Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (15 page)

"Yes, you did," said Brownie. "I actually took the day off from work to see Riley pitch that day. I do believe he won twenty games that year."

"A day off from working on the mirror? To watch a ballgame?" Moe smiled. "I'm honored that baseball matters that much to you."

"It doesn't, really," said Brown. "But Ollie wanted to go, and his pal Hughie lives down the street with his grandparents and we like to do nice things for Hughie, so a ballgame now and then is the least we can do."

The background noise of the big diesel engine on that Aerocar tractor-trailer changed pitch as Moe listened to him and turned to look. Jesus. He'd been talking baseball with Marcus Brown when this world, this reality and a lot of others, hung in the balance. The big rig had rounded the last corner and was just fifty yards away, straining to make the final grade, straining to pass right by them in the next five or ten minutes.

There was a polite tap on Moe's shoulder. It was Miriam, asking to be introduced to Brownie, asking if she could stand with them as the great mirror went by. She was holding that clutch of hers, the little beaded aqua-colored handbag. Moe guessed there was a gun in there, something small, so she'd need to be close to the target.

The big rig was fifteen yards away now, but barely inching along. Moe, the Brown family and Hughie, Miriam Ruggiero. How long should he wait? Until the cab and the driver were right next to him? Yes, the fork in the road was just beyond that point, so he'd struggle to keep the rig in gear long enough to make the left turn and start going downhill. There'd be trouble, for sure. Even with Miriam dead or dying there'd be others, probably Donovan and his pals who were lurking back in the crowd. They'd have their own guns. Damn.

Moe could see the driver through the windshield. Ten more yards now. Damned if it wasn't a woman behind the wheel. Damned if it wasn't
the
woman, Clarissa or whatever her name was. How'd she do that? Well, hell, that ought to make it easier to deal with Ruggiero and hijack the damn mirror and its bomb.

Five yards. The kid, Ollie, was so excited he was jumping up and down. Hughie was standing still, looking around, keeping an eye on Moe. Brownie himself was grinning and applauding, his wife holding onto his right arm, proud of her man, happy for her son. Everyone was applauding. Miriam was opening up that clutch. Behind the windshield the woman driver wasn't smiling, she was looking at Moe.

Moe felt a warning twinge in his gut. No, damnit, not now, but then came a major cramping, wrenching bout of nausea and Moe closed his eyes for a moment, a second or two, and when he opened them the road was there but the crowd was gone and the sun was shining. Oh, hell. Moe spun once and there was little Hugh Everett standing there, wide-eyed, looking at Moe looking at him.

No! Moe tried to find the moment again, tried to bring it back, tried to change it, and sure enough there was another wrench, and they'd changed. Still no crowd, no Aerocar tractor-trailer, no big mirror, no bomb. But, sure enough, there was the Everett kid, stock still, staring at him.

Another wrench, a hard one, and then it felt right. The crowd was back, the big rig just a few feet away. Too much going on, too many questions, but Moe had to act and so he did, reaching into his coat pocket to get a good grip on the Beretta, pulling it out and turning to face Miriam Ruggiero and glad that he was already aiming at her chest since she was pulling her own gun from that clutch, had it halfway out.

Moe pulled the trigger and there was a click, no more. Misfire. Miriam had hers out now and was bringing it up to shoot when a form came out from her side and hit her in the hips, a nice collision, a play at home plate that jolted her, sent her arms flailing as she pulled the trigger once, twice, before she lost balance completely and went onto her back, firing a third time straight up at the gray sky.

It was Ollie, the kid who'd just made the most important play of his young life. Behind him came both parents, Mom reaching for her child, Brownie reaching for Miriam and her gun and grabbing it before she could fire again, then starting to kneel on her as Moe turned around to get to the cab of the big rig.

There were two holes in the windshield, a foot apart, and inside the woman, Clarissa, was falling forward onto the steering wheel as Moe watched it all happen in slow motion. He ran for the door of the cab, pushed the button to open it, swung it wide and climbed up the two steps that got him next to the woman.

"Go," she said. "Moe. Go," and he did that, pushing her across the seat to the passenger side, seeing as he did it how the blood was already starting to flow from one hole and there, a foot away, from another hole, the fabric of the jacket smoking from the heat of the slug that had torn its way through and into the woman.

Moe climbed in, the engine stalling, and stepped on the pedal and felt the rig shudder and then catch as he got seated and grabbed the wheel and tried to see through the shattered windshield as he reached up to pull the horn cord and started steering left and hoped to hell that people were getting out of the way. Out the left window he could see Brownie and a couple of other guys holding the Ruggiero woman down. She was still alive, and that was too bad. Next to Brownie was little Hughie Everett, his eyes on Moe, taking it all in.

A few seconds later Moe had the rig turning left and cresting the little hump where the old road met the new one. Over it and then downhill and, still working the horn, he had it going downhill, shifted up a gear and then another to get some speed and, suddenly, he was in the clear, heading down the road he'd walked yesterday, heading down to the meeting place, heading down to the Californians and bringing them the superbomb. He had a few minutes, he hoped, time enough to get where he needed to be before the Mexicans brought their fast death his way and blew him, the great mirror, and the superbomb all to hell.

He looked over at the woman, who was slumped on the seat. She didn't look good.

She managed to raise her head and look at him. She managed to smile. Ten minutes, that's all they should need. Ten minutes and then they'd leave all this behind and with any luck when they made the shift to the new place she wouldn't have a hole in her chest.

"I'll make it, Moe," she said to him over the grinding of the gears as he dropped it back one gear to keep control.

Sure she would. There was a sharp curve to the right, then a steep downhill straightaway, then another sharp right and then he'd be there, they'd be there, on that quarter-mile of wide, f lat road. Five minutes? That would do it.

He made the curve, relying too much on the brakes and not enough on the gearbox. He could smell the brakes overheating. Not good, not good.

Straight ahead at the moment, out over the plains that led to the ocean, Moe caught a glimpse of the P-38s wheeling, trying to take on the Mexicans, dying in the trying of that but buying him time. He didn't see any of the big Hughes f lying boats.

Time. And changes. That was all they needed, the two of them. A few minutes and a useful change. That nausea and something different, a better place. A place with no fast-death jets.

Riding the brakes down the steep slope, he tried to downshift but couldn't find the gear so he went back up to where he'd been. She moaned, over in the passenger seat. He stole a quick glance. Blood, way too much blood. Damn it.

Into the final curve, the brakes smelled like he was burning up a house, but slowed the rig down enough. Just enough to hold onto the shoulder as they went—too damn fast—around that final curve and there was the stretch he needed. And men in uniform there, even Will Bill Donovan, the son-of-a-bitch, standing there grinning with a pistol in his hand. Two men manned a big fifty-caliber machine gun and the rest of them stood with their rif les aimed up, shooting at something. Oh, hell, a 262. Had to be. Muerte Rapida.

He wiggled the rig back and forth, trying to be a moving target until he got to the wide spot, where he pulled right, stood on the brakes, shifted down and down and down once more and the rig slowed and slowed again and then, the brakes crying and burning, he was there.

"That Everett kid okay, Moe?" she asked through her pain. "Tell me the kid is okay."

"The kid is okay," Moe said. Donovan was running their way, one hand raised to shoot his pistol into the air—wasted effort—and the other hand holding onto his hat.

"That's good," she said, "real good. The kid matters, Moe. I couldn't tell you before." She winced, but then looked at him and smiled. "It's going to be all right, Moe, I swear. Here we go. Right now." She reached over to take his hand and Moe grabbed it for dear life, hanging onto her as they heard the scream of the Mexican jet behind them coming in for a strafing run and saw Donovan coming their way and the Californians firing that big fifty-caliber and, maybe, an oomph from behind him and maybe the men at that machine-gun were starting to raise their hands in joy when there came a moment of nausea, a wave of violent convulsion in the pit of his stomach; worse than anything he'd felt before any other shift, and it all went dark and he wondered, as he faded away, if he'd ever wake up from this one.

Ted's work has been reprinted in nine Year's Best anthologies and nominated for both the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His last contribution to
Asimov's,
"Blood Dauber," written with Michael Poore, won the 2010 Asimov's Readers' Choice Award. Although the inspiration for his terrifying new tale may owe much to his career as a lab tech, in recent years, his writing has led him away from that occupation. Ted is now a full-time video game writer at Valve where he's been hard at work on Dota 2. The author's first novel,
The Games,
came out in 2012. His second novel,
Prophet of Bones,
was released in April.

Nathan saw the bull before it saw him.

On small things are lives hinged. He froze, stomach to the dirt, tasting grit and blood. He fought the urge to vomit.

A dozen feet away, his wrecked cycle chugged, sputtered, died—its back wheel spinning crookedly from where the bike had embedded itself in the woven wire fence.

What the hell just happened?

He eyed the bull, trying to piece together the sequence of the last few moments, but whole parts were missing. Whole parts
must
have been missing. He squinted, trying to clear his aching head, but the memories were jumbled. He'd been on a scouting mission ahead of the caravan, checking the hills for ambushes. That much he knew for sure. After that, things got fuzzy. He remembered riding off-road, skimming a ridge along a stand of scrubby pine, then—a drop. He remembered a drop, and the ground rearing up at him. Now an angry bull stomped the earth a couple of yards away.

Somewhere close a dog barked. The bull snorted and advanced on the fallen motorcycle, attracted by the snaking wheel. It lunged—huge skull slamming into the rear of the cycle, and the whole fence shook under the force of the impact. The beast flung its neck and the cycle jerked free with a twist of horns. Nathan rolled away, scrambling to his feet. Where the hell was he?

Around him the fences seemed to multiply. The next pen held several sheep, the pen beyond that, pigs. In the distance, a ramshackle house leaned toward a withered stand of corn.

A farm then. He had—somehow—ended up in the middle of a working farm. He'd never expected to see one again.

On the other side of the fence, the dog went berserk, its shrill barking joined by
equally frantic shouts from a lanky farmer in filthy overalls who sprinted across the dusty yard.

Nathan turned, and a short limestone bluff loomed above him, shaded in pine. It wasn't much of a drop, maybe ten feet. Understanding washed over him.
Shit.

New fencing was hard to come by since the big sick. A natural ridge of limestone worked as a perimeter and would provide some shelter from the wind during the cold winters. The farmer had fenced his livestock against the rise, and in the lengthening shadows of evening, Nathan had ridden over the edge.

A black surge grabbed his attention as the bull struck the damaged cycle again, f linging the three-hundred-pound dirt bike off the point of its horn. The front wheel folded, rubber tire coming loose from the rim. Over the sound of barking, the farmer screamed in rage. Something unintelligible. Curses, most likely.

The bull turned its head toward Nathan—its backside swiveling fluidly around to point the entire beast at him. It wasn't a large bull, as bulls go. Maybe a thousand pounds, but Nathan knew that human ribs were probably incapable of appreciating the fine distinction between a skinny half-ton yearling, and an eighteen-hundredpound Angus. A ribcage would splinter the same either way.

The bull charged. Nathan bolted for the fence and hit it chest high, pulling his legs over. He actually
felt
the point of the bull's horn on his calf, actually smelled its humid breath, and then he was up and over. He landed hard, knocking his wind loose.

The dog was on him in an instant, snarling and snapping at his head as he tried to regain his feet. The farmer came around, his filthy shirt splayed open to reveal a strong, wiry torso. He brandished a long wooden hoe.

"Fuera de aquí!"

"Hey!" Nathan shouted. "Hold on a minute; call off your dog."

"Ladrón! Ladrón!"

The man shook the hoe aggressively. The dog snapped at Nathan's arm. For about the ten thousandth time since the TDR, he wished he'd taken Spanish in Mrs. Gonzales's class in seventh grade. But Chinese, his counselor had told him, was the language of the future. She hadn't counted on the there not being one.

The dog's teeth sank into his calf.

"Shit!"

Nathan kicked the mutt away and tried to stand, but the angry farmer shoved him. He landed on his butt, falling against the fence.

"Hey!" Nathan shouted. "Hands off."

The dog bit him twice in quick succession, and the farmer raised the hoe. Behind him, a half-naked little girl walked calmly across the dust, fingers in her mouth, watching them.

Nathan felt a jab from behind and remembered the gun tucked into the small of his back—Doc Hunter required all outriders to carry arms. Nathan didn't want to pull the gun if he could help it. He tried to kick the dog off, but it sank its teeth into the side of his foot. His f lesh tore; pain lanced through him.

"Fuck!" Enough was enough.

Nathan yanked the Sig from his waistband. And here's the thing about dogs. They don't know when they've got a gun pointed at them. In this way, they're different from men.

The dog lunged again, teeth snapping bloodily. Nathan had no choice. His finger found the trigger.
Crack, crack, crack.
He managed to avoid shooting his own foot, and the dog slumped. The farmer's eyes widened, hoe still held in rough approximation of a batting stance.

Nathan brought the gun up to the farmer's face.

The man dropped the hoe and backed away, arms out, palms exposed in the universal sign of capitulation. Behind him, the half-naked girl screamed. She looked about six—old enough to know what a gun was, maybe. Or old enough to recognize the fear in her father's eyes. Old enough, in this time, in this place, to have seen too much death already. Tears cleaned streaks into her filthy face. Nathan could count the ribs on her bare torso. Her dark eyes swam crazily, and Nathan wondered how many times in the coming years she might see this moment in her dreams: her father held at gunpoint.

If she were lucky.

Nathan's hand shook, but he didn't lower the weapon. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Nine Inch Nails shrieked. He couldn't touch a gun without hearing it. Not after Perryton. Luke had been blasting them from the truck speakers when the shooting started. Now it was the sound in Nathan's nightmares.

Nathan took a step back, then another, glancing around for other family members who might materialize out of the woodwork. He saw no one. Just these two. When he passed the edge of the fence, he sprinted into the pines, heading back toward the caravan. It was a long time before the music left him in silence.

The walk back to the caravan took most of the night. He backtracked the way he'd come, across a trickling little river bed, through a shuttered old no-streetlight town, windows broken out, doorways standing open like knocked out teeth. And past that, a half-dozen more miles, to the camp. As Nathan expected, Luke was still up, pacing around the fire.

"Boy, what the hell happened to you?" Luke's face was blank, unreadable, as Nathan entered the glowing circle of the campf ire. At seventeen, Nathan was the youngest of them by a dozen years, but only Luke called him boy. Nathan glanced around, but the two of them were alone. The others were in the vehicles, sleeping.

"I crashed the bike. There was a farmer."

"Farmer?"

Nathan told him what happened, expecting him to be angry about the motorcycle—the bike, after all, had been property of the caravan. Its loss was a punishable offense. But Luke said only, "You rode off a cliff?"

"Just a small one."

"And landed in a bull pen?"

"Yeah."

"Boy, you got the luck, ain't you. How far away is this farmer?"

"Hours. A whole night's walk past the next town."

"You see anything we need to worry about up ahead?"

Nathan shook his head. "Nothing. The same as it's been. Except for the farmer." Luke stirred the fire with a stick. "The doc ain't gonna be happy, but you know that already. Now find your sack and get some rest."

By the time Nathan slid into his sleeping bag, the sky was showing the first hints of light back toward Texas—or what used to be Texas, Nathan reminded himself. He was still trying to get used to the new lines on the map. He was still trying to get used to a lot of things.

The caravan was down to three vehicles now. Two trucks and an RV. Not what you could call a caravan at all, really. Just these four men, in addition to himself. Doc, Luke, Marco, and Elias.

There used to be more. Back before Perryton. Before Osage.

Doc Hunter rode with Luke in the big RV—a twenty-six-foot Winnebago they'd picked up in Tankawa, just outside the reservation. Elias rode in an old four-by-four pickup. Marco drove the little S-10. Nathan mostly rode the cycle. He preferred it
that way. Scouting ahead, staying out of the Doc's sight. The safest thing, all things considered.

It had happened twice, back when their numbers were greater.

Nathan had ridden ahead of the caravan, and when he'd circled back to find the group at the end of the day, they were fewer. The last time, it had been Andrew, the other kid his age. A kid who couldn't keep his mouth shut. A kid who wasn't good at staying out of Doc's sight.

"Where's Andrew?" Nathan had asked, when he pulled up on the bike.

"He ain't here no more," the doc had said.

"What do you mean?"

"He left."

"Where?"

And the doc had pointed a huge arm back down the rutted track they'd come.

"Back there, sixty, eighty miles or so."

And that's all he said about it. Nathan had sat on his bike, feeling the engine idle beneath him. A steady rumble. He could go, he knew. He could ride back the way they'd come, follow the tracks. Find him. Dead, or not dead.

The Doc's eyes narrowed, as if seeing his thoughts.

"Turn the bike off," the doc said, holding out his hand for the keys.

The engine rumbled. Nathan could have done it. Could have ridden away. Instead he put his hand on the key. He turned the ignition, and the rumble went silent. He put the keys in the doc's hand.

Nathan woke to the crackling of fire. He sat up, and Marco gave him a scarred grimace over his half-eaten breakfast of two-day-old snake. The grimace was what passed for a smile. The shotgun blast hadn't killed him, Marco had explained once, rubbing his puckered cheek. "But it damn sure ruined my day." Now he wore the scar like a badge:
shoot me, and I still won't die.

The breakfast looked revolting, and smelled worse, but the caravan was running short of food. "You got in late."

"Yeah," Nathan said.

"I don't see no bike."

"I lost it."

"The dentist ain't gonna like that."

"Tell me something I don't know."

Nathan shook himself free of his sleeping bag and moved closer to the fire. When Nathan had first joined the caravan, there'd been talk about just what kind of doctor the doc was exactly. He'd never come out and said. One rumor was that he was a dentist. "On account of his teeth," Andrew had speculated. Then he explained, "It's like plumbers. At home, they always have fucked up toilets, you know?"

"Not gonna like that one bit," Marco continued, holding out the pan of crispy snake. "You better see him."

"I'll see him when he wants me to see him." Nathan grabbed the crispiest chunk of snake he could get his fingers on. The grease burned his fingers. It tasted like charcoal.

"Ayeh. That you will."

Nathan walked to the S-10 to hustle up some water for his leg. He pulled a jug from the truck bed and washed his calf where the dog had bitten him. The water was murky brown, collected from a stream three days earlier. He glanced into the truck's side mirror. The mirror wasn't kind. The whole side of his face was raw. After cleaning the wounds, he inspected the bites. They didn't look good.

Nathan limped back to the fire. By then the doc was awake and sitting beneath
the awning of the RV, big hands swallowing up the armrests of his f limsy plastic lawn chair. Luke stood next to him. The two were talking about something. A few minutes later, Luke called out, "Hey boy, come here."

Nathan came.

"How's your leg?" was the first thing the doc said. Even in the shade of the awning he squinted, pale eyes nested within knots of skin beneath bushy, steel-gray eyebrows. Doc was soft spoken for the most part. He never raised his voice, settling for the hands-on approach, if it came down to it. He wore his gun on his lap, though he'd hardly need it. He was the biggest of them by a wide margin. Maybe fifty years old, six foot three. His broken teeth gave him a look of jagged ferocity. A shark's smile.

"Been better."

"Let's see."

Nathan pulled up his torn pant leg.

"Come closer," Doc said. He eyed the wound closely.

"How long ago did this happen?" he asked, probing the wound with a bare, dark f inger.

"Yesterday."

"I know yesterday," he snapped. "Yesterday when? How many hours ago?"

"I don't know, eighteen hours or so, I guess."

Doc shook his head. "Next time something like this happens, you let me know immediately."

"Okay."

"Don't sleep on it."

"Okay."

"This dog that bit you, how was it acting?"

"Pissed off." "Any foam around its mouth?"

"No, nothing like that," Nathan said. "It was healthy."

"When was your last tetanus?"

"Two years ago."

"Hmm." Doc bent forward and examined the wound again. "We're going to need to scrub this out. Puncture wounds are the worst; they tend to fester. We're out of Betadine and low on the rest of the antiseptics, so it'll just have to be soap and hot water. Was a time you wouldn't need to be so careful. Now those days are past."