Fran is sniffing at an RP she just tore into. The pack itself looks like jerky or tree bark. A meaningless script of letters and numbers on it but no clue what waits inside. She tries to break off a piece of whatever it is and can’t, pulls the knife out of her boot.
“Adventure,” I say. “Suspense.”
“Hey, chewing on this at least will give me something to do for half an hour.” We hear the wheeze and hollow grunt of shells striking not too far off. “The boys are playing again.”
“Ding dong the witch ain’t dead.”
“Just polishing her teeth.”
“Shiny!”
Lots of time to talk out there. I know about her favorite toy when she was four or five, a plastic submarine with a compartment you filled with baking soda to make it dive and surface, dive and surface. The head made of a carved coconut with seashells for eyes and ears. Her first kiss—from a boy twice her age whose hand crawled roughly into her shorts. The twin brother who died in a bombing, in the coffeeshop across the street from the college where he taught, when she was in boot camp.
“Everybody was going,” she said when she told me about that. “My cat died. My brother. Our old man. Ever feel surrounded?”
I waited for a shell to hit, said “Nah” when one did.
Timing is everything.
She looks out the gun slot of the foxhole. “Dogs’ll be next,” she says.
The dogs were everywhere back then. Genetically manipulated, physical and mental augmentations. Ten or twelve of them would spill up over the horizon and surge towards you. Nothing short of heavy artillery stopped them. Even then, what was left of them, half dogs, forequarters, kept coming. Most of the time they couldn’t see the foxholes but knew they were there—smelled them, sensed them.
These do what we hope: circle us twice, snuffle ground, sniff air, do it all again and move on.
“Damn things give me the willies every time,” Fran says.
“They’re supposed to. Bring you up against the elemental, the savage, within yourself.”
“Deep waters, college boy. Good to see all that schooling wasn’t wasted.”
“Most of it was. But knowledge is like cobwebs, get close enough, some stick.”
Our coms crackle. Go orders. Moments later we’re over the top, on our way to finding the elemental and savage within ourselves.
At night Foragers come out, looking for food, cast-off clothing, machine parts, citizens marooned for whatever reason in their world—anything they can use. Theirs is a mission of salvage, scooping up leftovers, cast-offs, the discarded. They decline the housing, employment, health care and securities guaranteed to all, choosing to live invisibly, perilously, and when every few years the government extends offers of amnesty, those offers go ignored.
Walking away from the station into thinner ground and air, we passed a number of Foragers who looked on, even followed a bit, before concluding it unwise to approach.
Warren watched as one, a woman in her late teens or early twenties, face pale above an ankle-length dark overcoat, military issue, took a final look and withdrew. “Interesting lives,” he said.
“They’re a part of you, deep inside, that longs to scream No.”
“Perhaps not so deep as you imagine.” He touched a wall, ran his hand along it. Dark grit fell from the hand when he took it away. “How did we come to live in a world where everything is something else?”
“Other than what it seems? We’ve always lived there.”
“Then how do choices get made?”
“Faith.”
“Now there’s something you can hold onto.” He pulled out a link, looked for a moment at the screen, and replaced it. “Our plan to protect Frances—”
“By staging her death.”
“—was solid, with high probability of success.”
“Not that it would ever occur to others that it was a ploy.”
He met my eyes, an action intended to register sincerity and directness but in effect defensive.
“High probability means you ran sims,” I said, “as many times as it took for someone to get onto those runs.”
“Of course.”
“Then you had the tag. Trawled out and put them down. It wasn’t about protecting Fran.”
We walked on. Pavement out here was everywhere cracked, fractured into multiple planes, grass and weeds growing from the fissures like trees on a hundred tiny hills.
“Afterwards,” Warren said, “she simply chose not to—much as you did.”
Thinking I heard footsteps, I put out an arm to halt us. We stood quietly, breathing slowly. Nothing more came. “Do you know where she is?”
“No. Nor, we trust, do those attempting to kill her.”
“You’ve intel?”
He shook his head. “Five words to a secure address. Introduce me to your friend?”
“A safe word.”
“And her way of asking for you. A request she would make only…”
Around us, like his sentence, the city trailed off, neither quite there nor absent. Heaps of refuse that looked to be undisturbed. Few sign of rats or other rodents—larger beasts who’d rarely venture closer to the city saw to that.
College days. Stray bunches of us had got our heads filled with notions of retrieving history, scrubbing away the years, getting back to common ground we’d misplaced. Music became a part of this; for about five minutes I played at being a musician. Fell in quickly with Sid Coleman, and while I wasn’t ever much good and wasn’t going to be, I could bite into a rhythm and never let go. We started out playing for parties, college gigs and such. Later, it was mostly protest meetings.
Sid steamed with frustration from the get-go. What he wanted to do was talk politics but what everyone else wanted was for him to bring his guitar and sing. He had started out with old-time mountain music, discovered calypso and Memphis jug bands, slid into home base with songs against what we started calling the forever wars. He sang right up to the day he got his notice. That day he put his guitar away for good.
Sid and his crew were chowing down on a breakfast of beer and RPs when mortar shells struck. Eight were killed. And while Sid escaped further injury, the blasts took his hearing. This was a couple of borders over from where we are now. It’s all the same war, he used to sing, they just move it from place to place.
—Hang on, Fran said, I need to pee. She checked with the infrared scope for all clear and stepped out. Got back and said Okay…
That’s it. There isn’t any more.
Oh.
But there was.
Years later, back home, I ran into Sid on the street. I could see in his face that he didn’t remember me, though he claimed to. He wore fake fatigues, the kind they sell at discount stores, and bedroom slippers. His hair was carefully combed, with a sheen of oil that smelled rank. Don’t get out much, he said. One social engagement on my calendar every month. On the 15th, 0900 to the minute, the government check lands in my account. No fanfare, no fail, there it is, egg plopped in the nest. And there I am too, waiting to claim my money.
Someone hands you a gun, you don’t check it out before you use it, be sure of its function, you’re a fool. Same with false papers. Next morning I crossed the southeast border into Palms, a city with no industry or trade centers and of scant strategic interest, populated as it is by the aged afloat on their pensions.
Cities, like the civilizations they reflect, find their rhythm. Their surges, falls. Areas within falter, decline and bottom out, open to new strains of inhabitants and push their way back up. Palms for now was on hold, a single sustained note.