John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Yeah, yeah… uh… here it is…” Bonham handed the man a paper.

“Okay. Come on.”

And Claire burst into tears.

Her father was gone. She had abandoned him.

URGENT: Witcher to Steinfeld

Decoded:

They extracted Stisky. He is reported dead. Ellen Mae Crandall reported dead. They have Purchase. You are compromised: they know your location. Repeat, they have made Paris as the location of NR field leadership; you in particular. Message intercepted relaying orders from Watson, Paris to be sealed off, the city to be “taken apart if necessary.” New weapons deployed. Leave Paris, repeat, leave Paris…

URGENT: Bensimon, Israeli Embassy, to Witcher

Decoded:

Your message transmitted on to Steinfeld. However, Russian damage to allied sats and other factors make Steinfeld copying message unlikely. Computer report: probability only seven percent that Steinfeld received message. Strategic good news: high-level decision in Tel Aviv resulting from new intelligence confirms extreme anti-Semitic activity SA prompting Mossad to take active part against SA. Will do what we can to get Steinfeld and cadre out.

Hard-Eyes and Rickenharp were picking their way through the ruins of Paris, en route to checking out the landing pod Steinfeld claimed was coming down a kilometer northeast, when they saw Besson frying the last two fingers of his left hand.

They could see Besson—his image distorted but recognizable—through the fire-warped bubble of the burnt-out McDonald’s plastic window. He was cooking something they couldn’t see, at that point, using the grill’s abandoned bottle of propane. True to form, Besson had camped out just two blocks from the Arc de Triomphe, on the Champs-Élysées. What was left of the Champs-Élysées… Besson was never far from the arch; his wife had been buried alive after a direct hit on their apartment building a few hundred yards from the monument.

And Besson returned to the shell of the building at night, to talk to his wife.

Rickenharp claimed he’d seen her himself; translucent and luminous, she drifted over the rubble, smiling enigmatically. So he said.

Maybe he did see her. Because two days after the front moved on north again, leaving Paris in the hands of the SA, the Strategie Actuel, and a few beleaguered cops, Rickenharp had made a deal with a black marketeer, traded an antique Chinese jade-and-silver bracelet (“First thing I bought when I got the royalties on my first hit. Everybody else bought a car.”) for half an ounce of blue mesc.

You do enough blue mesc, you see anything you want.

It was a damp, chill evening; gloomy but suffused with the pearly gray afterglow. There were shreds of fog gathering, knitting together in the blue shadows of the ruined walls.

They stood outside the wrecked MacDonald’s, the steel of the Belgian assault rifle growing cold in Hard-Eyes’ hands as the dusk wore into night. There was a .45 holstered on Hard-Eyes’ right hip. Rickenharp carried something he’d scavenged from an SA ordnance dump: a Heckler and Koche Close Assault Weapon System (CAWS) automatic shotgun, model three. Gas operated with recoil assist, bullpup layout, internal operation floating system; 12-gauge. It was a thirty-four-inch gun, with the flash-hider, squarish, made of lightweight permaplast, carbon-fiber and plastic, stronger than steel. Twenty-round box. Rickenharp carried a pouch of seven ready-loaded boxes, and he’d practiced slapping them into the magazine till he could do it faster than the eye could follow. The CAWS was lethal out to 150 yards.

Rickenharp said, “What you think, neggo? Let’s go see how old Besson’s getting on. We’re, like, the only civilians left in Paris unless you want to count the cannibals in Pigalle.”

Hard-Eyes shrugged. “Steinfeld won’t like it. We gotta get to the thing before the fashes do, Harpie.”

“Probably not a landing pod the spotters saw, man. How likely is that? Orbit drop pod? Sure. More likely helicopter. Talk about fashes, it was probably them.” The fashes: the Fascists.

“Yukio saw the sensor profile and he knows spacegear. But fuck it, let’s look in on Besson.” He stepped into the MacDonald’s as he spoke, “Five minutes tops and—oh, shit.” That’s when he saw what Besson was cooking. His fingers…

They’d gone into the refugee camp, recruiting, more than once, and they’d seen things there, that—well, this shouldn’t have bothered Hard-Eyes as much as it did.

His gut contracted as he watched Besson stab a fork into his fingers and bring them to his mouth, start chewing, his eyes blank. He had a submachine gun, a Russian model cadged off some corpse, slung on a strap over his right shoulder.

“Hey, Besson, man, uh—” Rickenharp said softly. “Put down the gun and—everything. You come with us, we’ll find you some rations, man. We didn’t know you was so hard up.” Stupid thing to say: everybody was hard up. Rickenharp’s pale face had gone grim; his Adam’s apple bobbed on his long neck as he swallowed to keep from gagging.

Besson looked at them—and growled.

Looking into Besson’s small red eyes, at the sores on his emaciated face, his scalp and hair missing in patches, Hard-Eyes knew he was burnt. Gone, blown. He’d gone into the neurotoxin-dusted sectors, maybe without knowing it, scratching in the rubble for food, and the stuff was killing him slowly, making him mad first, as it was designed to do…

And now he was pointing the machine gun at them, holding it against his hip with his good hand. One of his charred fingers still clenched in his teeth. He growled again—a warning, like a dog with a bone.

He’d probably shoot at them if they moved, even if they backed away. A man got that way if he was yellow-dusted.

So Rickenharp pretended to faint.

He fell into a swoon, sighing, falling flat out on the shard-strewn floor. Besson gaped, confused. The charred finger fell from his mouth. Finally, his burnt brain decided: something moved, and even if it was only to fall, better shoot it.

So he lowered the gun to point it at Rickenharp on the floor.

Hard-Eyes drew his sidearm and did Besson a favor.

Besson fell with a neat round hole through the forehead, and Rickenharp, lying on the floor, started to sob.

Hard-Eyes felt empty. He reached down and pulled Rickenharp to his feet. “What you gonna do if we run into Carmen’s patrol, she sees you like that,” Hard-Eyes said, a catch in his voice. “Cut it the fuck out.”

Rickenharp staggered out the door and took deep draughts of the cold night air. Hard-Eyes came to stand by him. “Later on,” Rickenharp said, “we take his body to his old house, bury him with his wife.”

“Okay… He’s better off, Harpie.”

“Yeah. I guess.” He took an old, ornate snuff box from his pocket, opened it, scooped a strong hit of blue mesc with a thumbnail grown extra long for just that purpose. He snorted it up, and, still sniffing it back into his sinuses, said, “Yeah—” Sniff. “Probably better off now—” Sniff. “Than he has been for years.” Sniff.

Hard-Eyes watched dolefully. “Hodey, I shouldn’t be trusting you with a gun anywhere near me when you’re on that shit. I’ll be glad when you run out.”

“Hey, it just makes me a better shot.”

“Sure, if you’re shooting at gray aliens and fairies.”

“Hey, I’m the head producer, the programmer of my hallucinations, neggo.”

“Just fucking come on.” Hard-Eyes led the way off through a narrow side street, the buildings on the other side mostly intact, heading northeast again.