John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

No one spoke for a few moments. Swenson peered up through the interlacing branches, trying to see the sun. The sky beyond the naked twigs was uniformly steel gray. The woods were silent, except for the strikingly unnatural sound of the body bags being zipped up.

“Hey—how about leaving me a gun?” Rickenharp said. “What the hell. I mean, if I have to stay in this fucking truck alone—this fucking truck I’ve been in all fucking day long. Not to complain or anything.”

Carmen paused, straddling the truck’s closed tail-gate, and looked back at him. She’d just said, Stay here, don’t move, if anybody speaks to you play dumb. We’re going to see if the pass is open.

Now she was a silhouette, spiky black against the deep indigo of the late evening sky. Even her cold-plumed breath showed in silhouette.

And Rickenharp was sitting with his back to the cold steel, his muscles cramping with the chill of it.

Carmen made a hissing sound of impatience and swung back into the rear of the truck. She crouched by her pack, and he heard the crisp sound of nylon rustling. She took a wedge of darkness from the pack and, moving crabwise, came to hunch beside him.

He felt something cold and heavy pressed into his hands. She was a figure of darkness giving him the means to kill. “It’s a machine pistol,” she said.

Her hands were still on the pistol, and the pistol was in his hands. It was an assassin’s benediction. She was touching him via the pistol.

There was a faint, neat-edged click in the darkness.

The gun glowed in his hands; it shone from within.

The pistol was transparent and electrically lit up. It was framed with stainless steel; the inner sections of the gun were made of glass-clear hyper-compressed plastic. He could see into the magazine, could see the bullets in the clip like a row of robot larvae. A tiny light in the pistol’s butt and another under the breech gave the gun an eerie blue glow.

She ticked a black-painted fingernail against a stud just above the trigger guard. “That’s the safety. Up is safety off. After that all you have to do is aim and squeeze the trigger. Those are .22 rounds. Not big, but very precise. The small rounds give you a clip of forty…”

Willow hissed from the tailgate. “Put out that bloody light in there! And come on !”

She showed Rickenharp the light switch on the back of the butt and flicked it off. “Light shows up your position—it’s only in case you have to check the gun when you’re under cover. Don’t shoot unless you’re sure someone’s shooting at you, or about to. You might shoot a friend by accident. These plastic guns look like children’s toys. They’re not.” She moved away and slipped out of the truck.

He wanted to ask her, What made you so sure I didn’t know anything about guns? But he realized it was a stupid question.

Carefully, holding the gun up so he could see it against the screen of night sky above the tailgate, he took the grip in his hand and slipped his finger into the trigger guard.

He looked at it for a moment; in the darkness it was like an outgrowth of his arm. And a door opened inside him, and something slithered out of the door, leaving a trail of thrill behind it.

Rickenharp drew the gun close to his chest, between both hands, and looked out into the night.

Now and then he had to shrug down farther into his coat, to shake the shivering off. He took deep breaths, trying to stoke oxygen fires in himself, and thought, Christ! Maybe I’m drugged-out delirious. Maybe I’m still back in Freezone, hallucinating in my shit-hole hotel room. Or maybe I really am somewhere in the Alps with a machine pistol in my hands.

He thought of Ponce and the band. That scene ain’t real, you Grid-nipplers. THIS is real! Gridfriend help me, this is real.

He wiped his nose on his sleeve and listened.

No sound, except the the snap-sound of the wind whipping the canvas. The minutes passed—or maybe they didn’t. He wasn’t sure how long it was before he heard the voices.

Guttural voices. Foreign language.

He thought, Russians.

Willow had talked about it, blasé as a trucker talking about the highway patrol. “Some of the Alps are Russian and some parts aren’t, and the bloody borders keep shifting. NATO territory today is Russian tomorrow and vice versa, like,” he’d said.

…Crunch of footsteps…

I’d have heard gunfire if it was the Russians, he told himself.

But not necessarily. Yukio, Willow, and Carmen might have walked right into a trap—been forced to surrender without firing a shot. Maybe a mile down the road they’re tied up, lying gagged in the back of another truck. Russian truck. Or SAISC—worse. And the SA could be anywhere.

The talking had stopped. Crunch. Footsteps again. Closer.

He brought the gun around and rested his elbow on his right knee. He trained the gun on the rear of the truck.

And the Russians torture everybody for intelligence nowadays, Willow had said. Even sheep farmers.

He reached across the top of the gun and flicked off the safety.

The guttural voice again. He tried to be sure of the language. Couldn’t hear it clearly enough.

A creak as someone stepped onto the rear bumper, two shapes blurred together in the rear, the guttural voice again, and then the rear of the truck lit up—

It lit up with strobe flashes, four of them, going off like flashbulbs, making the scene at the rear of the truck into a choppy motion-picture sequence: Carmen, hand lifted over her eyes, mouth opened to shout, a strange man beside her in a watch cap, his eyes wide; Carmen with two red holes in her chest; Carmen with arm flung up; Carmen falling back.

The back of the truck echoed, a metallic lisp for each gunshot.

And Rickenharp realized he’d squeezed the trigger.

He thought, Willow said something yesterday about meeting some Swiss friends.

And then: I shot Carmen.

“The truth is,” Molt was saying, “there are two factions in administration. One faction is basically in favor of martial law in the Colony. Their attitude is something like, the danger to the station’s life-support system is too great if they let things go on.”

Bonham sat in the After, listening to Molt talk on an old twelve-inch TV sunk flush with the wall, thinking, Molt sounds tired, mechanical. Barely maintaining.

And the TV in Prego’s After was tired itself, barely maintaining, the talking-head image of Molt warping into the outline of a peanut shell, making Molt look even more tired.

Bonham nestled back in the easy chair. The chair took up half the room. Like everything else in the small room, the chair was frayed, ripping out at the seams, and grimy. The walls were papered with fading printout porn; marker graffiti overlapped unreadably on the walls between the printout girls. There was a mattress behind the easy chair stained with a revolting potpourri of effluvia. This end of the Colony had some kind of heat-convection problem and Prego had been issued a space heater to compensate; the heat rose and its waves lifted the papery girls by the corners of their pages; the heat had activated the decay factor built into the paper, so that the underprinting was showing through: TIME TO RECYCLE ME. There was a heap of Prego’s laundry beside the TV set; its sourness dominated the room.

There were three rooms in Prego’s After; the other two malodorous, trashed-up rooms were bigger, crowded with people drinking Prego’s foul home brew; fermented garbage, Molt called it. Bonham had the door closed and the TV turned up as loud as it would go, to beat the sounds coming from the other rooms: laughter, minimono blaring; he had to strain to hear as Molt, on TV, went on, “…The other faction is… I believe… sincerely interested in negotiating a compromise with strikers. The blockade state of emergency is a time when we should all be working together to survive…” He paused to glance at his notes. Bonham saw that Molt’s hands were shaking and he blinked too often.