John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Finally, Rickenbarp was finished. Hard-Eyes took off the earphones. His ears rang.

“Rickenharp, man, I had no idea.”

“This is my instrument. Could have been custom-made for me.”

“You want a hit of this blue, Eyes?”

“No, hodey, come on, you know me better than that. But play another tune. I’m not quite deaf yet.” He put the earphones back on.

Rickenharp and Hard-Eyes were smiling when they came out of the back room.

There was no one in the hall. Hard-Eyes frowned and flicked the HK’s safety off. He led the way up the hall, thinking, All that noise in the earphones, anything could’ve happened out here, we’d never know it.

They went up to the counter. Heard a rustle, an urgent whisper, couldn’t make out what was said. Hunched over, they moved around the counter, looked out into the main room… Room strewn with fiberplas crates, the guts of a smashed piano, broken glass. A little light bleeding across the room from the busted-in windows on the left. Movement to the right, behind the crates. Rickenharp turned that way, stepping out from the cover of the counter.

Then Hard-Eyes saw the men in the doorway to the left. “Harp—” he began.

But Rickenharp stepped into the open, and the darkness was splintered by muzzle flashes; the walls echoed with thudding automatic weapons. Rickenharp went spinning, falling. Two stray rounds slammed into the broken piano, making plaintive, discordant notes…

Hard-Eyes bellowed and jumped out to fire at the door with the HK; it leaped in his hand, funneling his anger; the room lit up with strobe flashes from the muzzle. One of the men yelled hoarsely and fell. Hard-Eyes instinctively moved back to the cover of the counter.

In the strobe from the gun he’d seen Bonham and Kurland lying facedown on the floor, hands behind their heads. The men had come in, seen them in the main room maybe. They’d surrendered… Where was Claire?

“Rickenharp? Yo, Harpie!” Hard-Eyes hissed.

“I’m… okay, man.”

“Don’t move.”

Hard-Eyes peered over the top of the counter at the door. Saw no one.

He bent and moved on into the middle of the room, groped till he found Rickenharp. “Where you hit?”

“Leg. Hip.”

“I gotcha.” He slung the assault rifle over his back, bent to help Rickenharp.

But before he could pick Rickenharp up, light stabbed from the doorway. A man barked, “Hold it, drop your weapons!”

Hard-Eyes looked, blinking in the light. Above the glare he made out three men coming in, weapons raised. SA Regulars. No heavy body armor on them. But they had the drop on him.

“Harpie…”

“I say fuck ’em,” Rickenharp said.

Rickenharp had his CAWS across his chest. Grimacing with pain, he sat up, fired across his body at the men in the door. The autoshotgun roared like a small cannon, booming and leaping in his hands, and the man in the lead was torn apart by four 12-gauge rounds at a range of thirty feet, his left arm separating from his shoulder; his body, seeming to liquefy, splashed back on the others. Then the booming stopped and Rickenharp hissed, “Fucker’s jammed!’

Hard-Eyes was trying to bring his HK into firing position, but it was too late, the other SAs were firing; Rickenharp grunted and fell back; 9-mm rounds were whistling so close by Hard-Eyes’ head he could feel the friction, and any split-second now one would—

Claire popped up from behind a crate like a jack-in-the-box, the machine pistol blazing, rattling in her hands. She sprayed wildly at the door—both men went down.

The flashlight was lying in the doorway, still shining, making a reflecting pool of puddling blood.

Hard-Eyes was shaking, his heart hammering in his chest.

He told himself, Get calm, get calm. Rickenharp was alive, his head bleeding, trying to get up. “Lay still, ya damn fool,” Hard-Eyes told him. He walked on wobbly legs to the door, picked up the flashlight, wiped warm slick wetness from it on a SA uniform. He straightened—and the flashlight beam fell over Yukio. He seemed to be embracing someone.

He was lying facedown atop an SA regular, his right hand still on a knife stuck in the dead man’s throat. His side was bloody. His left arm was shot through, a welter of blood and protruding bone splinters. But he was breathing.

Claire walked up from behind. She said, “Kurland went to look out the window. Yukio told him to go back inside. They argued, and then the SA men came. Yukio shot one of them. Another one shot Yukio, and Yukio dropped his gun and fell down. But when the guy came to check him, Yukio jumped up, stabbed him, and they fell down together… And then some more SA came and Kurland surrendered… And then you came…” She shrugged.

Her voice was dead; her face was expressionless.

Hard-Eyes looked at Rickenharp. Kurland was there, spraying a dressing on Rickenharp’s wounds from the first-aid kit in his backpack. Claire took another medikit from a belt pouch and bent down to see what she could do for Yukio.

Hard-Eyes went to the door, looked down the streets. “They were probably just a patrol. Maybe we’re okay here.”

He went back inside. Kurland and Bonham were carrying Rickenharp into the back room. They laid him down by the chemheater. He was unconscious, bleeding from the right temple.

“Lad took a ricochet, maybe just a fragment, from the size of the entry wound,” Kurland said. “That second salvo, after he shot at them… maybe not too bad, though… Might be just badly stunned.”

Hard-Eyes and Claire—she was stone-faced, efficient—dragged the dead SA patrol to the back of the main room, hid them behind the flattened piano.

They laid Yukio beside Rickenharp. Yukio stared at the ceiling, ground teeth against the pain but making no other sound. Hard-Eyes injected him with synthmorph from the medical kit, and he gave out a long, soft sigh, and went almost immediately to sleep. Hard-Eyes used a field cast-kit to set Yukio’s broken arm in a temporary plaster brace. The wound in Yukio’s side was superficial.

It was about four a.m. when Rickenharp woke and asked Hard-Eyes to shine the flashlight in his eyes. His voice was raspy. Hard-Eyes shrugged, got up, and shone the light in Rickenharp’s eyes.

“Do it, Hard-Eyes. Shine the light on me…”

“I’m doin’ it already, man.”

And then they knew he’d gone blind.

“Bone splinter probably,” Rickenharp said, trying to sound clinical. “Severed the ol’ optical nerve. Or maybe a blood clot.”

“Shit, man, we’ll get you out; they’ll operate…”

Rickenharp said, “Blind.” Tasting the word. More amazed than horrified at first. “Blind. What a scene, man. An Anti-scene, really. Blind. ”

The bullets Rickenharp had taken in the leg had made flesh wounds, and missed the arteries. But he was weakened and lay on his back near the chem-heater, head pillowed on Hard-Eyes’ rolled-up jacket, playing the Telecaster, listening to himself on the earphones. A little behind him stood the small amp, its red light glowing like a supernatural eye, as if Rickenharp’s demon crouched protectively near.

After a while, he stopped playing but, smiling faintly, seemed still to be listening to something. “Hey, Hard-Eyes,” he rasped.

Hard-Eyes went to crouch near him. “Yeah?”

“Take the earphones off me. Put ’em on. Listen.” Hard-Eyes took the earphones and listened. He heard static and, very faintly, a voice.

Hard-Eyes burst out, “It’s Willow! Willow’s voice!… This thing picks up one of our frequencies!”

“Yeah, they do that sometimes. You hear what he said?”

“Yeah, he’s repeating it over and over. All units meet at rendezvous twenty, oh-nine-hundred. Damn—What was R-twenty?”