John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Dan Torrence was tired. He was gritty tired and aching tired; physically, mentally, emotionally tired. He cranked the side window open a little more, to let the cold air wash over his face, revive him a little. He wouldn’t let himself sleep, because Steinfeld was there, and Steinfeld never seemed to sleep, never showed his weariness except a sort of tangible moodiness, a tendency to lapse into scowling silences. There were forty-four of them in three trucks, moving southeast toward northern Italy, as they had been for almost four days. They were supposed to rendezvous with the rest of the French NR in twelve hours.

But most of the French New Resistance probably wouldn’t make it. Most of them were probably dead, or swallowed up by the SAs “preventative detention camps.” And two hundred of them had died when they’d broken through the blockade around Paris. They died to get Steinfeld safely through. Which, perhaps, was why Steinfeld never seemed to sleep.

Torrence had lost his three closest friends in Paris, at the end. Rickenharp and Yukio and Jensen. Killed by the Fascists; crushed by the Jægernauts like small animals under a jackboot heel.

But he’d found Claire. They’d met in the wartime chaos of Paris.

Now she was curled up in the back of the truck, probably asleep beside Carmen and Willow and Bonham and the others. Claire was a short, frail-looking woman who’d killed seven of the enemy back in Paris, one of them with a knife.

Torrence wanted to climb into the back of the truck and curl himself up around her, try to keep the warmth of her humanity from slipping away into the mountain shadows.

But he remained sitting stiffly in the passenger seat, staring blearily out the mud-spattered windshield. Feeling his eyelids twitch from exhaustion, his back ache from the hours in the truck.

Steinfeld shifted his bearlike bulk in his seat, stretching as much as he could in the cab’s confines, wincing.

“Find cover soon, Hard-Eyes,” he muttered.

Torrence heard himself say, “Don’t call me that, anymore. Call me Torrence. Or Dan.”

“Oh?” Steinfeld looked at him but didn’t ask why. He shrugged. “Well, Torrence—satellites’ll pinpoint us. New-Soviets will think we’re NATO; NATO’ll know us for Unauthorized in this area; they’ll collate it with the Fascists.” His voice was gristly with fatigue.

Torrence nodded. “You know a place?”

Steinfeld shook his head. “Don’t know this stretch. Just hope I’m where I think I am.”

A single short honk from the track behind them.

Torrence felt a chill, then a hot surge of adrenaline wakefulness. They wouldn’t be honking unless something was wrong.

He looked in the passenger-side mirror. “They’re stopped—looks like they’re stuck…”

Steinfeld cursed in Hebrew and pulled over, close under the cliff side. He put the truck into park, left it idling as he got out, breath pluming in the chill air, and went back to see what was wrong. There wasn’t enough room between the truck and the mountain for Torrence to get out on the right side, so he slid across the seat and climbed out the driver’s side door, grateful for an excuse to stretch.

Levassier was the driver of the second truck. He was standing in the headlight beams, arguing in French with the big, bald Algerian, an NR guerrilla Torrence barely knew.

Levassier had driven a little too close to the edge of the road, on the eastern side. The road’s shoulder was badly eroded by winter weather and the shock of air-to-ground missiles that, earlier in the year, had torn up parts of the roadbed. The road had crumbled away under the left front tire, and the truck was beginning to tilt toward the ravine. The Algerian—Torrence hadn’t found a chance to learn his name—was saying, so far as Torrence could make out, that Levassier should simply back farther up onto the road. Levassier was making grand gestures that seemed to say, “What an imbecile!” as he maintained that there was ice under the rear wheels, so the truck wouldn’t make progress backward, but might well slip about, slide into the ravine if they tried.

Steinfeld was crouching, looking at the rear wheels of Levassier’s truck.

Torrence lifted the edge of the canvas tarp and looked into the rear of Steinfeld’s truck. Claire was sitting up, with her back to the truck cab, staring into the shadows. He looked for Bonham, the other refugee from the Colony, saw him curled up on a sleeping bag, snoring through his beakish nose, wide mouth open. Reassured to see that Bonham wasn’t sleeping beside Claire, Torrence looked over at her again. She didn’t look up at him. He could just make out her eyes, open in the darkness, staring at the truck bed. Blinking, staring.

Why wasn’t she asleep? Why was she sitting there in the dark, staring at nothing?

Steinfeld shouted, “Torrence!”

Torrence walked back toward Steinfeld. Looking at the sky as he went, wondering if they were under surveillance. And wondering if a Second Alliance patrol plane might not happen by. Or the New-Soviets. Or NATO.

Everyone was their enemy.

Steinfeld had appointed Torrence as captain. He had no bars, no insignia to show his rank. He wore blue jeans and a ski jacket and black hiking boots. But Willow and Carmen and the Spaniard, Danco, went instantly into position when he told them, “You three—grab the S.A.G. and the grenade launchers, stand watch for air attack.”

Torrence walked on, found Steinfeld and Burch unloading a heavy tow chain from the rear of the third truck. Burch was a stocky, glum black from the People’s Republic of Central Africa. He wore a parka and wire-rimmed glasses.

Without looking over, Steinfeld said, “Torrence, detail a crew to hook this up.”

Half an hour later they were still trying to safely move the teetering truck. It was packed with ordnance; there wasn’t room for the stacks of rifles and ammo boxes in the other trucks, and Steinfeld didn’t want to leave it behind, so they continued to struggle with several tons of metal poised on a cliff edge. Torrence had cut his hands on the chain as they added manpower to the rear truck’s pull. His hands ached with the cold; the knuckles were swollen. The shadows had shrunk, the growing light was blue-gray; it was a watered-down light, but they no longer needed the headlights. The sun was edging over a mountaintop that looked to Torrence, in his weariness, like a Klan hood slightly cocked to one side. There was just a faint suggestion of sun warmth on the top of his head.

They couldn’t back the towing truck very far, or it would have gone over the edge behind it. So they couldn’t use its full power to move the one it was pulling.

Steinfeld made up his mind. “Unload the rest of the gear, anything useful; we’ll run the truck over the side, make do with two. Hope they’ll get us up over the pass.”

Torrence gave the orders. All the time looking at the sky, or at the first truck, wondering about Claire. He looked up at the austere mountainsides; listened to the men talk, their voices sounding tinny and lost in the mountain vastness. Thinking he’d be moved by this place, another time—the scenery, the heady purity of the morning air… but now it was just another pain in the ass, something to hump over, trudge through…

He heard a distant thudding sound. Soft and repetitive but distinctly man-made in its ominous regularity.

He looked around, frowning, losing the sound in the noise the others made as they unloaded a crate of ammunition… there it was again, louder.

He felt his scalp tighten, the hair rising on the back of his neck. He looked around for Carmen, saw her perched on a boulder with a grenade-fitted rifle in her arms. She was looking at the sky, frowning. He started toward her.