John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Then came the IS vehicles, Internal Security Vehicles, three anti-insurgency Mowag Roland units: six wheels apiece, olive-drab armored cars shaped like thick ax wedges, their prows equipped with dozer blades, turrets that fired gas or grenade rounds or bullets, the operators watching everything on screens inside; up-angled deflection skirts all around against mine blasts. Electrically charged exteriors.

Suddenly the ISVs were wheeling around the corners, plowing into the four hundred survivors, grinding them under, driving them back, shunting them like human mud. Booming out commands in a voice so amplified it cracked the eardrums of those standing near: DO NOT MOVE AND YOU WILL BE UNHARMED. RUN AND YOU WILL DIE. DO NOT MOVE AND YOU WILL BE UNHARMED…

“Don’t stop! Jamais plus!”

Roseland kept shouting, kept running. Running through a cloud of exhaust smoke as an IS vehicle smashed past him and crushed a dozen men and women under its dozer blade; as another opened up with a barrage of explosive rounds to his rear…

Then he felt the ground shake. He paused, looked back to see the crystallized-steel Gargantua arching its metal scythes over the horizon: a Jægernaut, ten stories high, this one, a spoked wheel without the rim, a giant steel swastika, a skyscraper-size Rototiller ripping up anything in its path, brought here through the ruined buildings near the high-rises. Converging on Roseland’s high-rise, biting down on Processing Center 12, the five hundred who’d remained inside crushed between the floors as they accordioned flat… he could hear them screaming even from here…

Making an example for the ones across the street, in PC 13. And for the ones who’d hear about it later in other parts of the city.

A mountainous geyser of dust rose where the building had been, swirling around great scythes of metal that cut through the night sky.

It was an act beyond murder. Murder was too small a word.

I should have died with them …

But when he heard the ISVs rumbling down the street, searching him out, he began to run once more.

Running blindly. Or perhaps some part of his mind made decisions about where it was running to. Or maybe it was dumb luck.

But thirty minutes later, when the strength went out of his limbs, he collapsed into the high weeds of a vacant lot, letting a fresh rain wash over him. Wash some of Gabrielle’s blood from him…

He found that he was alive. Alone. Intact.

It was almost five hours—hearing IS vehicles, now and then, roar obliviously past him—before Roseland had the strength to move.

He sat up and retched. The world spun.

When the spinning stopped, he saw that the clouds had parted and there were stars. He sat there, very still, cold, muddy, not moving in the yellow grass that reached up to his chin. The smell of the wet grass was overpowering.

Was he the only one who’d made it?

Oh, please, no. Kill him if it was so. Someone kill him if that was true.

Another thought, then. It wasn’t in words, at first. Just a picture, a blurry peripheral image of people exploding from gunfire all around him. After a while, there were words to go with it: I led a thousand and more to their deaths. I led them into the slaughterhouse.

He waited for the guilt to come. Gabrielle was just one of more than a thousand dead. He was guilty of leading her and the others to death. The guilt would come down on him like a hammer from the sky.

He waited. Not moving.

Nothing.

Feel it. Face the guilt: Maybe they should have waited. Maybe someone would have come to save them. Maybe…

No. This was better.

He felt another kind of remorse. He had survived: he should have died with Gabrielle, with the others. Not because he led them into a shower of bullets, but simply because he was one of them. There was no fair reason he should survive and they shouldn’t. No justice in it.

He sat completely inert, balancing precariously on his spine, thinking he’d fall forward or back if he tried to move. Thinking: All that death. Most of them gone.

It was still better.

He went into a gray study. Stopped thinking at all.

A little while later, something ran over his leg.

He moved only his eyes, some instinct priming his fingers, waiting…

Again. Motion. Something moving toward him. Investigating him. Thinking he was food. A rat.

Moving up his leg.

All by itself, his hand moved. He watched his own hand with amazement as it struck like a rattler and grabbed the rat. Squeezed it dead and tore it open. He closed his eyes and let his hands and mouth do their work.

After a while, Roseland could move again. He was on his feet, staggering south, toward the city.

Just after dawn, as he crouched in a doorway somewhere in Paris, he saw a woman spraying a wall with a glue can, then slapping up a poster. Translated, the poster said, THEY’RE LYING TO YOU. LIES MAKE SLAVES. WAIT FOR THE RESISTANCE. Above the words was a picture of a sky-blue flag.

Moving quickly, the woman put up two more posters, then hurried away.

He trotted after her. “Hey! Hey! ”

She froze on the street. He could see she was about to break into a run. She thought he was police. He shouted hoarsely, “Please! I need… I ran away from the processing center!”

Just as he said please, she’d started running. But now she stopped. He could see by her body language, her silhouette against the dawn-lit backdrop of blue morning mist, that she felt she was taking a chance as she turned, slowly, to look at him. She walked toward him—then suddenly ran to him, grabbed his wrist. A faint expression of revulsion flickered over her face as she looked him over.

She led him into an alley, into another street, and into a debris-choked entrance to a Metro station. After much worming and climbing and walking in darkness (all the while Roseland feeling he would die if he took another step, but somehow always taking another step), they came up in a ruined building, and she took him through some doors. There was some argument at the doors in French, but they went through.

They were brought to a lean man missing an ear. A man whom Roseland knew immediately as an American. Knew without knowing how.

“Monsieur Torrence,” the woman said, introducing the stranger.

Roseland said, “My name is Abraham Roseland. Give me a gun. Give me a fucking gun.”

And then he collapsed.

Jack Smoke, a tall man with a hawk nose and sharp black eyes, walked on a long-legged drooping gait across the tarmac to the transport plane; he was walking more slowly than he would have liked so that the little girl carrying the crow could keep up with him. Her name was Alouette; she was about ten. She was the color of a polished coconut shell, her wavy black hair tied up under a sky-blue scarf. Smoke wore an identical scarf around his neck. Both of them wore short-sleeve white shirts, shorts, and sandals.

“You said we could go swimming again before we took the plane,” she said. She made it sting by saying it matter-of-factly.

She had too many of the adult tricks, Smoke thought. There are advantages to having a gifted child, and disadvantages. But he’d never regretted adopting Alouette.

“We’re not taking this plane yet. We will go swimming before we leave the island,” he promised, glancing at the sky. It was a warm day, but the subtropical island was sheeted over with a thin cloud cover, and there was a brisk wind. Weather report said a storm was coming; he hoped it would take its time, and not make him a liar. “We’re going out to this plane to see the reporter from MediaSat.”

“Oh. You could’ve told me before.”