Гарднер Дозуа - City Under the Stars

Mahoney blew his breath out noisily. “That’s a’right then.” He stood briskly, and slapped Hanson on the back. “We sleep in the ruins. Pick yourself out a spot.”

He disappeared into the darkness. Several of the others were already gone.

So they had not even bothered to build themselves shelters. Somehow Hanson was not surprised. He scouted out a flat spot in the angle of two ancient walls, and laid out his blanket preparatory to sleep.

The Preacher came stumbling around the corner, stopped, and stood blinking and bewildered. “This is—” he began. “I was—that is, I was sleeping here and I, I—” His mouth opened and closed, gulping against tears.

Disgusted with the little monkey-faced creature, Hanson gathered up his blanket. “Oh, hell,” he grumbled. “Take it, if y’ want it. I’ll find another spot.” He left, sickened by the pathetically grateful expression that flooded the Preacher’s face, the moist and worshipful look that came into his eyes.

Hanson was caught in an endless, looping dream when the raid began. He was on the transport again, rolling up and down to the rhythm of life on the roads. It was a long, easy rhythm; it lent itself to a watchful contemplation that was an edge away from sleep, and yet was almost preternaturally alert. There was nothing to mark it but the passage of the sun, rolling up across the arch of sky, under the horizon, up again, and the roads themselves, slipping endlessly under the transport, sometimes paved, sometimes mud, sometimes sunbaked and dusty, the trees along the roadside white with the dust kicked up by the transport, as if they had been hit by a blizzard in the midst of summer. The heat would be rising in waves from the deckplates, shimmering vision. The sky would be dazzlingly blue, and the sun a hot copper penny in it, except when the dust-trail would shift and swirl around the transport itself, and then the sky would become dirty white, and the masked sun would become a smoldering bloodshot eye. Always the endless moving ribbon of the road sliding smoothly toward them, being swallowed by the prow of the transport, with new road always coming into being ahead of them, around the next curve or over the next hill, sliding forward to be swallowed in its turn. And occasionally a hamlet or village, borne up by the current of the road, bobbing nearby for an instant, and then whirled away behind, like a drowsy, peasant-infested, cow-carrying chip of driftwood. He would become aware that he had dreamed this before and then immediately lose all assurance that this was so. So he would anxiously relive the nonevents of traveling the roads, the muted waterfall thunder of the engine, the constant swaying of the transport and the relentless thudding of the treads, the trees, the road, the villages, Willis’s grunted orders, Brigault’s sudden and pointless laughter. Until he forgot what he was worrying about and it all began again.

He awoke to explosions.

Men were shouting, screaming, running. A bullet splintered bark from a tree not five yards from him and there were bright lights and dark shapes beyond the dying embers of the campfire, down the path up which he had come. Savage shouts echoed through the ruins, and another bullet sizzled through the air.

In a panicked instant, Hanson was on his feet, quivering and frozen motionless, like a jack-lighted deer. Somebody slammed into him, cursed, and was gone, along with Hanson’s paralysis. He grabbed at his shirt to keep from losing the gun, which he’d carefully stuck between undershirt and belt before turning in. It did not occur to him to use it.

Stumblingly at first, and then faster, he began to run. Men were shouting and crashing into things, running ahead of him, up the path. He followed blindly. Somebody grabbed his arm and he lashed out without looking, his fist smashing into a face. But whoever it was did not let go, but wrapped both arms around his waist.

Turning, he stared down into the Preacher’s fearful face.

“Don’t!” the Preacher gasped. “For God’s sake, don’t! That’s just what they want you to do. They’re just beaters. The SIs will be up the trail, waiting. I’ve seen it before! And politicians—it’s a sport to them, ambushing rievers, they get to notch bandits without any risk to themselves. Sometimes they take souvenirs.”

The old man’s unexpected lucidity broke through the haze of fear and instinct. Hanson stopped and looked around. A flare screamed high into the night. Bright lights, harsh shadows. “What should we do?”

“We’ve got to get away from the path,” the Preacher said. “This way.” Tugging at Hanson’s arm, he half pulled him over a pile of crumbling bricks and between two ruined walls. Awkwardly, Hanson let himself be led. Behind them, two SIs stooped over a fallen bandit, machetes in hand, hacking wildly, the blades flashing in the smoky light from the Wall as they rose and fell, rose and fell. One SI looked up and, seeing them, shouted.

They struggled deeper into the darkness.

Together he and the Preacher forced their way through a nightmare of noise-filled woods, stumbling over low walls, ducking under loops of vampire weed and blundering into tangles of mile-a-minute vines, flinching every time a bullet pierced the air with its shrill whine or a phased sonics cannon blanketed the area with an awful split-second of unbearable silence. There was nothing but fear and confusion in Hanson’s mind. He’d left his knapsack behind. He had nothing now but his gun and the clothes on his back.

Then the Preacher fell and did not get up.

“Stand, damn you!” Hanson seized the Preacher’s shoulder to give him an impatient shake, but his hand came away wet and sticky. He looked at it wonderingly.

Blood.

He stared down at the wrinkled old man, saw the grayness in his bruised face, how the clothes down one side of his body were black with blood. He’d been wounded all along, kept going by hysteria and fear. A flare went up in the air, and doubled shadows from it and the Wall danced in all directions. The little man wasn’t going to make it. It was a miracle he’d lasted this long. Hanson couldn’t take him along, wherever he was going—it would be useless. The Preacher needed a doctor, and Hanson had no doctoring in him; he could splint a leg or tie a tourniquet, and had several times, back at the factory, but that was it—the kind of gunshot wound the Preacher had was far beyond him. Best to keep moving and let the Preacher fend for himself as best he could, live or die as the gods willed. There was no time now for sentiment …

Cursing himself for a fool even as he did it, Hanson bent down and scooped the little man up in his arms.

“They killed an angel in Harrisburg,” the Preacher said suddenly. He did not open his eyes. “It’s in the records—not that anybody but me ever bothered to read the records… Used to do that a lot, back then, the angels. Angels passing through the Wall…”

“Don’t talk,” Hanson said. He started walking, too tired, too burdened, to run any more. If the SIs caught him, they caught him. It was hard even to care.

But the Preacher went on unheeding. “So close… I came so very close . I was not an inconsequential man… but I was afraid. Couldn’t take those final steps. I had the key to Heaven in me, and I couldn’t go .” He started to weep. “At night, I hear its voice, calling, calling… it’s never still . I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

Embarrassed, Hanson repeated, “Don’t talk.”

“Take me to the Wall,” the Preacher said, with surprising force. “I want to get that far at least. Bury me there. So I can say I went the distance.”

“Yah, sure.” Hanson’s step was slowing, and the weight of the body in his arms seemed heavy beyond endurance. He didn’t think he could go much farther. The night, so full of noise for the duration of their flight, now sank back down into silence, either because of distance or because the SIs and their political masters had finished having their fun and departed.