Thicker Than Blood
by C. Q. March
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
On his knees, naked in the garden, Jackson’s breath chilled in moonlit puffs. He cradled something small. Smooth, metallic, plastic and glass. A mobile device. Isabel felt an early memory shake loose. She was very small, and her mother held the thing secretively to her head, whispering. Communicating across the thin air. Isabel hadn’t seen another one outside of training. They were ultra-contraband, stockpiled for when they got the grid back up.
Jackson had kept her mother’s mobile, all these years. Relief streamed through Isabel, fresh and brimming like a long drink from the spring house. This would get her off the front.
Isabel stood over Jackson. He looked through her, slack inside a soft plume of liquor. Dreams were there in her father’s knocked, crooked face. It gleamed with tears that slid thin around the gluey mucous from his damaged eye.
He talked into the device. Isabel leaned close to hear. “Love love love,” he said. “I can’t hear you. Did you — ” and he saw Isabel then. “Your mom...” he said.
Tree lines rippled across their valley. Missiles coming in squiggled lines. The hills seemed to shift from their places, and one stuck abruptly crooked like an elbow into the thin-clouded moonlight. Out in the night came a sound like old joints popping from an arched spine. A cold, skinny rain came in.
Jackson shuddered. In the dim, wet light his wilted skin was mottled with old contusions, ladders of hasty stitches, whorls of scarring, odd angles of broken, unset bones.
Something loomed and pushed fogged air down the valley. Rich odors pressed through the rain’s chill. Woody smells of thick crumbling snake-filled log piles, disintegrated dead things and upturned earth.
A missile fell closer, and then a super-long-range heavy artillery shell, only a couple miles distant. The high hills seemed to tighten against the falling fire. The rain turned wire-stiff without space between the drops.
Isabel could leave him there for hypothermia or stray shrapnel. The contraband mobile pulled easily from his hand. But then she cursed him and went for a blanket. He mumbled, thick-mouthed and wordless.
Incandescent things hung discarnate in the writhing dark below the ridge lines. Rain flung its cold gravel spray into the incoming fire, and lightning walked the trees.
Isabel carried Jackson like a piece of driftwood. She dried his chill-puckered skin and put him in his bed in a new blanket. A brick went in the wood stove. When it was hot, Isabel bound it tight in burlap and flannel, and put it at his feet.
His empty hand clawed and pressed to Jackson’s face. “Are you — where are you?” His eyes rolled and he tried to rise, frantic, and went into some kind of fit, elbows locked. Isabel pressed the mobile device back into his broken hands. His twisted fingers crept over the glass face. She let him huddle with it. When he slept, she’d take it back and be off the front forever.
* * *
The rain eased down to mist, and the firing moved on to other places. Isabel pulled a chair on the leaning porch and unrolled soft leather. She filled a syringe and slid in a warm dose.
Dripping caves and forests convulsed in the trembling night. Moonlight swam like wet glass. The snuffling, blasted valley groaned through clay and limerock folds, veined crevices left by the long work of forgotten glaciers and an ancient sea.
Jackson once asked her if she ever actually met one of the religious ones on some of the other sides. “I used to know a few. It was fun to argue with them, when we were younger, before all the killing,” he had said.
Isabel’s mouth had twisted and said she thought she’d found one, once. He must have sneaked through the line or got caught on the wrong side when his unit fell back. A white band wrapped his upper arm, marked with a red cross, big as daylight, just asking for it.
He didn’t even have a gun. Unwrapping a sandwich, could you believe it, hunkered down in half-collapsed earthworks. Isabel shot him straight through the sandwich and he blinked, puzzled when it came apart in his hands. He just looked at her, seemed to collect himself as blood foamed down his front. The bread and everything else were shot away but a thick slice of tomato stayed clutched in his fingers as he leaned forward, slow, so calm, until his chin sank into the mud.
That slice of tomato stood out brighter than the blood, brighter than the cross on his armband. Where the hell had he got fresh tomato when we’re eating years-old salt-preserved shit out of cans, Isabel still wanted to know.
She filled another syringe. The hills were coming to their feet as she went to check on Jackson. He was sleeping deeply, crooked in his bed, the mobile device clutched in his scarred hand. She only had to take it from him. Leave tonight, find a garrison by mid-morning. She went back to the porch to fill another syringe. Missed the vein at first, but got it worked in.
She only had to take it from him. The hills tromped through the valley and shook the earth under marching earth and stone. The clouds cleared out. The moon fell to pieces. Isabel drifted buoyant from her seat in adoration, loose and warm and heavy. A halo of shadow thickened soft around her edges, then moved hard to the center. The night went gorgeous and death-dark. Isabel curled into it.
* * *
The dark loosened. Through a dizzy open door, pale light splintered gold needles over the broken-crusted ridge lines. Cheeks leaking, Jay-Phon had a huge needle jammed into Isabel. She leaned on the plunger like a crowbar, and kept slapping her. Adrenaline jetted and Isabel’s heart flopped, wriggling prickly blood through her snail-cold veins. They had her in the cold spring house, under its icy water. Pale pink-clean segments of chicken and fish hung from hooks in the chilled stone. Tender, Jackson curled Isabel to him, slid clasps, slipped her arm off and elevated her head.
“I’m all right, I’ll just—” Isabel kicked heavily. She sank back, sour with vomit.
She came back up, jittering. They moved her to warm morning sun near the garden. Jackson cradled Isabel in blankets. He tilted her a cup, cool sips of water to rinse the sick from of her mouth. Her head hurt brassy and hollow.
Jay-Phon squatted. “You look like shit run over twice, but you’ll make it.” She gave Isabel’s knee a slap. “I’ll see about some hot broth,” and went inside.
Isabel was able to sit a little. Jackson watched her, solemn. “Scared me bad,” he said. Isabel couldn’t meet his eyes. Across the hills she saw swathes of freshly crushed trees and mounded earth.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said finally, soft with sorrow.
He watched the house for Jay-Phon, and said, “You need this.” He pressed the mobile device into Isabel’s hand. It lay curved and hard in her palm.
“I won’t—” she said, pushing it back.
“No,” Jackson said, “they’ll be impressed, since it’s me — old firebrand gone bad — and you’ll be doing in your own family. Big commission. They’ll take you off the front.”
“I’ve been digging through your things,” she said, too loudly over her part-deafness. “For something to give them, so they’d move me.” She blinked back shame. “I’d have turned you in.”
“I know.”
“When?”
“Day you came home.”
Isabel felt that she would break like a dropped jar.
“All this power, and we’re weak as nothing,” he said.
“No,” she said, angry, and recited: “Weapon stock depleted only eight percent. Decades and decades of firepower still. Millions of fighters.”
“Same as the others.”
“We’ll outlast them.”
“The last cold, dead fish hanging on the hook,” he said. He looked away. “We thought we could spin silk from dust, history be damned.”
And then he stunned her, though she was stupid to be surprised. “They want intel on you, too. Casualties have run a little high, so they’re looking for infractions. Pulling out all the med-heads for infantry and splicers. They’ve got an idea about you. Told me you were coming home. Promised they’d fix me up good if I got them proof on you.”
Of course. “Do it then,” she said. “I was going to do you the same.”
Jackson lowered his head. “Isabel...”
Jay-Phon came with the broth and stood shifting a moment. “I should see about things,” she said, and tramped off through the hills to her church.
Isabel levered her left arm across her lap and ran her live hand over its scratched surface. They sat cross-legged in the grass and Isabel drank her broth. “Two years ago,” she said, and her words, long clotted, flowed. Sliced open.
“My unit had a cruise missile, took it apart down in a work bay, modding it to launch off a long rail. It’d been quiet, so we went up top to smoke and watch the sunset. No rats for once, like they knew something. This single lucky rocket comes across, through a ventilation shaft. I woke up out in the open, couple hundred yards from where the bunker had been.”
Mounds of barbed wire had spooled out in soft, broken curls over the land. Thick mats of flies came to bundle newly uncovered corpses like knitted wool.
Isabel said, “I was down on my side. Half-buried, dirt full of maggots. But something said, ‘Come on,’ so I rolled over.”
Her left arm came off under her, leaden and sticky. The maggots didn’t go for live flesh, so they left the arm alone a minute until all the spark went out. Consciousness slipped, and dusk spread the sky in a lavender lace, so beautiful she might have sat up to watch if her gas mask wasn’t on fire. It curled and melted around her neck.
Isabel stopped her telling, scratched her throat at the deep scarring. Jackson’s hand was out, offering up the device again, to get her off the front. She pushed it back to him.
“Then run,” he said, “and keep running. I’ll stall them long as I can.”
“They’ll take you,” she said. “And won’t let you go this time. Run, and I’d be signing your death warrant.”
“Then sign it. They can have me. Just go.”
Isabel shook her head and leaned, reluctant but desperate, into Jackson. She’d not let anything happen inside her in a long stream of unbroken years. Nothing but a steady, hollowed dry sobbing.
Her father leaned too, smelling like a hangover, and put his forehead into her hair. Isabel and Jackson shook against each other in the warm grass of the new sun. First bitter, vintage tears long gone to vinegar, but then new ones, sweet and fresh, came to rinse their faces. With a strong hand, Isabel took hold of Jackson’s two small, broken hands. The high hills heaved and settled in place.
They sat like that a long time, while the Coopers spied from behind their big bay windows. Finally Isabel and Jackson got up. They dug potatoes, fried fish, and ate on the porch with plates on their knees.
A transport came for Isabel in the morning.
* * *
Jackson pulled weeds slowly in the garden. Isabel wouldn’t run, and wouldn’t take the mobile device. She’d returned to the front. Jay-Phon gave her a little dope to try and wean off on, so she wouldn’t get too sick. Now Jay-Phon hurried down through a cut in the hills. She pointed down the road, and Jackson left his weeding.
A passenger van came bouncing down one of the twisted little roads. Helmeted guards leaned out each side where they had the doors off. They drove up to Jackson’s place. Across the way, Mr. and Mrs. Cooper stood up from their rockers. Mr. Cooper savagely kicked potted flowers off his nice big porch. Mrs. Cooper pulled him inside. Next door, Midge pulled her curtains.
A self-important woman climbed out of the van. She had a neat kerchief knotted at her neck, and her eyes gleamed sharp under a beret she had slouched just-so. An expensive, oiled machine pistol hung from a polished leather strap at her shoulder.
They pulled a stenciled box from the van: REMAINS. The woman said, “Compatriot Jackson, in honor, in solidarity...” She went on, etc., etc. for a minute. Then they drove off. Jay-Phon wiped her face and said she’d carry the box. Jackson limped his way inside and Jay-Phon followed.
In a low corner of the kitchen behind stacked wood for the stove, Jackson cleared a patched section of concrete and tugged a rusted wire. A block came free, then another and another. He pulled a hinged trunk from inside the wall. Under its lid lay a threadbare lavender baby blanket. On this, laid out reverently: things like his wife’s old scratched-screen mobile phone, a blank green-and-yellow baby monitor, a rubber-banded stack of data disks marked photos, a television remote control with blurred, worn buttons.
“Tell anyone you want,” Jackson said to Jay-Phon.
She shook her head and wiped tears and spit from her cheeks, and dried her hands with a fresh rag. She clicked open the stenciled REMAINS box. It held only Isabel’s arm. Jackson brushed it free of dirt and ran a soft oiled cloth from shoulder to finger tips. Black-red stains lay deep in its joints and hairline cracks. Jackson left the shrapnel embedded in the pocked surface.
Jackson bent Isabel’s arm into the lavender folds, nestled it there with the other hidden things. When the trunk was back in the wall, he said to Jay-Phon, “You know how to fish?” Then he took up two rods, two screw-top cans of soup, and made for the stream that fell cold between the craters.
Copyright © 2018 by C. Q. March
