Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (33 page)

It was hard to follow that.
Real
hard. It even took a few moments for the full meaning to sink in for Cole. Anya shut her eyes for a second or two, and Marcus didn’t look like he’d even heard what she’d said. That normally meant he was listening to every syllable but didn’t want to react. But someone had to
say
something,
do
something, or poor old Bernie would be wishing she hadn’t mentioned it.

Dom was sitting right next to her. “Shit, Bernie, I’m sorry. I had no idea.” He was the kind of guy who hugged and back-slapped everyone. He put his arm out automatically, but suddenly looked too scared to touch her.

“You’re not a monster. You were dishing out justice.”

Cole remembered something Bernie said not long after she first showed up in Jacinto. It hadn’t all been jokes about her shooting cats for food and fur. He knew damn well—after he’d talked to her and watched her for a while—that some bad things happened to her while she was traveling. Stuff happened to most people; they took their chances out there. But it was tougher for a woman.

What was it she’d said?
I’ve done some bad stuff. It wasn’t just cats I skinned
. Well, if Bernie had some interesting earrings now as well as kitty-fur boots, then that was fine by him.

“Okay,” she said. “It needn’t have happened. This gang of bastards spent most of its time cruising the islands, killing, robbing, raping—preying on other Stranded. I happened to have my nice big Longshot, so I put a few holes in them. Then they came back. I can probably handle one man, but three—no.”

Cole could see Bernie was going to cry at some point. He just wanted to make things right for her. Maybe getting it off her chest would do that, or maybe he’d opened up something nasty she couldn’t handle.

“Any of the gentlemen we just made acquaintance with?” Cole asked. “’Cause me and Baird, we run a really good etiquette program on how to treat ladies with respect.”

“I told you they were frigging animals.” Baird leaned back in his chair and looked over his cards again. He didn’t
mean
to be an asshole, but sometimes he just couldn’t put things nicely. Cole stood by to shut him up if he couldn’t manage some tact. “Dom’s right. Why are
you
the monster ? Because you shot a few? They’re vermin. You should get a medal.”

“I didn’t exactly
shoot
the two I tracked down.”

Baird shrugged. “Good call. Why waste ammo on ’em?”

Bernie didn’t have to draw a picture for Cole. He could guess how she’d settled the score. She knew her way around a carcass, and he’d seen her nearly lose it with that grub back at Port Farrall. But she was still Bernie, still fun to be with, still someone he’d trust with his life. She wasn’t one of the monsters. She just had to deal with them too often.

“So,” Marcus said slowly, “what are you planning to do when you find the third guy?”

Yeah, he always got straight to the point.

“I know what I
want
to do,” she said. “And you’re going to give me that disapproving Fenix look.”

“Is that what’s really bothering you? What I think?”

“I don’t know, and
that’s
what’s bothering me.”

“If the asshole shows his face, we got a legal system, right?” Cole was starting to wish he hadn’t started this.

“Martial law. Rules are clear. The boss man’s comin’ soon, and we’ll be runnin’ the place just like we did Jacinto. Can’t argue with a legal system.”

“I’m not the jury, Bernie,” Marcus said. “Can’t say I blame you. Can’t judge you, either.”

Bernie just shrugged. “Well, now you know. I’m not traumatized or any of that shit, because I won’t let them win. But if I have a choice, I’ll be predator, not prey.” She looked like she’d had enough, and stood up to leave.

“Okay, wake me when it’s my watch. I’ll be back to normal in the morning and everyone can forget we had this conversation.”

Anya hadn’t said a word up to then, but now she moved in. There was some sisterly ladies’ stuff going on. Anya probably knew best what Bernie needed to hear. “Come on, Bernie. I’ll make coffee.”

Cole felt he’d failed Bernie somehow. He thought that a bit of comradely support would work wonders; Gears were closer than family, because there was nothing as tight as a team that’d been under fire together. But whatever was really getting to her wasn’t going to be fixed by sympathy.

“Shit,” Baird said. “What kind of pervert rapes old women? I mean, no offense, but Bernie’s Hoffman’s age.”

Dom shrugged. “Maybe they were, too.”

Marcus gathered up the cards from the table and shuffled them. “It’s about power and humiliation,” he said.

“Nothing to do with animal lust.”

“Well, if she catches the last asshole, don’t expect me to stop her and tell her to be civilized and legal about it.” Baird took the deck from Marcus and dealt new hands. “I’ll hold her coat.”

“Bernie’s right,” Dom said. “We’re all messed up by one thing or another. If I’d …” He seemed to be concentrating hard, like he kept forgetting what he had to say. “If I’d come face -to-face with the actual grubs who did that shit to my Maria, I’d have done just what Bernie did … whatever that was, but I can guess. That’s all I’m saying.”

It was the first time Dom had said anything like that. He only talked about Maria’s death in vague and general terms. But now he’d spelled it out to everyone: the grubs had done something terrible to her. Shit, everyone knew that. But sometimes you had to say it out loud just so
you
could hear it, so you accepted that folks were gone and never coming back.

Baird had dealt Cole a lousy hand. He hadn’t done Dom any favors, either.

“I’m out,” Dom said, pushing his cards back into the center of the table. “And I’m so tired I won’t even have nightmares tonight. Wake me up when it’s my watch.”

“Yeah, count me out, too,” said Baird. “Wow, listen to that silence out there. Isn’t it
weird?”

The sea was pretty noisy, and so was the wind. But there was no traffic, no animal sounds, and no distant thump of artillery or mortars. It took some getting used to. Cole and Marcus patrolled the town on foot, as much for the novelty of breathing in clean, mild air as getting into alleys that were too narrow for the ’Dill. The locals had built a really nice place here.

“Is Dom really doin’ better?” Cole asked.

Marcus shrugged. “Up one day, down the next.” He let out a long breath. “Thinks he can save the world if he works hard enough.”

“That world’s
gone
, man. Gotta draw the line. Save the new one.”

“How do you teach a man who never quits that he’s done all he can?”

Marcus was no good at letting go of stuff, either. “Well, maybe you gotta
show
him.”

If there was anything good about the last fifteen years, Cole decided, it was that shared pain saved you from having to explain what the problem was. Everyone—Gears and civvies alike—had been through a lot of the same garbage, more or less, so you never had to feel you were crazy or abnormal, seeing as normal meant you were just like everyone else. And that meant seriously fucked up.

Pelruan looked like its worst problem might have been feeling lonely. It was so small that they could cover it all in thirty minutes at a slow amble. Every time they did a loop around the Ravens up on the cliff, Sorotki and Barber were sitting in KR-239’s bay, chatting happily with buddies on long-range comms.

“It’s okay here,” Cole heard Barber saying. “I can’t believe all this shit is finally over.”

Marcus stood staring out to sea.

“What’s that?” he said.

Cole followed where he was pointing. It looked like a dim, intermittent white light on the water. Then it was gone.

“Reflection?”

Marcus stared a little longer. “Don’t think so,” he said. “Cole Train, go wake everyone.”

PELRUAN, 0300 HOURS.

If there was anything out there on the water tonight, then it had to be human, and Dom hadn’t had to deal with a human enemy in a very long time.

He kept to the spongy grass above the pebble shore so that he could hear better instead of drowning out everything with crunching boots. Once he’d adjusted to the sound of the sea, he tried to filter for other noises. At one point he was sure he heard the puttering noise of an old outboard motor.

Damn, my hearing used to be better than this. That’s what comes of never wearing a helmet. Eighteen, nineteen
years of noise, noise, noise …

Dom scanned the shore with his field glasses, picking up what little moonlight there was. A small flock of seabirds huddled against a cliff north of him, heads tucked under wings; gleaming shapes in the water turned out to be seals of some kind, eyes narrowed in weirdly smug human expressions. If it hadn’t been for the voice traffic in his earpiece, Dom would have believed he was the last man left on Sera, alone with more wildlife than he’d seen in years. He was out of visual range of everything and everybody.

It would have been a great place to bring up kids.

Baird’s voice in his earpiece made him jump. “Dom, see anything?”

“All clear.”

“There’s something out there, man.”

Anya cut in on the radio. “Marcus, I’ve just left Lewis. He’s disappointed that everyone’s been told to stay inside and leave us to it. Some of the locals are pretty pissed off.”

“When his guys have trained with us and know how to stay out of our fire, we’ll deploy together,” Marcus said. “Until then, they’re safer indoors.”

In the middle of nowhere, the list of potential intruders was short. If it wasn’t the heavies from the Stranded camp, then there was a whole new problem out there that they hadn’t thought of.
Big island. Long coastline. A few thousand people stuck in one town and a few farmers here and there can’t
possibly keep an eye on who comes and goes
.

“Massy would have to be crazy to start anything,” Baird said. “Is he seriously going to go up against Gears?

Dumb asshole.”

Bernie had been unusually quiet. She didn’t have a lot to say when she was working, but she’d been checking in with only the occasional grunt, nothing more.

“Hey, Mataki—what d’you think?”

She took a little while to answer. “He might be doing what damage he can before the whole bloody COG

shows up and smokes him. He knows there are only ten of us. And he doesn’t seem worried by the locals.”

“Rules of engagement,” Marcus said. “Remember that we have them, Delta.”

“Yeah,” Baird said, “but do
they?”

“Just saying. They’re not grubs. Self -defense or defense of COG citizens when presented with lethal or injurious force.”

Baird didn’t argue. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t find a reason to shoot, though. Dom wondered how Bernie felt about that.

“Bernie, can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah.”

“If you shot some of the bastards to start with, why didn’t they kill you?”

Marcus sighed. “Dom, drop it.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Fair question.” Bernie seemed relaxed about it, but that didn’t mean a thing. “You want a blow-by-blow account, all the details?”

“God, no. I’m sorry.”

“I think they wanted value for money,” she said. “You have to be alive to suffer, remember. That’s why I felt a bit
… cheated
after I killed them.”

“You got that cleaver with you, Bernie ?” Baird asked. Dom couldn’t remember the last time he’d called her Bernie. He was definitely doing his best to be nice to her. “The one for making omelets.”

“I thought it was for chopping nuts.”

“We’ll swap recipes.”

The squad was now spread out along the kilometer of shore, with Anya patrolling the landward boundary in the

’Dill. She was pretty safe in that; Stranded weren’t likely to have grub firepower. But Dom was sure she’d just drive right over anyone who got in her way, because she had that same streak as her mom, the ability to shut out everything else and go for a target.

She was still getting to grips with the physical stuff. When she did, she’d be scary.

“Hey, something moving,” Baird said. “Hear it?”

It was running fast along the pebbles, something pretty small by the sound of it, a rapid skittering noise at a gallop pace. Dom picked it up in his binoculars: two goddamn dogs. After the feral pack in Merrenat, he wasn’t taking any chances. He could hear the
hah-hah-hah
of their panting as they raced in his direction. But they streaked past him. They didn’t even slow down to check him out. He wondered if they were chasing rabbits, or whatever had left its crap over the short turf here, but a few moments later they started barking their heads off. Then two, three, four shots rang out. The barking stopped.

“Game
on,”
Baird said.

Raven engines cut through the night air as the birds lifted in complete blackout. If anyone was coming ashore from the sea, they had to do it at Pelruan, between the break in the cliffs that gave the town a sloping shoreline and a harbor. Dom dropped to one knee, Lancer ready. In the town behind him, dogs took up the barking.

“KR units, on task.” Gettner said. “Sorotki, keep an eye on the back door.”

“On it, boss.” KR-239 broke away and headed inland.

“Contact, hundred meters out, on your two o’clock, Fenix—rigid inflatables.”

“I see ’em.”

“And here,” Cole said. “They’re spreadin’ out. I got a bunch of three inbound, slow-movin’.”

“I see you, Cole, and I have a shot—lead boat of group of three.” That was Bernie. “Ready when you are.”

Dom ran toward the slope of the next cliff to get some elevation. He could see what Gettner had eyeballed now

—another group, four small raiding boats, coming in slowly. The swell hid them in the troughs until they were almost ashore. Then they hit the throttles and stormed in.