The Shadow of Alpha, page 12
“You don’t have to tell me that,” he snapped, yanking a shard of cloth from his shirt and waving it in front of her face. “Would a clerk be dressed like a goddamned beggar? Would a clerk have to kill—yes, kill, dammit!—just so he could see the sun come up again? You’re tired? What the hell about me, Jess? I’ve been beaten, clawed, starved, and God knows what else when I should be back in my safe and stupid office watching some idiotic unit speak parables to me in dumb percentages. It was Coates, that self-important, overblown son of a bitch, who did this to me. It wasn’t my idea, and I’ll tell you the reason why I’m not running to some miserable horror in a city.” He turned, then, and glared at Peg, who had stopped her cleaning and was watching him wide-eyed. “You know what the Alpha is? It’s a starship, little girl, and if I can’t be on it, then goddamnit, I’m going to make damned sure there’s something decent for it here when it gets back.”
“I thought you didn’t care,” she said when he gulped for air for another spate.
“Who the hell said I didn’t care? Now, are we going to stand around here all goddamn day or are we going to find McLeod and get ourselves out of this mess?”
Without waiting for an answer, and suddenly embarrassed at his own uncharacteristic outburst, he yanked up the passenger sidedoor and half-guided, half-shoved Jessica inside. Peg, claiming she was smaller, crawled unprotesting into the cramped back, less of a chore now than when there were two. Parric slammed the door down and took the driver’s seat. He hesitated when he saw the ominous array of dials, then took a deep breath with a prayer for Ike’s ignition setup and slipped his hands into the cuffs. He triggered the engine with a flick of a thumb, pushing with his body as the motor whined through a nonstart cycle before suddenly leveling its pitch and he could feel a pull against the brake.
“Amazing,” he said, grinning as his fingers folded around the handgrips and his left foot released the emergency stop.
“Well, I’ll be,” he said when the landcar lurched onto the roadbed and jounced down the gentle slope. It took several minutes before he could admit confidence in handling the machine, several minutes more before he relaxed his stranglehold on the grips and could guide it without jerking.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said finally, looking to Jessica, who was trying and failing not to smile, “I’ll take a hovercat any time.”
“You had one?” Peg said. “I thought, from the way you talked, that clerks only took the walkways.”
“Once,” he said, no longer daring to take his eyes from the road when he nearly flattened a storm-bent birch. “When I saved free time for a few days off, I’d take it to the coast and ride the water.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed, “a small one.”
“It was enough for me, little girl.”
“And stop calling me little girl, Frank. I’m nearly twenty-five.”
Parric smiled, broader and wincing at the pulled scratches on his face when Jessica broke her silence and laughed aloud, coasting to the brink of hysteria, hovering, then easing to show she had returned to him, though as what he couldn’t yet be sure.
“How far?” Peg said when the sun had lifted to bake them.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Trying to picture that question mark over the road is hard, but I’m pretty sure we’re not all that far away. The hard part will be knowing when to stop and move into the hills to find him.”
“What’s he like?”
“That’s hard to say. He spends so much time trying to goad the Central into giving him a raise, sending him women, bothering them just for the hell of it raises a smokescreen you can’t always tell when you’ve penetrated. We’d lunch once in a while—”
“You’ve been there?” Jessica stared at him.
“No, of course not. We’d lunch, that’s all. It means we’d put up tables in front of the comunit and talk while we ate. The Central didn’t much care for that because the Town’s links were separated from normal channels and cost more to operate.”
“Something’s up ahead,” Peg said, interrupting.
Parric tried to see through the veneer of dust on the windshield, but it was as if the world had been enveloped in a tan haze. Then, at the side of the road, he saw a large dark object. He slowed, and as they passed it, saw it was a man lying facedown, his clothes ripped down the back. His feet were bare, his skin baked and dry, and welted with black pustules.
“Plague,” Peg said unnecessarily.
Parric needed no instructions to speed up, and a pair of shoes crumpled under the wheels before he had time to swerve. The trees, then, began to fall away at infrequent intervals, and shacks could be seen in the clearings. Several had been burned to the ground, most of the rest firegutted and leaning precariously. Ritual, Parric thought. Comes the plague, comes the fire. Too bad no one has learned to burn the wind.
And in slowing again, he watched his left as a pair of raw wood shanties came into view, joined together by an umbilical crude breezeway. There was a clothesline stretched from a window to a tree and several men’s shirts hung upside down. Since Peg and Jessica were busily searching the opposite slope, he didn’t bother to point out the legs he could see in the front door. There was a dog dead on the unkempt front lawn, still tied to a stake half-pulled from the earth.
“I saw something,” Jessica said, pressing a finger against the glass to show Peg where she was looking.
“I think it was a man, running.”
“It couldn’t be, not here,” Parric said. “There’s too much concentration of plague.”
They rounded a bend, dipped, and began to climb again when, at the top of the rise, two figures jumped into the middle of the road. They were carrying rifles and made no efforts to conceal at whom they were aiming. Parric’s hands loosened on the grips, then tightened as he slapped a foot heavily on the accelerator. The landcar shuddered, skidded almost into a shallow ditch, found purchase, and charged. Jessica had already ducked below the line of the dash, Peg had crouched as far down as she could although her head was still visible above the flattened triangles of the front seats. Parric could do nothing but stare as the car whined toward the men. By their hesitation in firing, he thought them surprised he hadn’t succumbed to their threat, and since they wore no uniforms of authority, he wasn’t about to ask them how soon it was until the next rain. When they finally did fire, it was as they leaped into the ditch, both shots only piercing the sky,
Thank God for projectiles, he thought, having seen what a laser weapon could do to the flimsy metal his vehicle was encased in, and then realized he was worrying for nothing. The bulky laser rifles had not been very popular of late, and had been kept mainly in the hands of the military. Still, his pessimism cautioned, a man desirous or desperate enough…
As the car topped the rise, he saw a wide and table-flat plateau, heavily wooded. Through the trees he could see open fields not large but sufficient to sustain a family or two with a surplus to tantalize those whose greed for the organic transcended expense. The road, too, had smoothed, unpaved but hardened by constant traffic.
“Who were they?” Peg asked, being the first to shake off the shock of the blunted attack.
“Desperate,” Jessica said. “Looking for credits or food, or just someone to get at. There’s a town up ahead, Frank. Maybe they come from there.”
If they did, he thought, then we’re in worse trouble. “No,” he said when the first tiny house cornered into view, “no, they weren’t.”
“This place,” Peg said a moment later. “I don’t remember seeing it when we flew over.”
There was a freshly painted sign identifying the town as Eisentor, the historic home of Noram’s first Vice President.
“Historic,” Jessica said bitterly. “Ike would have loved it.”
Eisentor was dead.
Hovercats and landcars were parked in the streets, orderly except for two or three that had crashed into others. The lawns, sidewalks, dollhouse-tiny porches were littered with the corpses of animals and birds. Approaching the center, Parric was forced to reduce his speed to weave between grounded cats that had slammed into poles, storefronts, the tops and sides of landcars. He tried not to look into them, his eyes watering from the strain of staring straight ahead, but from one a hand protruded, another swallowed half the body of a woman, shadowed the head of a child. In front of one building, single-story like the others, a quenchcat was parked and around it the masked and black-banded bodies of half a dozen firefighters.
Moving clouds of flies.
Crawling rivers of gleaming dark insects.
And the stench.
Parric swallowed, trying not to gag, picking up speed as the jams lessened and there was room for him to move.
He looked down at the dash.
“We’re low,” he said grimly.
“Don’t stop,” Jessica said. “I don’t care if we have to walk. Just don’t stop.”
He swerved to avoid a flame-eaten truck, circling a block to keep them from passing the remains of what looked like a street meeting complete with a forlorn banner that begged for salvation.
Stores dropping away to houses mostly gutted, their white colored gray.
To fields tall and fallow.
He pushed aside the window to clear the cabin of the scent of death.
When the road resumed a perceptible climb, he stopped and got out without saying a word. Holding his sides, he walked around the landcar, kicking at the metal, the tires, the stones he found loose on the shoulder. He breathed deeply, angrily, brushing away a hope that the air was still unpoisoned.
“The Cities,” Jessica said when he returned.
“I can imagine,” he said, adjusting the cuffs.
“Frank,” Peg said, leaning over the seat, her eyes red-rimmed, “how much longer?”
“If I knew, I’d be the first to tell you. And when we leave the car—”
“Leave the car?”
He nodded, understanding how she felt about jettisoning their only, concrete source of protection. “We’ll have to. The one thing I do know is that McLeod won’t be on the road. Besides, the choice is hardly ours. We’re going to be out of fuel soon.”
He started off again, pushing the landcar until the antiquated vehicle actively fought his unsteady guidance. Jessica and Peg, after desultory comments about anything at all that would exorcise Eisentor’s specter, fell into sporadic dozes that made him envious and feel more tired than he was. He shifted the drive to his right hand and pulled the left from its cuff to rub at his eyes. He was momentarily blinded, then, when he swept around a curve and saw, too late, the tree that had been felled across the road. He braked, using both hands to yank at the steering rod and the landcar whined into a skid, sliding off the road in seeming slow motion before coming to a battered rest near the base of the blockade. He heard Jessica swearing before he passed out.
Chapter 10
“No more,” he mumbled. “Don’t want anymore. No more.”
Whirlwind lights, imploding nebulae, a dark star reaching to pry open his eyes. He was sitting up, knew by the hard press of metal against his back he was propped against the landcar. His chest felt crushingly smaller in aching stripes where the safety bands had gripped him before the moment of impact, and he imagined his knees were swollen as though his feet had been jammed up into them. His right hand was partially numb, was returning sensation in a flurry of bee stings, and his left fumbled to cover it. The fact that he wasn’t dead surprised and somewhat angered him. It was, he was ready to believe, the least someone could do to keep him out of pain; Coates never did anything the easy way.
“He’s awake, Jess.”
The voice was unworried and, without a face to go with it, apparently unconcerned. A hand, feather soft and professionally caressing, brushed across his forehead with a breeze that persisted in signaling the advent of rain. It was nice in the dark in spite of the tiny suns, but the hand became insistent, dropping to his shoulder to push slightly. His head tipped to one side and, to keep the dizziness from churning his stomach, he opened his eyes, slitting them to keep the overcast glow from adding to his headache.
He was facing the way they had come and he could see the gashes in the road where he had skidded, digging into the darker earth beneath the surface. Jessica was sitting just beyond his outstretched legs, her arms folded across her upraised knees, her head resting upon them. Peg was kneeling beside him, and he smiled before trying to stand.
“No,” she said, using the same gentle hand to keep him in his place. “We’re not going anywhere. Relax until your lungs get themselves back into shape.”
“How long?” he said as he tried a deep breath and gasped at the razors someone had slipped between his ribs. “And how did you know about this?” He placed a hand carefully against his chest and patted it over the front, looking for the holes that must have been there.
“I never had a ’cat, but my brother once had a landcar that slipped out of control in Bosford. I know how those bands feel. Worth it, though. At least you’re still alive.”
He rubbed at his sides, doubtful her prediction was entirely accurate. “How long?” he repeated.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe an hour; I’m not much good without a watch.”
Immediately reminded, he looked at his wrist and saw the shattered timepiece useless in its chromium band. He scowled, pulled it off, and tossed it over his shoulder. “Jess, how are you doing?”
Jessica raised her head, brushed back her hair, and smiled, albeit ruefully. “I was sleeping when you decided to end it all. The bands had a hard time finding me. My head hurts a little.”
“Mild concussion,” Peg said when he looked to her. “No problem except that she should be in bed with a mediunit nearby. We should all be there, for that matter, but what can you do, right?”
“What about you?”
“My shoulder got banged up when the seat hit it, that’s all. Frank—” She turned to Jessica, who only shrugged, abdicating a responsibility Parric couldn’t yet fathom. “Frank, I think … that is, we think it was deliberate.”
He nodded and pushed to sit straighter. “I sort of gathered that. But it couldn’t have been for an ambush or we would have been attacked by now. Or have we?”
“No, no, nothing like that, Frank. I meant, I think we were supposed to stop here, and whoever wanted that had to be sure we wouldn’t pass this particular spot.”
“All right, nurse,” he said, “and how did you figure that out?”
He realized then that he had spoken too harshly when she looked slightly hurt and retreated to sit next to Jessica, who was rocking slowly, one hand carefully massaging the back of her neck He shifted again, found breathing decidedly less painful, and shook his head.
“Sorry, Peg,” he said. “I didn’t mean to snap like that. Now what makes you think that tree is a signal of some kind?”
She pointed mutely toward one end, obviously still feeling the sting of his sarcasm. And where do you get off talking to her like that? he demanded of himself. You’re no more country than she is. He stared, trying to see through the remnants of his dizziness what she was trying to show him. Failing that, he pulled his legs to him and, with one hand pressed against the cooling car, got to his feet. He waited for a warning about his health, received none, and sighed loudly, hopefully sounding humiliatingly contrite.
The landcar was broadside to the lower portion of the brown-skinned trunk, crumpled and clearly no longer functional. The left front tire had been twisted parallel to the ground, the left rear battered off its axle by a stout stubby branch. Parric leaned heavily against the fallen tree, unable to control the spasm of trembling as he suddenly understood how close he had come to being killed. There was a second limb barely clearing the car’s roof; had it been a handsbreadth lower, or had the car jumped before it struck, he would have been missing most of his head and torso, and so would Jessica.
As he pushed his hands against the bark, lowering his head to combat the urge to retch, the shaking subsided, but not the black pit fear that he was too mortal, too human to undergo much more punishment. And yet, absolutely against his will, there were the two women; that Jessica would be able to handle herself—she had to be or she wouldn’t have survived her profession—that Peg would see her way through to whatever end, he had no doubts, but he bristled at the way they continually leaned on him. Somehow it wasn’t the same category of responsibility he had assumed in the name of the Alpha—this was too personal for comfort.
Damn, but I’ll be glad to see McLeod, he thought, and let him hold the cup for a change.
After examining the landcar’s damage, he turned his attention to the tree itself. It took a moment before he understood it had been snapped instead of cut and had been dragged across the road. It was dead, as leafless as it had been during the winters of its youth, and where it had been torn from its roots was a mark obviously not made by the crash of the car: not large, and crudely fashioned, but an arrow nevertheless which pointed toward the slope on the right. He straddled the narrow trunk, looked down at the sign, and slowly followed its direction with his eyes, staring, puzzled, until he saw gashes large enough to be seen from the road in several more trees.
“Damn,” he said. “Why the hell didn’t they put up a sign? It would have saved me a splitting headache.”
“How many people running away from a disaster would bother looking for an arrow carved into a tree trunk?” Jessica asked. She had risen, finally, and was standing beside him, trying to smile through the dishevelment of her hair and clothes. He grinned, pleased to see she was at last behaving like the woman he had known a hundred years ago. He swung his left leg back over the trunk and sat sidesaddle, his arms folded across his chest.
“I suppose you were the one who found this miracle,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “I’m a reporter who’s trained in looking for things other ordinary people miss.” She looked back to Peg, who laughed. “Actually,” she admitted, “it was luck. After we got you out of the car, I fell back against the tree, dizzy as hell, and when Peg tried to pick me up, I saw the mark. I didn’t know what it was at first, probably didn’t want to believe what my eyes were showing me. But when Peg saw it too, she wanted to follow the trail up the hill right away. I thought it would be better if we all went. It still might be a trap, you know. And it might not even be for us. It could have been here for days, maybe to keep those people from Eisentor from going someplace they weren’t supposed to.”
