky, viscuous, mixed with brain tissue that very well might have held the love that she had once exhibited to her husband who had killed a truckload of soldier boys.
Reynald sank, feeling his eyes roll back, feeling not bad at all, just falling, just falling from the moment. He had maintained as long as he could on the reserve of rage that this war had given him, and now was his time to sleep for a while. He heard the medics above him, felt but did not feel the touch of bandage, the sting of needle, the injection. And all through his fall, he heard the sobbing of children, the same two children whose mother he had just shot in the face. He fell.
What was her name? Hannah? Hannah.
He fell.
“I’m okay.”
She was, or at least she thought she was okay enough, and she stood on her own, although his arms still held her close. She turned to face those eyes, saw his concern. She smiled weakly. He let go, and she bent to pick up her paperback, which was now crumpled and fluttering, a wounded bird in the street. He followed her gaze and her motion, and grabbed the book for her, turning the cover over in his hands to see what it was.
“The Stillness Between?”
Helen for the first time noticed the soldier’s nametag stitched onto the front of his uniform: Windham. She reached out with leather-clad hand to take the book and instead found her hand ensnared by his. He studied her small digits for a moment, his grasp gentle, for he knew what he would find already. Without a word, he pulled back the leather and found the wrist beneath just now beginning to show the silver. Helen stared resolutely at the sidewalk, her breath coming fast. She appeared to be on the verge of sobbing. Windham let go of her hand.
“I’m sorry.”
“I—I should go, I’m sorry. I have to—”
“Stop. Don’t go.”
She pulled the cuff of her right glove back over the offending dust of metal. This was it. No more chance of hiding.
Windham looked around at the nearby soldiers, looked back into Helen’s eyes.
“Listen. I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s okay. It’s everywhere now. There’s nothing we can do to contain it.”
“You’re just—”
“No. We can’t do anything about it. The war’s over.”
Helen inhaled sharply, looked around in disbelief. “You won’t tell anyone?”
Windham smiled. “The war’s over. You’re safe now.”
She exhaled with a hesitant relief. She did not trust him, although she so wanted to.
“Come on.” He reached out, put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
Helen frowned. “But won’t you—”
“The war’s over. Fuck it.” His grin was contagious, and they walked away from that street and that life and into a future of silver and stars and black.
It was a time of rain and the coffee was awful on that day that he asked her to marry him after a torrid courtship of six months. The link was blaring footage from the peace accords at the United World building, President Jennings waving enthusiastically to the billions of viewers as he in essence signed away control of the planet to the creature that lurked within.