Joe Haldeman: Earthbound

Elza held out her pistol, handle first. “Paul, at least take this. You must have had some training in the Space Force.”

He took it and stared at it. “One afternoon, back in ’62. This is the safety?” She nodded, and he put the pistol in his waistband, out of sight under his shirt. “Thanks. Pray we don’t need it.”

I put two bottles of water and some snacks in a bag, and slung it over my shoulder. I’d lost my sun hat down on the beach, so pulled a faded NASA cap off a peg. Paul straightened it. “Now we’re official.”

“If you’re not back in two hours, we’ll come after you,” Namir said. I checked my wrist tat and it was still 10:23, for the rest of my life.

“Make it three,” Paul said, without suggesting how either of them could tell time—some secret military thing, no doubt. “Take us half an hour just to walk there.”

“Careful by the bleachers,” Card said, unnecessarily. Paul nodded and went out the door.

It was a relief to be alone with him, the first time since we’d left the billet at dawn. He took my hand and squeezed it. “You and me.”

“Me and you,” I said automatically. A song refrain from when I was eighteen. Paul an ancient man of twenty-nine.

We walked in silence for a minute. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“I’m still trying to sort it out.”

“Guess we’re all still in shock.” He laughed. “Except Snowbird. The only one who knows for sure she’s going to die.”

“Poor thing.”

“Poor us. Poor whole fucking human race. How many will be alive a year from now? A month from now?”

“In a month, they’ll still be eating groceries,” I said.

He nodded. “In a year, each other.”

“Save you for last.” I pinched his butt. “You always were a tough old bastard.”

We both laughed. Keeping that one monster at bay.

There was a lot of trash on the road, with no wind to blow it around. Press releases and promotion packets, as well as cups and food trash. And this wasn’t the main avenue out; people who lived in California would be going the other way. Assuming they were headed home.

A couple of hundred yards before we got to the bleachers, there were the first signs of violence. Dark spatters of blood, dried in the dust.

No bodies at first, but then Paul followed a trail of drops to a place behind a portable toilet. A woman in sexy silver shorts, who had been wounded in the abdomen. She’d held it in with her hands for a couple of dozen steps, and then collapsed. Her guts were a pile of glistening gray and blue, awash in blood. Paul checked her pulse while I usefully leaned the other way and vomited. He held my shoulders while I gagged and coughed the last of it, and handed me a water bottle.

“We don’t have to go any farther,” he said.

“We do,” I said, my voice a hoarse croak.

“It will probably get worse.” He started to pull out the pistol, and I leaned against him.

“Leave it hidden. Someone might be watching.”

“Of course.” He put his arm around me, and we continued up the road toward the HQ building.

“Look at the brass. Someone stood here and fired toward the bleachers.” A scatter of brass shell casings to our left.

“Or up in the air,” I said. “No more bodies.”

“That’s something.” He stopped. “This isn’t smart. Let’s go back to—”

We were maybe twenty yards from the entrance to the temporary building. A tall fat man stepped out onto the wooden deck, brandishing a weapon, and fired a burst into the air. “Y’all put up your hands?”

We did. He clumped down the three steps to the ground. “Look what we got, Jemmie. Y’all from that spaceship. The starship. Saw you on the cube last night.”

“We are,” Paul said.

Another person, presumably Jemmie, stepped out of the darkness. He was also holding a weapon, and binoculars with a strap dangling. “Been watchin’ you. You come up from the motor pool.”

They were both wearing NASA coveralls, spotless, with the fold lines still visible. Jemmie’s were a couple of sizes too large, the sleeves rolled up.

“You work for NASA?” I said.

“Guess we do now,” the fat one said. “You wanta help me launch my rocket?”

Paul tensed. Don’t! “We don’t mean you any harm,” I said.

“I bet you don’t.” The fat one stepped forward, his weapon on Paul, looking at me.

“You keep it in your pants, Howard. Bet they got that god-damn Martian back there.” He stepped down to join us. “Don’t you.”

“I don’t know who’s down there now,” Paul improvised. “You saw a Martian in the binoculars?”

“He was with you all on the cube this morning, before it got shut off.”

“And the other aliens did that,” Howard said.

“Time we did something back,” Jemmie said, pointing his weapon down the road. “Let’s us go have a talk with Mr. Martian.” He started walking. “Then we figure out what to do with you all.”

Howard came alongside me and put his big arm on my shoulder. “They say you was with all those men fifty years.” He grabbed my breast, hard. “Don’t seem possible—”

I was going to give him an elbow to the ribs, hesitated, and heard a tiny metallic click. Then there was a huge explosion and a shower of blood and gore in front of me.

Then some voices I could hardly hear, my ears ringing. At first I thought all the blood was mine; I was dead. But then Howard fell in front of me, hard, the top of his skull shattered, an artery still pulsing.

I turned around and saw the other man, Jemmie, trying to run backwards, both his hands out to protect himself from Paul’s pistol. Paul had the pistol gripped in both hands, but they were shaking so violently he probably couldn’t have hit the man if they were in a small room together.

I saw all this in a strange state of floating calm, realizing that the little sound I’d heard before I went deaf had been the safety on his pistol.

The man was running like a sprinter now. Paul fired once over the man’s head, and stooped to pick up the weapon he’d dropped or thrown down.

I looked back at the big man dying, his arms and legs moving feebly as the blood spurt slowed to a drizzle. He’d shit his new blue trousers. I leaned over and burped a little acid, and opening my mouth wide made my ears crackle, and some hearing came back.

Paul came up from behind and gathered me to him, still shaking hard, sharp sweat smell and gunsmoke. “Killed him. Jesus fucking Christ.”

I was still floating, stunned. “That’s the most religious thing you’ve ever said to me.”

FromRear View Mirror: an Immediate History, by Lanny del Piche (Eugene, 2140):

… there is no way to calculate how many people died in the first second, minute, or hour. A week later, when there was still food, perhaps one billion of the globe’s seven billion had perished. Failure of transportation systems and medical life support—which almost claimed this writer’s life—accounted for a large fraction of those deaths immediately. Most died in violence, though, after the total collapse of civil and military authority. As far as I know, no truly large city, more than ten million people, survived the initial crisis well, except perhaps for the religious police states in the Middle East and America’s new Confederacy. (But I don’t think either would last very long without supporting technology to keep the desert at bay; without wealth to trade for water.)

Civilization, in the broad social sense of the word, obviously has survived in smaller towns and cities around the world. This writer met a couple who had sailed from Australia to California, who said that life was reasonably comfortable and secure in a string of hundreds of fishing villages spread along Australia’s eastern and southeastern coasts, and in the Great Barrier Reef. Here in Oregon, we have had sailing visitors from as far south as Costa Rica, and as far north as the Aleutian Islands. No sailors have come from Europe, Africa, or the American east coast, which leads us to believe that the Panama Canal is not open.