MICAH COLONY. THEN.
Hell is cold this time of year.
Caleb and Dorcas travel by night through the ancient forest that skirts the edge of the main colony road.
Night is winter winds rushing through the bare trees to stab at their backs, each cold breath feeling like the knifepoint in their young lungs. Night is greywood roots made invisible by dim green planetlight, waiting to trip an unwary traveler face-first into the jagged rocks clawing out of the forest floor. Night is foraging in vain for small bitter berries to eat, for a squirrel to kill and cook, a dry cave to sleep out the day.
Night is nevertheless safer than day.
By day, they’re two bright targets inching north through a monochrome wasteland. Visible to unseen eyes from great distances away. Easy targets for the Tigers’ alien guns.
His father’s heavy old rusted shotgun and two shells, that’s all Caleb has for their protection. If local wildlife ever scampers across their path, at least he’ll have something to shoot it with so they can finally get some fresh meat. If Tigers find them, they’ll be helpless after the first shot. He’s never seen the invaders firsthand, but he’s seen their handiwork along the road to Fenario, and he harbors no illusions about what one boy can do to them.
As night brightens to dawn, there’s at least one rare scrap of good fortune: this section of the forest has a narrow recess eroded into a low hill, too deep to let the wind in, too shallow to properly be called a cave. While he compulsively checks the gun’s ammunition, and worries about the lack of so much as a thin moss to lick off the wall for sustenance, Dorcas kindles the fire.
Her first fire, a week or more (or less) ago, had blazed so brightly he’d doused it in a paranoid fit, fearing discovery and alien attack from the dark places beyond that night’s clearing. With a light that bright, a paranoid mind can even turn the nearby flowing stream into the animal growling of an alien transport sweeping the forest for survivors. There’d been no heat that night, and really it was just by the grace of God they didn’t freeze solid. Now, Dorcas builds fires small enough to cast shadows on the wall and nowhere near big enough to melt the winter dredge out of their bones, and he worries less about detection.
In the week or more (or less) since Caleb thinks the invasion started, there’s never been meat to cook and, thus, no reason to worry about how to cook it under these conditions.
They settle down together, Caleb and Dorcas, two small bodies pressed back to back inside one undersized wool coat. It’s so tightly stretched across them he’s afraid it’s going to rip apart one night and leave them with nothing. Dorcas won’t sleep any other way, and even with the fire, it’s still too cold to risk going without.
Sometimes, he tells stories. The old man in the belly of the whale, or the house built on sand. Sometimes, she just falls asleep. Tonight she asks him, in a drowsy voice, if he knows where to find God.
Somewhere else, he thinks with a bitterness that surprises him. "He’s testing us," he says, "to see if we’re resourceful enough to earn His favor." Dorcas seems satisfied with the answer, and why shouldn’t she? It’s what her parents and Father Ephraim have always told her. Why start asking questions now?
Caleb remains still and awake long after the sky brightens to silver-blue. His shoulder throbs for want of motion and warmth against the hard rock. The world beyond the crackling flame is blackness, pregnant with uncertain terrors. Is that a frozen tree limb snapping, or the deafening boom of a Tiger’s gun? Is that the wind howling, or a frustrated wolf coming home to find tonight’s meal delivered itself? Is that distant thunder a falling tree? An artillery strike? A spaceship landing with Union aid or alien reinforcements?
He doesn’t notice when he falls asleep.
When he awakens at dusk, he can’t tell Dorcas the difference between the restless dreams of the day behind them and the long march of the night ahead. His feet already pulse with pain at the prospect. His stomach growls, an empty vessel making an inordinately loud sound, and he tries to remember how long his father said human beings could survive without food.
As ever, he kneels down and buttons Dorcas’s coat before they head out back into the world. The shotgun is heavy again in his arms. The gunfire echoing south across the empty, silent surface of the world grows infrequent as the combatants lose the ability to see what they’re shooting at.
Hell is cold this time of year.
The next night, there’s a bus in the middle of the road. Its roof is peeled back like the flesh of some flayed arm stretched across a rack. The windows which aren’t broken have been scorched black from the inside.
What’s left of the 10:15 from Ephesis, twice-weekly service to Fenario, no ifs ands or buts except yours in the seat, little buddy.
Caleb watches the wreck from the tree line, shotgun stock cold against his shoulder as he thinks. Survivors are clearly out of the question, but as living travelers, the dead had surely carried supplies for the road. Cans of fruit. Jars of preserve. Trail mixes and salted meat. Suitcases with packed clothes. The answer to their prayers for food and greater warmth might be realized on this very bus.
But first there are frozen corpses in unknown states of disarray. Dorcas is nine. Caleb’s far from an expert in child-rearing, and Micah is hardly a colony concerned with psychological niceties, but he’s pretty sure you don’t let nine-year-old girls look at a bus full of burned-out frozen corpses if you can avoid it.
What would General Zandt do?
Well, he wouldn’t leave a nine-year-old girl alone in the wild, would he, little buddy?
He looks down at Dorcas.
"What are you looking at?” She looks up, her cheeks blasted red by the wind.
"We need to check this out," he says. He’s trying to sound decisive and mature, so of course his voice breaks two words in and remains peaky for the rest of the sentence.
"For food?"
"Maybe some new clothes, too," he says. "But I need you to do something for me. When we get to the bus, you have to close your eyes really tightly and not open them until I say it’s okay, okay?"
"How can I see where I’m going if my eyes are closed, Caleb?"
"You can hold my hand," he says. "All right?"
She chews her bottom lip. "All right," she finally says.
He has them circle the bus twice before entering. Just because he doesn’t see any Tigers doesn’t mean there aren’t Tigers inside, watching, ready to add two more trophies to their overstuffed display.
With Dorcas at his back, he starts with the luggage rack. The luggage rack is relatively clean. The luggage rack isn’t full of things which used to be alive and are now staring without sight from the other end of the bus. Starting with the luggage rack’s not a hard decision to make.
Only three bags made this trip. One took a round of whatever the Tigers were firing. Nothing left now but but blackened flannel and cooled ashes.
The other two aren’t much better. Shirts and skirts, belts and underwear, all thin, all cotton, all useless against the demonic chill which has made a ninth circle of the countryside. Some goodwife tucked two glass jars of pickled beets into her suitcase between wool stockings and a well-worn Bible with a broken spine.
All the goodwife’s careful ingenuity was for naught. The jars broke, probably when the Tigers hit. Her suitcase is full of dark red beets frozen to broken glass and the Word of God is pulp. They couldn’t eat the mess without swallowing glass, but he thinks very hard about trying it out, anyway.
"Dorcas?"
"I didn’t open my eyes," she says just fast enough to be suspicious.
"You need to let go of my hand."
"You said I could hold it,” Dorcas says. "You said that.”
"I did. Then you did. But I need it back now."
"Can I open my eyes yet?"
"I’ll tell you when," he says. "Remember?"
"Sure." She sounds bored.
He should have checked for an intact Bible. Made her read him the story of the houses on sand and stone because Dorcas is always amused when the tide rolls in and the guy loses his house. If nothing else, it’d keep her busy for the next ten minutes.
By degrees, he turns to face the passenger section, and hears a distant dangerous tone of swarming wasps in his head as he sees -- really sees -- the dead for the first time.
"Caleb?" Something about Dorcas’s tone is off but he can’t concentrate on her now.
Tigers don’t hold back. What these people carried inside in life is strewn about the outside in death, frozen in chunks, in pools, in strings draped across the faded dark upholstery of the bus’s old seats. Everything’s looking black in the wan light of Micah’s father-world seeping in through a cracked window.
The wasps a little louder now, a little closer now, buzzing like an alarm in the next room.
"Keep your eyes closed," he says, voice breaking again. The living have eyes. The dead have empty holes and blood dried in tracks down their hollow faces. Watching, watching him, saying come on and sit down with us, little buddy, you’re going where we came from and we’ll all be in the same place soon enough and --
"Caleb!" Dorcas’s hissing in a whisper.
– the wasps are even louder, even closer, swarming buzzing roaring in his ears and he thinks he can see a goodwife’s curdled brain through the ragged hole punched through her head and he drops his to puke and –
"Outside," whispers Dorcas. She pulls him down with her weight, all her weight, who knew a nine-year-old could pull so hard, and he hits the floor and his head dips down and burning bile sprays out of his mouth into the lap of a goodwife and he hopes God truly isn’t here to bear witness to such desecration.
Wasps stinging now. Buzzing through his ears, his bones, his brain like the scream he wants to scream and he’s drawing in breath to scream and Dorcas is hissing "Tigers" and he freezes –
like the dead
– when he realizes the buzzing isn’t in his head.
This is how he’s going to die: face-first against a dead woman, noxious stink of his own bile choking out his breath, Dorcas shaking in fear against his back.
There’s no life in the kingdom of death, he thinks randomly, and then what would General Zandt do?
Well, he wouldn’t get his nine-year-old cousin eaten by Tigers, now, would he, little buddy?
The buzzing louder. Feeling it in his sinuses. Feeling it in his mind, a great vibrating slice of metal cutting thoughts ribbons.
Dorcas hands to ears.
Mechanical growling.
Something at the window.
Stop moving now.
Stop moving.
Stop.
Mechanical growling.
Thick and ugly.
Mechanical growling.
Different growling.
Higher.
Gun.
Gun?
Two shells.
Two growls.
General Zandt.
Valor.
War.
Dorcas.
Hero.
Rise.
Now.
The buzzing quiets. His head feels emptier.
A sound like a dried-out brake line squealing in the air
Under the big buzz, something like a mortar or a bomb exploding in the distance.
The buzzing farther off now, wasps in the next room now, wasps outside the house now, wasps flying off to swarm other prey now.
Dorcas wrapped so tightly around his legs he’s sure she’s going to cut off the circulation altogether.
He puts a hand to her head.
There are worse things than death.
What can General Zandt do against them?
What can Caleb?
The Tigers arrived about a week ago, Caleb thinks, spreading fire across the midday sky. An emergency tone across the colony’s radio band announced their coming and their mastery – blaring first, screeching next, static and silence by and by. A flashing, thundering roar from the center of town large enough to blow the window Caleb looked out of into his face. Luck alone, what he might once have called God’s Will, prevented the glass from blinding him.
In another life, another time, he might have joked with his parents about how he’d never be pretty again.
In this life, his father went to town that morning for the council meeting, all those old elders who perceived the Devil’s brimstone brand in each maiden’s hemline and every rowdy husking bee but never thought about looking up until it was too late.
In this time, there was a second fire nearer the house. And his mother grabbing him and Dorcas and shoving them bodily into the deeply-dug root cellar and slamming the great metal door on them before the third fire bloomed overhead. Piercing light rammed through the gaps where the heavy iron door had never fit its frame.
It was two hours, or two days, in the farthest lowest corner of the cellar while lights blazed and dirt settled and the door shook against its hinges like some juggernaut angry with its chains. Tearing strips off of his shirt to bind the gouges in his face.. Kneeling in the dirt, praying God deliver them from Evil and whatever else had found them.
Three days, or three hours, later, the world fell still and silent. Dorcas prayed on. Caleb rose on unsteady feet, climbed each step to the surface feeling like metal weights were clamped around his ankles, put his shoulder to the dented iron door and opened it onto what used to be the kitchen.
Where once had been a home, messy and bright, now stood only rubble and charred timbers. One of the walls collapsed. The neighborhood beyond looked every inch as flattened and depleted as his home. Nothing moved, and there was no sound, and of his mother there was no longer any trace.
He went back into the cellar, and took Dorcas by the hand, and led her up into the afternoon’s acrid grey haze.
First, they searched the ruins for his father’s guns. His pride and joy, the one he took out on private hunts and long trips, was a shining modern marvel with digital displays and full clips of three types of ammo. For the public hunts with his council acquaintances, he had a Godlier sort of shotgun which forewent any technology more advanced than gunpowder. The rifle was gone – Caleb felt a dull ache when he realized his father had been concerned enough to take it and throw public expressions of piety to the wind. Only thing that remained was the bulky double-barreled relic with two shells in the breech.
When they left town, they found furrows stretching away from every half-intact building, wide and violent as a man fighting for his life against a fate which had other ideas. All the lines converged at a great rounded imprint in the dirt at the edge of town. Its source had vanished like the bodies of Caleb’s neighbors, as if God’s hand had rooted around in the dust for His clay people and taken them Up like a child collecting his toys when called in for supper.
Walking through the wasteland since, they have seen no sign of other life, and have no real reason but hope to believe anything will be different when they reach Fenario.
The forest thins out two days later. What is at dusk a squat shadow on the distant horizon becomes, by midnight, the taller outline of Uncle Isaac and Aunt Abigail’s farm. The destination itself, in sight at last.
Uncle Isaac built his farm just far enough away from Fenario he could claim, in full sight and hearing of his wife and his child and all the town elders, that he and God alone would provide for his family. Uncle Isaac built his farm just close enough to Fenario that the slow-rolling stream of buses and crop trucks and Union transports ferrying people and produce and politics up and down the main colony road could still be seen from his porch. Just in case God decided, in a fit of divine convenience, that Isaac had been insufficiently resourceful to warrant favor and mortal assistance would be required, after all.
For days, they’d been hearing the omnipresent crackle and rattle and bang of distant gunfights grow louder the closer their path led them to Fenario. Mere miles from town, here and now, they hear nothing, not even the normal, natural kind of nothing of native to uninterrupted wilderness. When she asks, Caleb tells Dorcas the Union must have already won, or they must have melted away to fight a guerrilla war from the wild.
If it didn’t hurt his face, he’d smile at the irony. A week ago, the Amal Union’s garrison were savage barbarians who refused to walk under the light of God, at best a necessary evil whose presence posed an intolerable spiritual affront to Micah that the colony’s elders had learned to tolerate quite well. The colony, being in what might politely be described as a contested star system, quickly found such evil to be quite necessary to keep the Tigers from the door. What’s changed, Caleb doesn’t know, and he figures he never will.
Neither he nor Dorcas have the energy to run to the farm, or really do anything more than shamble towards the prospect of shelter with the tottering movement of calloused feet blistered from constant motion and numb from bitter cold. As they shuffle down the road, one step dragging after the one before it, they see boots and uniforms and guns scattered about the hard-packed dirt like birdseed. About nine servicers’ worth. Caleb’s joy at finding real working weapons lasts for about thirty seconds, joy and a more than half-deluded fantasy of taking up arms and having a heroic stand against as many Tigers as the guns can handle. But the Union code-locks its guns to keep all the outsiders just like him from leaving greasy colonial fingerprints all over their shiny ordnance. Joy decays to dismay. He thinks now of Tigers stripping down the servicers without any godly, proper concern for gender, marching naked men and women both at gunpoint through the cold.
That’s what the Tigers did.
He can see it in his head.
Sick.
It’s sick.
Dorcas, unseen, has picked up a discarded greatcoat from the road and turns it in her small hands. “These look better than our clothes,” she says. “Besides, it’s not really stealing if nobody’s using it anymore, right?” She drapes the coat over her shoulders, and Caleb sees major’s pips on its two shoulder boards as it settles across her small frame. It’s dirty, but it’s bloodless and without any serious damage. If they have to keep walking, he knows, it will serve Dorcas better than her old stretched-out wool.
Something about this whole scene doesn’t sit well with Caleb, but it takes his worn-out mind a while to figure out what it is.
All the war-pictures, all the stories traded between boys in the schoolyard during recess, say that servicers fight like lions when cornered, will face death before the dishonor of surrender, and make sure the enemy pays for that in blood. General Zandt, they say, single-handedly took on twenty Tigers when they sprang a trap on him on Aquila VI. Catherine Dean, why, she’d broken a siege of her troops by hijacking Their own communications and summoning their own fire to burn them in judgement. Sergeant Getyani personally rushed Them so his men could escape a trap and, for his valor, was torn apart. Everyone has heard that story, that very true story, or at least seen the movie. Point being, the Union uniforms should be damaged. There should be signs of blood and war. Why aren’t there any?
Tigers wouldn’t leave the guns behind, either, would they?
He replaces his boots while Dorcas watches, not saying anything, but her shoulders are tight and her arms are crossed and she’s got that look like she wants to be home already, God, Caleb, what’s taking so long?
Once he notices it, the absence of light in the farmhouse’s crooked windows is ominous, a suggestion that nothing may wait at the end of the tunnel but more dark, lonely tunnel. “They’re keeping the lights off so the Tigers won’t notice them,” says Dorcas, which is what and how he’d been planning to tell her when she asked. For the first time, Caleb wonders if Dorcas really is as slow as he’s always believed.
The farmhouse’s roof is collapsed, bowed in at the center like a heavy fist from the heavens above smashed it to kindling. Unlike the blasted sticks left behind in Ephesis, at least the main structure is still standing. They’ll have an indoor place to sleep, if nothing else, real beds instead of rock, real quilts to hold back the cold. Real food? Uncle Isaac salts and cures pork in the smokehouse on the other side of the farmhouse, his only acknowledged vice. Meaty, solid between the teeth, satisfying all the way down to the belly. Or jars of Aunt Abigail’s preserves.
Yeah.
Blackberries. Raspberries. Strawberries. Blueberries. Sweeter than sugar. Purple-dark once spread across the soft bread she is forever baking in the hollow old cast-iron oven in one corner of the kitchen, that smooth yeasty scent hanging always in the air welcome and warm like home and Jesus and the girls he’s found himself noticing just in the last few months and Jesus, Jesus and God and every Disciple, what he wouldn’t do right now for some FOOD --
"What?" His voice feels manic as it leaves his throat. "What is it, Dorcas?"
"What’s that?" Dorcas’s small hand tugs at the threadbare sleeve of his sweater while her other points at the dark shadow of a car outside the house.
Caleb had seen it but not registered it. Isaac’s not the cosmopolitan sort, would never buy something as unholy as a one-family sedan, even if the old skinflint could have afforded one several times over during the farm’s better seasons. So, visitors. Except what sorry citizens would come out here to visit the miserable old so-and-so? Even Caleb’s own father could scarcely bother, and Isaac was his brother. Servicers, maybe, commandeering a transport?
A silhouette sealed in armor steps out onto the porch. Caleb opens his mouth to call out when he sees the tail.
In fear, he finds his way back to energy, hopes he can find his faith again, and he and Dorcas somehow flee up the hill towards the barn. They’re too far along to risk darting in any other direction, and surely if God does come back to His forsaken world, He will surely turn the Tigers’ heads away as His faithful frightened servants flee into the dark.
As they reach the barn, he feels a pressure wave more than he hears its explosion – Caleb’s ears will forever after have a far-off, forlorn ringing – as what can only be the farmhouse rips apart in a blizzard of splinters. Isaac’s piously unpainted barn is illuminated by the blaze like the town square at Christmas. The door hangs slightly open, a little black portal into the totally unknown, but any Devil in the darkness they don’t know and can’t see surely has to be better than the one on their heels.
With Dorcas behind him, both running faster than their now-bleeding feet should be able to carry them, he doesn’t even notice the familiar furrows dragged through the hard-frozen ground beneath them. What he smells in the cold air just outside the narrow black entryway causes his stomach to twinge and complain again at its emptiness. Even before he crosses the threshold, he knows what lies within, but even that can’t stop them now.
What he sees reminds him very much of the time when, as a child, he’d peeked behind the curtain of old Mr. Gagarin’s butcher shop. Once, those slabs and sides hanging from hooks had been cows, pigs, sheep. Once, these slabs and sides had been Isaac and Abigail and the farmhands they hired out of Fenario to prepare the farm for winter.
Now they look like little more than ribs pulled from the chest of some great animal: grilled black, sucked clean of meat, thrown aside.
In the firelight, this is Hell.
He wishes he weren’t still hungry.
It’s hard for him to say how long he stands there, stomach rumbling, before he realizes Dorcas is standing behind him, seeing it all, her face crumbling like the house on sand. And that the door is still open.
He has to turn and move and shut it before the Tigers see it. Maybe it’s too late. If so, maybe he can trade his life so Dorcas has a chance to run off and find a safer hiding place, just as Getyani or Zandt would do or already did. The old shotgun may – may, if God truly exists and cares – do enough damage that at least one Tiger will remember Caleb Yeager Söderman.
When he turns, there are three Tigers behind him. Three devils climbing to this unpainted pinnacle from the Pit. Their armor shines red, that dark brown red of long-dried blood, in the raging fire that used to be the old farmhouse, and their tails lash and writhe behind them like serpents. Their helmets are squat, full clear faceplates which display lidless jaundiced eyes and gaping mouths full of fangs like a horrorshow. The weapons in their claws are slim like knives, and silver like sin, and Caleb doesn’t like to remember what he knows they can do to mortal, fallible flesh.
Dorcas is wailing behind him, one last shout of grief now that there’s no point keeping quiet.
One of the Tiger’s speaks with a machine’s dead hiss: “COME OUT. SURRENDER.”
He fires at it and, with a sound of thunder, the beast to its right collapses in a spray of visor glass and blood.
The gun jams on its second shot. Dorcas is still screaming, so he can’t delude himself that she might be running or hiding. As the Tigers raise their weapons and growl, that terrible mechanical growl echoing in his bones, he has time to think, Damn you to hell, Dad, and just enough time to note that God still does not come.
Then a column of lightning collides with the ground, knocking him sideways and out.
When Caleb swims his way from darkness back to the surface world, he’s sprawled out flat on the floor looking up at blue-white Union drop armor and open sky where a roof used to be, and someone is dragging him up, and then he sees a Tiger, the only Tiger left based on the pools of dark blood seeping into the rough timber floor, taking fist after hard metal fist to its face until it falls to a knee. And then the Union servicer shoots it in the head with the gun in his other hand.
“Form up surface-air cannons!” the man bellows. “Remaining team, take five and check your guns!”
Armor is clanking past Caleb and the man, and then the man turns, and it’s General Zandt himself. His face is squared, flushed with martial effort. His eyes gleam. With his granite looks and his armor gleaming in the dim light, he looks less like a man, and more like the old Earth myth of a noble king poured back into a mortal container in an hour of impossible need.
And the myth takes one small, friendly step towards Caleb: “You did a brave thing, son. What’s your name?”
“Caleb,” he whispers. Then he remembers: “This is Dorcas.” He isn’t sure she actually is where he’s gesturing but he can’t turn his head, can’t look away from the hero surely sent by God to save His chosen colonists in this very darkest of hours.
Zandt nods to an unseen man. “Zhang, see to it.” He then looks at Caleb like he’s the only other person – the only other adult – in the place. “We’re engaging the Lizaks in orbit and this is just one of three planetfalls in this system, you understand? They’ll come to this place, thinking there’s only a handful of us left, and with a little luck they’ll be surprised by the squad that cut a trail through to Feneer two hours ago and is already coming up behind them.” Caleb does not correct him on the name. “Your colony’s gonna be delivered from bondage by daybreak.”
From this angle, Zandt looks like he’s walking on fire the way the Son was once said to walk on water, and twelve servicers are walking with him. They do not look back as they enter Hell.
The woman named Zhang takes him and Dorcas to the woods, tries to pat blank-eyed Dorcas on the head, gives him a spare handgun with the God-blessed digital reading telling him he’ll have 30 shots, and orders them to sit there and “watch the fuckers burn”. Caleb doesn’t even take offense at the woman’s language, and in front of a nine-year-old, no less.
Within minutes, the wasp-swarm scream of three Tiger transports buzzes loud in the countryside. Night becomes day as glowing plasma fire splatters one craft out of the sky, its shards slashing down across the woods like a final judgement, almost tearing into Caleb’s new boot. Rockets scream from the remaining transports, half exploding in the sky, before they veer back, far enough to escape but also too far to properly retaliate.
After five more minutes of fire, the Tigers will run. Caleb and Dorcas will see her home has become a smoking crater and Zhang is crippled and another servicer’s dead. By the end of the day, Fenario – its modest buildings ravaged by street fighting, its streets full of smashed barricades made from food trucks and buses, its once-great church a hollowed-out cinder with ashen corpses cradling emptied guns – will be under Union control . The Tigers’ former captives will be told, wherever they lived before, that they’ve living in Fenario now. Caleb and Dorcas will be boarding at Glennjohn’s, the barbershop where elderly Glennjohn, now missing and presumed killed, once told Caleb stories of the founding during haircuts in the late summer.
In the months to come, after the war ends, the four thousand survivors will still find the Union garrison necessary but no longer call them “evil”. As Fenario is rebuilt, its men will talk of the glorious dead lost in the Great Siege, a godly struggle against the true forces of darkness which becomes more myth and less truth with each retelling, and the survivors of Ephesis will be judged lesser in God’s eyes for their city was not favored.
Except for Caleb. Caleb will be a man, a big man.
When he comes of age, he will enlist with the Union.
But for now, he is still only twelve, and he watches the Tigers and General Zandt’s men trade fire and fury, and he mutters, “come and see”.
And as they die, one by one, he knows that they saw.