Worlds Apart Read online

  “Then we just watch them fry.” Her voice was calm and happy. His own voice was tight and hoarse. His heart pounded adrenaline, his knees trembled. Palms wet and sphincters twitching. He sat down and put on his boots. If he had to run, how could he get by an electric fence? Steel shutters rattled down over the windows.

  “Ever fight before?” she asked.

  “Couple of times. And I used to be a cop in New York City.”

  “You sound nervous.”

  “Out of practice. Does this happen often?”

  “Every month or so. But it’s usually dark, shouldn’t be no problem.”

  He set both pistols on top of the sandbags and tried to get into a comfortable position, sighting down the scattergun. “You really aren’t afraid to die.”

  “No… I’d rather wait for the death, but if Charlie wants me early, that’s His will.”

  Tad got into place behind the bunker next to them. He had a heavy rifle with a fat starlight scope. He switched on the scope and looked around. “Nothing yet,” he said conversationally. “Everybody in place?” Somebody to the far left said “one,” and the count went all around the house, ending with eight. “Healer, don’t use that scattergun on the one with our Uzi, or anyone with an automatic weapon. We can’t afford to damage them.” The scattergun fired bursts of tiny metal splinters, propelled by compressednitrogen blasts. It was a good close-range weapon but it did make an awful mess of anything it hit.

  “We’ll go for Plan Two. Jommy, go turn off the fence and don’t turn it on until you hear me or Mom shout. Everybody else get down behind the bunkers and don’t fire till I tell you.” To Jeff he explained, “I’ll pick off one or two with the starlight scope, and then we’ll just let them waste ammunition for a while.” He peered through the scope, aiming the rifle in a slow arc from east to west and back again. “If they come at all. They might just take the Uzi and go.”

  “Don’t even think that,” Marsha said. She sat relaxed against the sandbags, her skin still glistening from sex.

  “It would be a good prize.”

  “They’ll try,” she said confidently. “There’s plenty of them.”

  “Sounded like,” Tad said. “Damn, I wish Larry hadn’t opened up on them.”

  “Plan One always works,” Marsha said. “The road sentry lets ‘em go by and warns us. Then he follows ‘em up and hides in a bunker over to the west there, at the tree line. When the shooting starts we’ve got ‘em in a crossfire.”

  “Most of ‘em get it from the Uzi,” Tad said. “Damn that Larry.”

  There was a sound like a rock hitting the ground, not far away, and then a bright flash and simultaneous blast. Bright particles spewed all around them. Tad had ducked behind the sandbags; now he popped back up and squeezed off five or six rounds, muffled taps behind a silencer.

  “Got one.” He crouched down again, and they waited. No return fire; no sound at all.

  “Healer,” Tad said, “give them a couple of bursts. See if we can get them started.” Jeff cautiously peeked around the sandbags. He heard a faint command, and suddenly thirty or forty people rose up out of the weeds and began moving toward them, silently and quickly. He fired two quick blasts in their general direction and rolled back. “Here they come,” he said. Still no return fire.

  “They’ve got ladders,” Marsha said, peering over the top. “This is gonna be target practice.”

  “Hold your fire until they have the ladders in place,” Tad said.

  The Uzi howled at them in a long burst, raking all of the bunkers in front of the house. The sandbags above Jeff and Marsha tore open, spraying dirt. Tad said “Aw, shit,” rather calmly, and fell down, holding his face.

  Jeff dashed over to him and saw that a flechette had ripped open the man’s cheek. A ragged flap of torn flesh dangled over his beard, exposing back teeth shiny with blood in the moonlight.

  “Here.” Jeff held the flap in place and guided Tad’s left hand up to it. “Hold it tight until this is over. Then I’ll stitch it up.” He wasn’t really sure he could.

  “Okay,” Tad said through clenched teeth. “Switch weapons. Can’t shoot the rifle one-handed.”

  Jeff handed him the scattergun and hefted the unfamiliar rifle. “That’s got eight, maybe ten bursts left. Any more ammo for this thing?”

  “In the stock. Tell Marsha to get the fence on.” Marsha heard, and yelled to Jommy. Jeff sighted through the scope, looking for the one with the Uzi, and saw the first casualty of the fence: a girl who was evidently holding on to it when Jommy threw the switch. She stood up rigidly, back arching, sparks, curiously, shooting from her elbows, and then she fell limp.

  Through the starlight scope the world was mono-chromatic and bright. It had some sort of radar gadget, the cross hairs automatically moving downward for more distant targets. A number in the corner told him he had twenty-three shots left. With a sense of detachment, he lay the cross hairs on the first figure he saw, and pulled the trigger. The target spun around but stayed upright, staggering. The rifle had no recoil at all. He turned the eyepiece to increase the magnification, aimed carefully for the center of the chest, and fired again. This time the figure pitched forward and was still.

  Jeff started walking dreamily back to Marsha’s bunker, then came to his senses and ran crouching. She admonished him to be careful and for Charlie’s sake find the bastard with the Uzi.

  He heard the Uzi then and pointed toward the sound. The man, or boy, who had it was standing in the road, firing at the lock on the gate. Jeff shot him three times. He staggered forward and fell on the gate; there was a bright blue flash and it swung open.

  “The gate!” Marsha shouted. “Kill the bastards!” With a steady rattle of gunfire mounting around him, Jeff again fell into an oddly calm state. Marianne had complained about that once, when they were trying to make it to the Cape and stumbled into an ambush, that nothing seemed to get to him; he had said no, not while it was happening. He kept the cross hairs fixed on the Uzi, lying in the dust, only firing when somebody stopped to pick it up, ignoring all the other targets as they streamed by. After six or seven he missed. A girl dove for the weapon, rolled, and began firing from a prone position. Jeff shifted his point of aim and then something smashed into the side of his head and he was falling, bright sparks flying around. He felt himself hit the ground and lay there for a few seconds, watching the sparks die.

  He woke up to the sound of children laughing. The sky was pale blue, just about dawn. He tried to sit up and black spots danced in the sky. He choked back vomit and lay still for a minute, and then rolled over so he could see.

  The children were playing in the garden. The cyclopean girl with the pretty golden curls was dressed in a party frock, holding a bloody hatchet. Giggling, she stood over the writhing body of a girl she had just decapitated. Other children were engaged in similar tasks.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on his monumental headache. How bad a concussion, he wondered. Carefully probing, he found a large bandage on the side of his head. It bent his ear over rather painfully.

  “Are you all right?” Marsha’s voice.

  He got up on one elbow and looked at her through the cloud of black spots. He couldn’t think of anything clever to say. “You got dressed.”

  “It’s been over a long time. You only missed a few minutes, really. The kids are cleaning up now.”

  He closed his eyes again. “Saves ammunition, I guess.”

  “Yeah, and it gets them used to it. Can I do something?”

  “Oh…bring down my saddlebags, I guess. Many wounded?”

  “Just a few. All we lost was Larry and Deborah. Here.” He heard her set the bags down next to him. “I’ve been usin’ your stuff, just the bandages. Is that okay?”

  “Sure.” But he’d have to take off the bandages and make things sterile, and then redress them. There might not be enough.

  He sorted slowly through the bag and, on a hunch, gave himself a shot of amphetamine. It made the pai
n worse, but the spots went away and he could sit up. He fingered the morphine ampoules longingly but decided to settle for aspirin. “Bring me some water. And have all the wounded come over, most serious ones first. Get some water boiling.”

  He looked at himself in a hand mirror. The left side of his beard was solid with caked blood. He gingerly removed the bandage, glad she had used the plastic kind that didn’t stick, and saw how lucky he’d been. The wound was long but not deep; he had been grazed by a bullet or flechette. It would have to be stitched up but the skull obviously wasn’t fractured.

  Two of the grownups brought Jommy over and laid him down. He was pale as death and crying quietly. His right hand was a bundle of bright red bandage. Jeff unwrapped it carefully.

  “Please don’t, Healer. Just let ‘em kill me. Don’t chop it off.” The thumb was blown off completely and the fingers were shattered, bone splinters sticking out of the gore. Without speaking he gave him a shot of general anesthetic. When the boy’s eyes closed he said to. the grownups, “Someone build a fire. Bring me a hacksaw.”

  3

  O’Hara continued to go down to the Bellcom studio at midnight every full moon, but for several months there had been no broadcast from Jeff. They said he probably was still sending, but the signal had gotten so weak they couldn’t pick it up: something about signal-to-noise ratio and discrimination. She kept going in the hope that he would find a new fuel cell or a way to recharge the one he had.

  Jeff defined “midnight” as the time when the moon was highest, which would be at eleven-forty this month, New New York time. O’Hara came in at eleven and sat down in front of the familiar blank screen, listening to static. She opened up her briefcase and took out a small printer, which she balanced on her knees. She started outlining a report on the correlations between accident frequency and age for people involved in various construction tasks.

  After about a half hour, the static abruptly stopped. She looked up, thinking that the monitor had been turned off, and Jeff’s voice boomed: “MARIANNE—I HAVE A FUEL cell.” Somebody adjusted the volume. “Can you hear me? Are you up there?”

  The printer slid to the floor with a crash. “Yes… yes, I—” A technician rushed in with a throat mike and she fastened it to her neck. “I can hear you, Jeff. Can you hear me?”

  There was a long silence. “Yes, I do. You’re all right, then—New New came out all right?”

  Words appeared on a prompter: SOMEBODY’S COMING FROM THE PLAGUE PROJECT. TELL HIM TO SHUT DOWN FOR TEN MINUTES AND CALL BACK.

  “Yes, everything’s…well, not back to normal exactly—Jeff, listen. We found a cure for the plague. An antibiotic. They want us to shut down for ten minutes, I guess to save your power; somebody’s coming to tell you about it.”

  “But…a cure? Christ. All right.” The static rushed back.

  While O’Hara waited, other cube screens lit up with various data about the plague. Two flatscreens showed a road map of Plant City and a satellite photograph, which enlarged itself and rotated, to match the orientation of the road map.

  A young man—black, short, wiry, stifling a yawn—rushed into the studio and sat down next to O’Hara. He shook her hand. “Elijah Seven,” he said. “Am I awake yet?”

  “Getting there,” O’Hara said. He had buttoned up his shirt wrong; she leaned over and fixed it. “You’re from the plague project?”“Yeah, I’m with the bunch distributing the vaccine. We have a special kind of—”

  “I’m back now,” the speakers said. “You hear me?”

  Seven put a throat mike in place. “Hawkings, this is Dr. Elijah Seven. We’ve synthesized a vaccine for the plague. I’m in charge of sending it down to Earth.

  “We’ve sent down a couple of hundred thousand doses already; none to your area. Some went to Atlanta and Miami. You may run across them: they’re bright red individual ampoules in crates of the thousand. The crates have pictograph instructions, as well as written ones, telling how to administer the dose.”

  “Haven’t seen anything like that.”

  “Didn’t think you would, not yet Listen, we have a special shipment for you. The ampoules are damned inefficient. We made up a batch in regular hypo bottles. You have an American standard hypo gun?”

  “I guess that’s what it is. It has the Pharmaceuticals’ Lobby symbol stamped on it.”

  “Good. We want to drop a crate at your hospital, for you to store in that safe. But we don’t know where the hospital is. We have a map of Plant City but it doesn’t show St. Theresa’s.”

  “It’s a brand-new building just south of the city limits, on Main Street extended. It’s shaped like an H, forty stories high, all blue glass and composites. Big golden cross in front.”

  “Okay…” He watched the prompter. “The vaccine’s in low Earth orbit. We’ll bring it down to you soon as it gets light. Coming in from the west about seven-thirty.”

  “All right. But look, are the bottles or the crate identified as plague vaccine? Most of the people around here wouldn’t take it if they knew it would prevent the death. They have pity on me for having lived so long.”

  “Yes, we anticipated that. No markings, no labels. Tell them anything you want.”

  “We’ve got a typhoid epidemic south of here. I can claim it’s for that.”

  “Good. You’ll be getting several years’ supply; twenty or thirty thousand doses, depending on the proportion of small children. Though I think it would be smart to inoculate the older ones first.”

  “What about me? Should I take it? Then I could start taking drugs again for the growth hormone anomaly—it’s probably all that’s keeping me alive, but sooner or later the pain is going to immobilize me.”

  “What, you’re growing?”

  “I don’t think so, not enough to notice. But it’s doing something to my joints, something like arthritis.”

  Seven kneaded his forehead. “I’ll have to talk to an endocrinologist. Seem to remember that in children the growth hormone sends some sort of ‘message’ to the bone ends. Maybe that’s what you’re feeling.

  “Don’t take it yet. We’ll get a consensus and leave word with O’Hma. Any other questions?”

  “No. I’ll call back in one month. Let me talk with my exwife.”

  They’d signed a one-year marriage contract, partly in the hope of getting Jeff space on the shuttle. “Hello, exhusband.”

  “So. How’s the weather up there?”

  Charlie’s Will

  Jeff heard the robot drone before he saw it. It came out of the morning haze to the southwest, banked toward him, then coasted silently overhead, releasing its package. About twenty seconds later its engines kicked back in and it sped off to the east.

  The bright red parachute floated straight down and just missed getting hung up on the golden cross in front of the hospital. That would have been interesting, trying to find a long ladder before some scavengers got to it.

  It was a plain metal box with no markings. No obvious way to get it open, either. He walked around it, puzzled, and was just about to turn it over when there was a faint “pop” and the top sprang open. Inside, dozens of half-liter bottles were nestled in spun glass. He filled the wagon and pulled it inside to the safe.

  After three wagonloads he put two bottles in his sad-dlebags and locked up the safe. He wrapped the fuel cell in dirty clothing and put it in the bottom of his canvas bag. When he went out to get his bike there were two boys standing there, looking at the parachute and the metal box. One had a shotgun and the other had a pistol stuck in his belt. He recognized them as the two hunters from the family he’d treated for syphilis.

  “Hello, boys. How’s the girl doing?”

  “What girl?” said the one with the shotgun. “The girl who had the fungus, remember?”

  “Oh yeah. She’s okay. What’s all this shit, we heard the rocket and saw it drop this shit.”

  “It’s medicine. They have typhoid down in Tampa. I’m trying to fix it so no one up here gets it. It’
s pretty ugly.”

  “So where’d the rocket come from? The Worlds?”

  “No,” Jeff said slowly, “you retarded? We killed those bastards a long time ago. This is from Mobile, Alabama. That’s where they keep stuff like that.”

  “Yeah, Willy,” said the one with the pistol. “You never seen them?”

  “Maybe I seen ‘em and maybe not.” He stared at Jeff. “So you got a radio in there.”

  “Not here. I have to go down to St. Petersburg. There’s a Public Health Service building down there.”

  “They got fuel cells, then.”

  “No, it’s a sort of bicycle contraption. It makes electricity; you have to pedal while you talk.” Jeff had actually seen such a device, in a fire station outside of Orlando, but it didn’t work. “Roll up your sleeves. I’ll give you the typhoid medicine.” So the first person Jeff gave the gift of life was a mean little punk who would have killed him for a bar of corroded silver.

  The sentry on the sand road to Forest-in-Need Farm stayed hidden but said hello as Jeff passed him. They had put heads on stakes all along the road. In the week Jeff was away, the ants had polished them clean.

  Tad was waiting for him at the gate. He shook hands solemnly and said, “Marsha’s got the death.”

  It gave Jeff a curious hollow feeling, not quite grief. He had seen a lot of people with the death, but no one he had known. No one he had made love to, or fought beside. “Well, let me see her.”

  She was on the porch, sitting next to the bath. Jeff braced himself, but she didn’t look as bad as the others he had seen, because she had been in good health and eaten well. They were usually emaciated and covered with sores. She looked normal except for her posture, slack and immobile.

  “Marsha? Say hello to Healer.”

  She looked up, her eyes slightly crossed, the pupils very small. Lips parted and wet. “Healer. Squealerdealer. Where’s the wagon, dragon?” Her head lolled forward. “Fraggendragon.” A string of drool dropped from her open mouth. She caught it on the second try and played with it.