Footfall (22 page)

“Out of gas.”

“Let’s get that cocoa.” Harry accepted Jeri’s hospitality knowing full well what it implied, knowing that it was too late. Three passengers on a motorcycle was going to kill his shock absorbers. “Those bushes at the top? I’d better ride the bike up. I’d hate to lose it.”

Harry let the bike coast to a stop. It was hot as soon as they stopped moving. Harry poured a little water onto his bandana and mopped his face. Getting sunburn to go with the windburn. Bloody hell.

“We’re almost there,” Jeri said. “Why are you stopping?”

“Got to,” Harry said. “Everybody off.”

Melissa leaped off from her perch on the gas tank in front of Harry. Jeri climbed off the back. Every muscle complaining. Harry slowly got off and set the stand. Then be tried to bend over.

“Back-rub time?” Jeri asked.

“Can’t hurt,” Harry said. He pointed to a stream that ran beside the road. “Melissa, how about you go fill the canteens.”

“Doesn’t look very clean—”

“Clean enough,” Harry said.

“Pour all the water we have into one canteen and just fill the other from the stream,” Jeri said. “Harry, you look like a letter S. Here, bend over the bike and I’ll work on that.”

Harry waited until Melissa was gone. “I don’t quite know how to say this. Hate to be the one to do it, but somebody’s got to. We’re almost there. Another ten, twelve miles—”

“Yes. Thank you. I know it was out of your way, and it can’t be comfortable, riding three on a bike—”

“It’s not, but that isn’t the problem,” Harry said. “You got across the Colorado River the day before the aliens came, didn’t you?”

“Yes—”

“And all you’ve seen since is a few towns, and that crater.”

“Harry, what are you trying to say?”

“I looked on the map. That town you’re headed for — there’s a dam just above it.” He didn’t say anything for a moment, to let that sink in. “Jeri, I goddam near didn’t get across the Colorado River. There’s nothing left of the town of Needles. Or Bullhead City. Or anything along the Colorado. They hit Hoover Dam with something big. When Lake Mead let go, it scoured out everything for two hundred miles. I mean everything. Dams, bridges, houses, boats — all gone. I had to get a National Guard helicopter to take me and the motorcycle across.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So I don’t know what we’re going to find up ahead. You got any idea of where Dave lived in that town?”

“No,” Jeri said. “He never told me anything about it. Harry — Harry, it’s got to be all right.”

“Sure,” Harry said. He couldn’t even try to sound sincere.

One more rise. Over the top of that little ridge—

Jeri sat uncomfortably among the gear tied to the bike. She couldn’t stop crying. Wind-whipped, the tears ran tickling across her temples and into her hair. Damn it, I don’t know anything yet, why am I crying? At least Melissa can’t see.

What should I tell her? Warn her? But …

The bike lumbered over the top of the ridge.

A sea of mud lay below. The reservoir had been ten miles long and over a mile wide; now there was only a thick sluggish ripple at its center, a tiny stream with obscenely swollen banks. A thick stench rose from the mud. They rode slowly, feeling that hot wind in their faces, smelling ancient lake bed mud.

There was no need to tell Melissa anything. She could see the dead lake, and must be able to guess what was ahead. It used to be we could protect children, spare them from horrible sights. They always do that in the old novels.

They rode along the mud, banks toward the ruins of the dam at the far end. Long before they reached the dam there were new smells mingled with the smell of decayed mud and the hot summer. Everywhere lay the smell of death.

The town below the dam was gone. In the center the destruction was complete, as if a bulldozer had come through and removed all the buildings, then another came along to spread mud over the foundations. Farther away from the stream bed was a thin line of partially destroyed houses and debris. One house had been torn neatly in half, leaving three-walled rooms to stare out over the wreckage below.

Above the debris line nothing was touched. People moved among the debris, but few ventured down into the muddy bottom area.

They’ve given up looking for survivors. She could feel Harry’s chest and back tighten as they got closer to the ruined town.

A sheriff’s car stood beside a National Guard jeep to block the road. Harry let the bike coast to a stop. He had his letter ready to show, but it wasn’t needed.

“I am Mrs. David Wilson,” Jeri said. “My husband lives here, at 2467 Spring Valley Lane—”

The young man in sheriff’s uniform looked away. So did the Guard officer.

She knew before the sergeant spoke.

“You can see where Spring Valley Lane was, just down there, about a mile,” the sergeant said. He pointed at the center of the mud flat.

“Maybe he wasn’t home,” Melissa said. “Maybe—”

“It happened about two in the morning,” the sergeant said. “Maybe five minutes after they blasted the Russian space station.”

“Warning didn’t help anyway,” the deputy sheriff said. “They did something that knocked out the phone system at the same time. The only way we could warn anybody downstream was to try to drive faster than the water. That wasn’t good enough.”

“How bad was it?” Harry asked.

“Bad,” the Guard officer said. “The whole Great Plains reservoir system, everything along the Arkansas River, is gone. There’s flooding all the way to Little Rock and beyond.” He drew Harry aside, but Jeri could make out what he was saying.

“There’s a temporary morgue in the schoolhouse three miles east of here,” the officer was telling Harry. “Some bodies still there. The best-looking ones. We’ve had to bury a couple of hundred. Maybe more. They’ve got a list of all they could identify.”

“Thanks. I guess we better go there. Anyplace I can get some gas?”

The officer laughed.

The wallet held two pictures of Jeri and one of Melissa. Jeri stared at her own face distorted by the tears that kept welling in her eyes.

My pictures. I think he would have been glad to see me. The driver’s license was soaked, but the name was readable. “That’s his,” Jeri said.

The thinly bearded young man in dirty whites made notes on a clipboard. “David J. Wilson, of Reseda, California,” he said. “Next of kin, Mrs. Geraldine Wilson—”

He went on interminably. He took David’s wallet and went through that; noting down everything inside it. Finally he handed her a shoe box. It contained the wallet, a wristwatch, and a wedding ring. “Sign here, please.”

She carried the box out into the bright Colorado sunshine. My God, what am I going to do now? There was no sign of Harry or Melissa. She sat down on a bench by the school.

What do they want? Why are they doing this? Why?

“Mom—”

Jeri didn’t want to look at her daughter.

“Harry told me, Mom.” Melissa sat beside her on the bench. After a moment Jeri opened her arms, and they held each other.

“We have to go,” Melissa said.

“Go?”

“With Harry.”

“Are we — where are we going with Harry?”

“Dighton, Kansas,” Harry said from behind her. “And we got to be starting right now, Miz W. We’re on the wrong side of the river, and there aren’t any bridges downstream at least as far as Dodge City. We have to go upstream and cross above where the reservoir was. It’s maybe two hundred miles the way we’ve got to go. We need to get started,”

Jeri shook her head. “What — I don’t know anyone in Kansas.”

“No, ma’am, and I don’t either, except Mrs. Dawson.” Harry snorted. It was easy to tell what he was thinking. Harry Red had no woman of his own, just other people’s widows …

“Harry, you don’t want us on your bike.”

“I sure don’t,” he said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Melissa stood and pulled her by the hand. “Come on, Mom, we don’t want to stay here.”

I might meet David’s friends. Find out how he spent his last months—

That’s morbid, and you’ll more likely meet his New Cookie. Or was she with him? Did the Earth move for you, sweetheart? “All right, let’s go, then. Harry, I thought you were out of gas.”

“He used his letter,” Melissa said. “Talked the highway patrolman into a full tank for the motorcycle.”

“Should get us there,” Harry said. He led the way around the corner. The bike stood there. It didn’t look in very good shape. It looked overloaded even with no one on it.

“Even loaded down with three?”

“Should.” Harry climbed aboard, groaning slightly. He looked a little better; the monstrous belly was tighter, and his back wasn’t quite so thoroughly bent. “Anyplace you want to go first?” he asked.

Jeri shook her head. “They…” — she took Melissa’s hand — “they buried over a hundred in a common grave. I don’t want to see that—”

“Me, neither, Mom.” Melissa hopped onto the bike in front of Harry.

The young are so damned — resilient. I guess they have to be. Especially now. Jeri crammed the shoe box into the saddlebag and climbed on behind Harry. “All right. I’m ready.”

She didn’t look back as they drove out of the town.

They were through the last of the foothills and into the rolling prairies of Kansas , a land of straight roads and small towns. Wheat and cornfields made the landscape monotonous. Whenever they stopped, the hot winds and bright sunshine drove them back into motion again.

Conversation was impossible over the noise of the motorcycle. The radio had nothing to say. Harry drove mindlessly, trying not to think of his back and the cramps in his legs. Fantasies came easily.

Jeri’s a right pretty woman, and she’s all alone. Don’t know what she’ll do in Kansas . Maybe there wouldn’t be enough rooms. They’d have to share a room and a bed, and the first night he could just hold her, and—

Part of his mind knew better, but the thoughts were more pleasant than his back pains.

— =

Dighton , Kansas , was forty miles ahead. The engine sputtered, and Harry switched to the reserve tank. They’d just make it, with a dozen miles to spare. Good enough, thought Harry. Good enough. There was a smaller city four miles away. Logan , Kansas . Nothing to stop there for—

There was a bright flash ahead and to the left. “Holy shit!” Harry shouted. He clamped the brakes, skidding the bike to a halt. “Off! Off and down!” He’d heard George and Vicki’s lectures too.

Jeri and Melissa threw themselves into the ditch alongside the road. Harry laid the motorcycle down. He found he’d been counting. It was nearly a minute before thunder rolled over them. There wasn’t any shock wave.

“Ten, twelve miles,” Harry said.

“We were closer to the other one,” Melissa said. She was trying to look brave and calm, but she was having trouble forgetting that she was a ten-year-old girl who’d been protected all her life.

There were more rumblings, a series of sonic booms, and the sky was full of sound.

“What in hell is worth bombing here?” Harry asked.

Jeri sat up. She shook her head. “I don’t — Harry!” She pointed up. Something dart-shaped crossed the sky, high up, glowing orange at the nose and leaving a wavery vapor trail. “What is that?”

Harry shook his head. The fading vapor trail curled and twisted. Winds did that in the high stratosphere. “Russian? Not like any American plane I ever saw.” They looked at each other in wonder. “Naw,” Harry said. “It couldn’t be.”

The craft was already too small to see … until it began blinking, pulsing in harsh blue pinpoints of light, like the lights Harry had seen that first night.

Dust motes were drifting out of the vapor trail.

Another ship crossed the bright sky, and another, on skewed paths. Dust sifted from the vapor trails. The motes left by the first ship were growing larger, becoming distinct dots. Harry watched with his knees in ditch water. A fourth ship … and the first two were pulsing now, pulling away.

They must be much larger than they seemed. Thirty miles up or more: they had to be that high, given what they were doing. They were streaking through the high atmosphere at near-orbital speed, dropping clouds of … dots, then accelerating free of Earth. So. Dots?

The fourth ship wasn’t pulsing. It was turning, banking in a wide arc.

The dots had become falling soap bubbles, and the lowest of them were breaking open. Hatching. Hatching winged things—

“Paratroopers,” Melissa said. Her voice held wonder. “Mom, they’re invading!”

At nearly sixty-four makasrupkithp of altitude[] the troposphere tore at the hull, blasting the digit ship with flame. Its mass seemed no more protection than the transparent bag around Octuple Leader Chintithpit-mang. The planet was all of his environment, vast beyond imagination, and dreadfully close.

[] {Thirty to thirty-five miles. (A standard trunklength or srupk = 5.8 feet = 176.78 cm = 1.77 meters. 512 skrupkithp = 1 makasrupk = 905.13 meters.)}

He was one in eight rows of sixty-four bubbles each, and each flaccid bubble held a fi’, his face hidden by an oxygen mask. He was first in his line, with the transparent door just a srupk from his face.

They were holding up well. Why not? The lowest ranks were all sleepers. A planet was nothing new to a sleeper. This must be like homecoming to them. As for the spaceborn, the Octuple Leaders and higher ranks, how could they let the sleepers see their fear? And yet—

Aft is raw chaos, a roiling white fog of vapor trail. But look down, where greens and blues and browns sweep beneath. Here the patterns are equally random, for worlds happen by accident, and there is no sign of mind imposing order. Layers of curdled water vapor almost make patterns. They seem more real, more solid, than the land. The snaky curve of yonder river holds more water than is stored in all of Message Bearer. Any one in that line of mountains they’d crossed a few 64-breaths ago would outmass the Foot itself—

“Octuples, you disembark now.”

Octuple Leader Chintithpit-mang’s breathing became shallow, fast.

He had been born in the year that Thuktun Flishithy rounded this world’s primary star. The Year Zero Herd had all been born within a couple of eight-days of each other — naturally — and that age group was closer than most. One and all, males and females, they were dissidents. They had no use for worlds.

Chintithpit-mang fiercely resented the Herdmaster’s splitting of the Year Zero Herd. He did not want to be here.

The aft door cracked. Air hissed away. The bubbles grew taut. The door folded outward while the chamber filled with a thin singing: troposphere ripping at the digit ship. A line of bubbles streamed out, sixty-four fithp falling above the fluffy cloudscape. Another stream of bubbles followed them. Then — The Octuple Leader was first in line, of course.

Falling meant nothing to Chintithpit-mang. It was the buffeting that held him in terror. The survival bubbles dropped through the troposphere, slowing. The digit ship shrank to a dot … and presently began pulsing, accelerating, pushing itself back to orbit.

The buffeting increased. Thicker air. The shape of the land was taking on detail. There, the crater that was both landmark and first strike; beyond, the village that was their target. Chintithpit-mang watched the numbers dropping on his altimeter.

Now. He opened the zipper. Air puffed away. He crawled out of the fabric and let it fall away into the wind. The land was yellow and brown, crossed by a white line of road, and now was a good time to learn if his flexwing would open.

It popped out by itself, and dragged at the air, unfolding as pressurized gas filled the struts. His senses spun as blood tried to settle into his feet. The landing shoe on a hind foot had been jerked almost loose. He bent his head and stretched to adjust it; his digits would just reach that far.

The shoes prisoned his toes: big, clumsy platforms of foamed material that would flatten on impact so that the bones of his feet would not likewise flatten.

He looked for other flexwings. The colors of his Octuple were rose and black and green. He found six others and steered toward them. One missing. Where?

The land drifted: He steered above the road that the crater had broken, then along the road toward the city. Six flexwings moved into line behind him. Still one missing. And no way to avoid the ground now. The planet was all there was.

Details expanded. Three dots scrambled from a tiny vehicle to lie by the side of the road. He steered toward them. They grew larger, LARGER! Chintithpit-mang bellowed and pulled back in his harness to catch more air in his flexwing, increasing lift, striving desperately to avoid contact with the planet.

The planet slammed against his feet. They stung. His landing shoes were smashed flat. He stripped them off, dropped his flexwing and looked about him.

Big. Planets were big.

A line of insect-sized flyers converged toward the town ahead. Those weren’t parachutes. “Delta wings,” Harry Red murmured. “Hang gliders.” The shapes hanging under the delta wings were not human.

Harry ran to the bike and lifted the seat. The .45 Government Model felt comfortable in his hand, and the slide worked with a satisfying click, but the secure feeling the big pistol usually gave him was entirely lacking.

A group of hang gliders broke away from the formation and came toward them. They split into two groups, one on either side of them.

Melissa peered through the binoculars. “Elephants,” she said. “Baby elephants.”

Jeri grabbed the glasses. Then she began to laugh. She handed the glasses to Harry.

He said, “That funny, eh?’ and looked.

Baby elephants with two trunks drifted out of the sky beneath paper airplanes. Harry chortled. They were wearing tall, conspicuous elevator shoes. He laughed outright. Rifles with bayonets were slung over their backs. Harry stopped laughing.

Two lines of delta-wing gliders swept along a hundred yards to either side of them. They were sinking fast into the wheat fields. A much larger group had drifted over Logan .

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Harry shouted. He raised the bike.

It wouldn’t start. Laying it on its side in the dirt hadn’t been a good idea. The smell of gas was strong.

The electric starter whirred again. The engine caught. Harry turned the bike—

A delta-wing craft glided onto the road half a mile behind them. The Invader came down hard. It freed its weapon, then stepped out of the elevator shoes. Other gliders settled to each side. A much larger vehicle swept overhead: a flat oval with upward-pointing fins. It glided along the road, settling slowly, until it landed more than a mile away.

“We’re surrounded.” Jeri sounded tired, already defeated.

“Let’s go,” Harry ordered. “Out in the fields. Get out there and lay low. Go on, now.”

Jeri took Melissa’s hand and dragged her off into the wheat fields. They left an obvious trail behind them. The wheat stalks were thickly planted, and you couldn’t move through without knocking some of them down.

We can’t hide. Maybe they don’t want us. Harry took a fresh grip on the pistol and followed.

Eight-cubed Leader Harpanet kept only the vaguest memories of his fall.

Bubbles had streamed from digit ship Number Twenty-six into a dark blue sky and were instantly lost in immensity. Far, far below, a vast rippling white landscape waited for him. Voices chattered through a background of static; voices called his name. He didn’t answer.

He might have spoken anytime during the years of preparation. He’d heard lectures on planetary weather: the variations in temperature, “wind chill factor,” and the coriolis forces that cause air to whirl with force sufficient to tear dwellings apart: A vast worldwide storm. accidentally formed, beyond the control of fithp. The Predecessors’ messages tried to tell us. Random death in the life support system!

Harpanet had been in the Breaker group, trying to learn of the prey. They’d watched broadcasts that leaked through the target world’s atmosphere. I can’t make sense of these pictures. They don’t mean anything. The more he knew, the more alien they seemed. Breaker Takpusseh could live with his ignorance and wait to learn more. To Harpanet, these are not fithp at all. They build tools, and they kill, and we will never know more.

Others of the spaceborn had had private interviews with Fistarteh-thuktun, and later been taken from the lists of Winterhome-bound soldiers. What they told the priest must have resembled his own thoughts: I can’t stand it. The things who will try to kill me are the least of it. I fear the air and I fear the land, and I can’t tolerate the thought of an ocean! They were shunned thereafter. Their mothers never mentioned them again.

Harpanet could have joined the dissidents. He had kept his silence.

He kept it now. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t make a sound save for a thin keening like the keening of the air through which he fell. The thin skin of the bubble rippled under the atmosphere’s buffeting. The sky grew more inaccessible every second.

He was late to open his bubble. The flexwing popped and the struts began to expand before it was clear. Harpanet shrieked. He was falling toward a rippling white landscape, vast in extent, and his collapsed bubble was still tangled around his flexwing. He clawed his way up the suspension harness and forced his digits under the fabric against the resistance of the inflated struts, and pulled. The planet’s white face came up to smash him.

It was nothing. He fell through it without resistance. He was still clawing at the bubble fabric, and suddenly it was floating loose above him. He had to nerve himself to let go of the flexwing; and only then did it begin to drag at the air until he was flying.

It was some time before he recovered enough to look for other flexwings.

He found a swarm of midges far away. Away from the sun. It is late in the day. The planet turns away from the star. My warriors are spinward.

The octuples under his command had steered toward their place on the rim of the great circle on the Herdmaster’s map. The circle would converge. Defenses would be erected. Digit ships would presently pick them up and return them to the darkness, the immensity, the security of space.

A rise of land blocked his view of the other wings. Undulations of yellow fur streamed beneath him, terribly fast, and Harpanet had seconds in which to learn to fly. Through his terror came a single memory, that lifting the fore edge of the flexwing would cause him to slow and rise. He slid back in the harness. The wing rose, and slowed … and hovered, and dropped, and picked up speed, and hurled him against the dirt. He rolled. The harness rolled with him; the flexwing wrapped around him; one of the struts hissed in his face as his bayonet punctured it. When he finally managed to disentangle himself, his radio was dead. One knee was twisted, so that he could walk on three legs only. Gravity pulled at him.

It was an experience he would never want to remember. But he was sixty-fours of makasrupkithp to antispinward from his assigned landing point.