A Private Little War (58 page)

We are none of us special. We are not loved or looked after. There are no grand designs.

In the primal dark of a primal world, Fenn slept and dreamed alone of nothing.

MORNING
. The last one.

Carter woke at dawn. There was no siren, but the sun coming back seemed an abomination that needed settling. The first instinct was to kill, as though the stars could be put out just by hating them.

In his tent, Vic was gone. Fenn had never come home. Carter had an instant’s fear that everyone had died but him. Worse, that they’d all gone off and left him. That Eddie or Ted had come through with some late Christmas miracle and he’d missed the last ride there was ever going to be. The fear deepened until it became terror. A fist squeezing his heart so that he had to get up and find another human face or die right there in his bed.

So he rose, pulled his jacket on, stepped to the door, and was stunned by the diamond beauty of the breaking light over ice-frosted grass and glittering canvas gone stiff with faintly ammoniac ice. It was beautiful, fragile, gleaming, and terribly quiet. Almost hallucinatory, as though he’d been dosed by something in his sleep that brought out the hard angles and soft interior of everything on which his eyes fell. Head muzzy and full of cotton, he was afraid to step out and leave his dirty boot prints on this strange display of nature’s alien perfection.

Looking down the tent line, he didn’t see another living soul. He crouched down and ran a palm across a tuft of silvered grass, its gilding of frost melting under his hand. It seemed to him that he’d woken to a world made of glass and had been given the power to destroy it with his touch. The silence was narcotic. The sound of his breath, his heartbeat, the squelch of his pulse were the only sounds in the universe, and he was as alone as anyone had ever been until Lambert, the mechanic, came around the edge of his tent in a filthy jumpsuit and face blackened with oil.

“God, I thought everyone else had died,” Lambert said. He had an accent that made him sound like a news commentator. Every word was a pronouncement. From his squat, Carter looked up at him and marveled, slack-jawed, as he grunted out a huff of steam. And even after Lambert had passed on in the direction of the field and the longhouse, Carter wasn’t sure that he hadn’t just imagined him.

He’d left boot prints in the frost rime.

Carter thought he might be imagining those as well, so he touched one—fitting his hand into the smear in the glaze of ice and considering it for a moment, feeling the odd sizzle of the sublimating ice against his palm.

He stood. He fished a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket, and the sound of the crinkling foil was like a peal of thunder. Squinting down the line, he felt something bump against his ankles and looked to see Cat butting its head against the leather of his boots, scales gone a dirty gray-brown, nails scrabbling at the dirt inside the door.

“Cat,” Carter said.

Cat didn’t respond. The thing never had, its name meaningless to it like the names of everything else here were meaningless to Carter.

“I was looking for you last night, you know.”

Carter reached down and touched the little animal, bumping the tips of suddenly terribly sensitive fingers down the soft fuzz of its scales. Crouching in the doorway, Carter smoked and he stared—watching for movement, feeling for life beyond.

“How long did I sleep, Cat?” he asked, the words so close in the cold dawn that it sounded to him like he was whispering into his own ear. “Forever, I think.”

Under his hand, Cat’s body was warm like a gun. Carter’s cigarette burned down to the filter, and the smell of it was like burning aircraft dope, chemical and sharp and sour, which he didn’t like at all. It reminded him of Lefty. Carter looked at the smoldering ember and wrinkled his nose at the stink. He flicked it disdainfully out into the perfect snow.

Under his hand, he felt Cat tense—ready to bound off after it, to play its game with Carter. But then, Cat didn’t run. It relaxed instead, opened its little mouth, hissed and spit a couple of times around its bright, needle fangs, then lowered its head, turned, and slunk back to its bed of tattered rags by the door and started tearing at it with a fury.

Carter watched. He felt there was some kind of lesson there. Some indictment or vital message that Cat was trying to get across, but he couldn’t figure out what it might be. It was just the day, he decided. Everything felt portentous. He ran a hand through his clean hair, sniffed at the stinging, astringent air, and stepped out into the beautiful, empty world alone.

Fenn woke before dawn to a quiet like death, like he was the last man alive. He was half-frozen, sore all over from sleeping with his head on a table, his back arched like a cat ready for a fight. There was no coffee. In the night and darkness, someone had come and thrown a musty blanket over his shoulders, but it’d slipped off to puddle around his feet on the cold ground.

He stood and stretched and, for a minute, saw lights sparking behind his closed eyelids like the blooming flares of antiaircraft fire. He had to sit down again. Without his armor on, the cold was even more ferocious and seemed to have leaked inside him as though through a thousand pinhole wounds.

There was just enough light to make out the frayed selvage between land and sky through windows turned into portholes by frost rime—closing apertures of ghostly diffusion, looking out upon a snow-globe world made marvelous by brief peace and the snow’s disdain for detail. His breath steamed like a soul continually fighting for escape. In his
head, he imagined the smell of eggs scrambling and toast burning and ham in a pan. A pine fire. The blanket joy of comforts, dimly recalled.

The worst of the mess tables was stained permanently with blood that had been scrubbed and bleached from the wood but still showed in dark smears. In the galley, he found a cleaver but felt it inadequate to the task he had in mind. He rooted around until, near an old potbellied stove, rarely used (though, had he known about it, one that would’ve made his night considerably more comfortable), he found an axe. He applied the axe to the table with some vigor. He tore up cardboard cases once used to hold bags of powdered egg. He pulled splinters from the rough wood posts used to hold up the tent canvas. By the time he was done, he’d worked up a sweat that froze against his skin every time he paused for breath, but had the makings of a decent fire. He piled his fuel, his tinder, his shredded cardboard, in the middle of a space he’d cleared on the floor and lit it with his lighter in ten places. He blew carefully on the guttering flames, coaxing them to spread, then squatted on his haunches, humming distractedly to himself, and waited to see if they would take.

They did. He tried to lift a tin coffee urn from one of the tables at the end of the mess and, when it resisted, tore it free of the wood to which it’d been bolted. His teeth were bared, his muscles full of blood.

He set the urn as close to the fire as he could get it. Inside, it was full of frozen coffee. No telling how many days old. Two, at least. With a stick of broken table, he pushed the fire up around the back of the urn and piled on more wood. When he saw that the smoke was not escaping, he climbed up atop another table and, with a knife from the kitchen, stabbed at the canvas until a tattered hole was born.

“Chimney,” he said to no one in particular, then lifted the top of the urn off with his sleeve and saw that the coffee was beginning to melt. Just a few minutes more now.

He went to find a clean mug, powdered creamer, sugar. In one of Johnny All-Around’s ice boxes, he found some native ham steaks, already cut. He stabbed one onto the end of a long barbecue fork and charred it over the flames while he waited. He ate it off the fork, pulling bites off with his teeth, burning his cheeks and his tongue. It was the best thing he’d ever tasted, and he grunted with pleasure at nearly every bite.

With a rag wrapped around his hand, he pulled the spigot on the coffeepot. Coffee poured forth. This made Fenn smile, and he jammed his mug beneath the stream. It was terrible, tasting like smoke and burning plastic and only vaguely like coffee at all. He doctored it with powdered cream and rock sugar that he’d crushed to powder with the heel of a pan, and it was the best coffee he’d ever had. He had two cups. Then he poured a third. Then, with more rags on his hands, he wiggled the urn away from the fire, lifted it, and dumped the contents onto the flames to douse them. There were still embers remaining, however. These, he pissed on—standing at attention, with his back arched and his dick in his hand, staring out one of the windows at the slowly brightening horizon.

This was how he was when he saw the first shooting star arcing across the morning sky. Then the second and the third. He put his penis away, zipped up, and stepped to the door with a warm coffee mug cradled between his palms.

“Well,” he said. “Well.”

He stepped outside into the snow, leaving virgin tracks in the oblivious whiteness. He walked a ways off across what had been the stubble field, toward the falling stars. Boots crunching the shrouded grasses, he felt the difference when he crossed onto the clipped apron of a runway, and he stopped. He sipped his coffee. He watched in silent reverence the miracles happening above and beyond him.

Silently, men gathered around him. Tommy Hill. Davey Rice, brought back from the dead. Albert Wolfe helped Porter Vaughn hobble over, one foot in a boot of plaster. Billy Stitches, walking as though everything were a dream, asked Fenn where he’d gotten that coffee. Fenn handed the cup to him and told him to drink. Max and Johnny and Emile and Lambert. Radio operators. Controllers. Mechanics. Vic drifted in from the longhouse, her glide path still having a hunting edge to it, a stiff breeze making wings of the blue quilted engine blanket she had wrapped around herself like a cape.

Kevin. He came from the tent line to stand beside Fenn and amid the coterie, the huddled remains of the Flyboy Inc. Carpenter 7 Epsilon mission. To stand and watch the gleaming traceries of fire in the sky; to watch with the same mute amalgam of horror, fascination, dread, and sickly, fatalist joy that their arrival had likely inspired in so many lesser
creatures before them; to watch as the dropships spiraled down, standing on tongues of flame, and as the cargo containers, like bombs, fell and left their comet trails of smoke and brilliant friction across the bluing bowl of sky that once had been their sole preserve. No need to hide now, to muffle their shining arrival in the sun’s cloaking radiance. No fear. No shame. No time left for pussyfooting around.

They watched the bold fireworks of their impending future coming to Earth, and not a man among them wasn’t overawed by the display. Not a man didn’t shudder and cower slightly—cringing closer to the man beside or behind him—when the sky was split and the dignified silence was shattered by the shriek of jet engines overhead, a wing of aircraft flying in close formation, howling directly past them.

“CB-30 transports,” Carter said when it was possible to speak again. “Hundred men or ten thousand pounds. VTOL engines. Good application here. Smart.”

Fenn turned to look at his friend. “Kev,” he said, “what did you do before you joined the company?”

“I flew those,” he said without hesitation, without looking away—shading his eyes and turning to watch the transports recede, to drop their men and machinery somewhere behind the Flyboy encampment. “For NRI. You?”

“I buried my wife and son,” Fenn said.

Carter nodded. He said nothing in reply. One of the CB-30s was altering its flight path, executing a long, screaming hook a hundred feet above tree level, skittering across the brightening sky, then standing in the air, reorienting. Carter turned full around to watch it, setting his jaw and staring daggers at it as its blunt, black nose seemed to search for him, sniffing for his scent on the frozen air.

“Fuck you,” he said under his breath. “Come get me.”

The scramble siren started to blow. The men standing, watching, tensed at the sound, but they did not run. They’d lost the want, but not the reflex. Behind them, in among the tents, there was some action. Bodies moving. Sounds of activity. The camp waking to a new reality.