The Beachhead Read online

  “Then why keep reading them over and over? You seem smart enough.”

  The old man snorted. “I’m smart enough to know that I know nothing—and dumb enough to believe I’ll someday learn enough.”

  John was quiet for a moment. “Why’d you go with the other Remnants to see them?”

  His grandfather smiled again, but this time some of the light had gone from his eyes. “I think that question has pretty much the same answer as my last.”

  No one seemed to have his grandfather’s sort of patience anymore, that strange blend of self-determination and faith that so many Remnants who had gone to their rest had possessed in life. All the Remnants he had ever known had it, whether they had been eighty or eight on the day of the Arrival. Maybe it came from being among the few to have survived the destruction of the human race. It made sense they were determined to keep what was left of it alive and believed that they could. But they were also smart enough to know that nothing lasted forever and that someday their knowledge—even the most closely held parts of it—must be shared with the Firsts and Seconds. Could his generation really be so complacent—and his parents’ so dangerously naïve—that the Remnants thought they were all still unready?

  A flash of torchlight, a pause, then two more quick flashes along the perimeter. A warning signal. He took another scan of the perimeter with his binoculars but saw and heard nothing—no lights, no sound. He glanced at the sky. About two hours until dawn. So what could be wrong? He slipped his carbine from his shoulder and flashed the stand-ready signal. Then he took his position and waited. Even the steady nighttime hum of the native insects seemed muted. Ten minutes later Kendra emerged from the woods, her coal-black hair flecked with bits of brush. She was slightly out of breath, likely because she had gotten it into her head to scout all the way to the beach and double-time it back up the foothills.

  He handed her a canteen. “Just had to hoof it down there, huh?”

  “What does the book of Revelation say?” She grinned as she gulped in cold mountain air. “‘He that overcometh shall inherit all things.’ Right?”

  “Trouble?”

  She shrugged as she swigged some water. “Depends. They’re back early.”

  “Why would anyone flash a warning signal for that?”

  She handed the canteen back, eyebrows arched. “Because there’s more than twelve of them coming back.”

  CHAPTER 2

  And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

  —The Book of Revelation 21:2

  Jacob Weiss had awoken three hours before dawn. Being awake didn’t surprise him; he never really slept well on the nights of the Orangemen’s visits. That said, this really was a godforsaken hour: too early to begin a new day and too far past the one just ended to add anything to it. It had always been to him a lonely and anxious hour that had gotten only more so with the years, filled as it was with so many memories of prayers said and so few answered. And still, one above all. He could hear Amelia now, a ripple of sound from decades earlier. And then, always, the voice of Dr. Giordano—“I’m so damn sorry, Jake”—telling him his wife had died in childbirth.

  Weiss stretched thick old muscles and slapped cold water on his face from the basin on his bureau. Then he dressed in his tan-and-brown uniform and strapped his sidearm on his belt and debated about going up to the perimeter to check on things. For a while he stood in his kitchen rolling cigarettes, smoking one and then a second before pocketing the other three. His commanders were all capable and well trained. Showing up now would only make them think he didn’t trust them. He brushed his bristly gray hair in the small mirror with the plain metal frame hanging in the hallway. Each family had received one soon after old Sammy Langhorne had first perfected laying a thin layer of metallic silver onto glass by chemically reducing silver nitrate. A small gift from an exuberant time, when, in relearning how to do things, what was old became new again.

  He opened his front door and went out into the empty street with no direction in mind. It felt good to be out of doors. The cold air rushed into his lungs and made his broad chest less tight.

  Lonely as he felt, he was also somewhat surprised to be glad to be alone. Sometimes living in the city among so many people, with so many voices around him all day and long into the evening, made him yearn for his boyhood. His family had lived in a cabin he and his father and his brother, Andrew, had built in the hills. The walls had been fastened together with metal taken from the cargo containers that had deposited them on the beach during the Arrival. But much of it, including the furniture, had been built from the wood of native vegetation. Unlike many Remnants who had been adults during the Arrival, his mother had believed they should build something that could survive more than a single season. She wanted to take a chance on permanence.

  Weiss wondered how much remained of that old cabin in the hills. He hadn’t been in that area for decades, not since his early years in the Defense Forces. He passed it all the time then on routine patrols or on perimeter-duty nights like this one. Had the roof caved in? Had the doors and shutters fallen off?

  Maybe I should go up there and see. Hike up with Andy sometime.

  Perhaps they had left some token of their stay there, something half-buried in the overgrowth that they had forgotten. He doubted it. His mother had been very thorough about cleaning out the place once the Remnants had agreed to abandon their isolation and build the city.

  As he approached Central Square, he thought of his parents and so many others long gone. Their descendants were now asleep in their beds behind the darkened windows he passed. Each of them—asleep or awake, talking or praying—knew what night it was: possibly, as every night, their last night as living beings.

  Whatever the whims of providence, Weiss and his Defense Forces were still responsible for their lives and their continuing existence as a race. It was something he never thought about during the day, only on cheerless nights like this. Was the anxiety of the hour less about the pair of lives he’d lost at three in the morning all those years ago than about the thousands of lives that could be snuffed out unawares because they were foolish enough to believe in this city, in their supposed strength in numbers? Wasn’t that exactly the kind of arrogance that had doomed the human race to begin with?

  The surrounding gaslights brought nearly the luster of late afternoon to the square and diminished the density of stars in the sky above. Such lights now ran down most of the main streets except for the outermost blocks. Having recently tapped some new natural gas pockets, there was talk among the engineers of adding gaslights to private homes soon, as they had already begun to do in public buildings.

  Weiss stood under a lamp, arms folded across his barrel chest as he fingered his mustache. Progress.

  “‘And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle,’” a voice said brightly from not far behind him. He turned and saw Gordon Lee flipping his long black hair out of his eyes as he came up along the square, a leather workbag slung across his slim shoulder. “Revelation 22:5. Good thing we decided to name the city New Philadelphia and not that other one, eh?”

  “Good to see you, Gordon.” Weiss extended his hand. “Working late?”

  Lee shrugged as their hands joined. “The kids in Sector Seven had a gas leak and were worried, so they called in a professional.” He jerked his chin at the lamp Jake had been studying. “Please don’t tell me there’s something wrong with that one too.”

  “What? No—I was just thinking.”

  “Thinking about how dangerous all these lights are, I bet,” Lee said with a laugh. “That’s the problem with you military types. You all think we should still be living in mud shacks in the hills and hunting with the rifles dumped here with us during the Arrival.”

  Weiss grunted. “I don’t mind the newer rifles.” He looked down the road in the direction of the beach. “You’re telling me it never worries you, Gordon? Even on
these nights?”

  “Especially not on these nights. Why should they attack us on the nights we’re expecting them? And for that matter, why pop in for a visit every other year for the last fifty-two years? Seems to me if someone wanted to get us—Friendlies, Hostiles, both—they had plenty of opportunities before we turned the lights on.”

  “Seems to me you don’t worry all that much.”

  “Such is the critique hurled at my generation by members of yours. No offense, of course.”

  “None taken.”

  “Actually, I worry about plenty of things. For the last three hours I’ve been worried about a gas leak. Now that the lights are back on, I’m worried about how I’m going to wake up my wife so I can get laid. I’m thinking ‘Be fruitful and multiply’—a cliché, I know—should do the trick.”

  “How’s Sofie anyway?”

  “Good. Very good. Thanks. I’ll tell her you were asking for her.”

  “Do that. I miss her a lot. As a drill sergeant she was one of my best.”

  Lee smirked. “And as a niece?”

  The rapid pace of boots tearing at the fieldstone road snatched their attention. They turned to find a pink-faced Novice of no more than fourteen, his rifle shouldered, his hand clutched around a scrap of paper. The young soldier almost forgot to salute, then snapped a quick one at Weiss while panting heavily.

  “General. I’m glad I found you, sir. Captain Giordano asked me to double-time it over to your house to give you this.”

  Weiss unfolded the damp and crumpled note and read its penciled contents. “‘The twelve are returning early from the beach.’” He read the next line silently and glanced up at the Novice. “And they’re not alone?”

  “No, sir.”

  His jaw set. “How many?”

  “Just four others, sir. All unarmed. No signs of a kidnap situation or hostility of any kind. They should be reaching Gate Six at any moment.”

  Weiss glanced at Lee and found him surprisingly silent. Then he turned his attention back to the boy. “Where’s Captain Giordano now?”

  “With the other perimeter guards, sir. They’re on alert, in case of an attack. The captain’s sent an armed escort to the beach to accompany our people and the, uh, guests into the city.”

  “Let’s go. I want to meet them at the gate. Gordon, you’re a civilian militia commander. Sound a general alert, but make sure not to start a panic.”

  “Me? Really, don’t you think that someone else might—”

  Weiss glared at him. “I want this city awake and ready for anything. Now let’s move.”

  When New Philadelphia was laid out, there were many who believed there was no point in encircling it with a wall to keep out an enemy who could simply launch an attack from the airspace above or from an even more comfortable distance in orbit. Others pointed out that there were practical reasons for building a wall—not the least of which was to keep out the carnivorous predators that had thinned their numbers considerably during the years in the hills. Weiss’s father, who had lost a younger sister to such a beast a year after the Arrival, was one of the first to advocate building a wall as well as having a patrolled outer-defense perimeter. “I’m not so worried about protecting ourselves from Hostiles who might or might not find us,” Dave Weiss said at the time, “as much as I’m worried about defending ourselves from the enemies here and now. If we’re the smartest beasts on this rock, at least, we better start acting like it.”

  Once they agreed to build their walled metropolis, the Remnants looked to the celestial city of New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation to aid them in its construction. They even built the wall with twelve gates, oriented to the major points on the compass. If only they, like the people in Revelation, also had guardian angels manning the gatehouses.

  New Philadelphia was without question a beautiful city. Not just in its stonework and gently curving streets, but also in its overall design. The Archives held some photos of cities on Earth-of-old but far more descriptions, so they built with the best precedents in mind: maximum concentration of people with easy access to open lands and common spaces. Half of the acreage inside the walls was dedicated to farmlands, orchards, public greens; the other half to row houses with deep front and back gardens. This design made the homes easier to heat in the winters, yet open enough to provide ventilation in the summers. A fringe benefit of the design hadn’t eluded the builders: ample escape routes in case of emergencies.

  For people who had lived isolated in the wilderness for some time, the city’s walls had to provide freedom within, not the feeling of a penitentiary. No one ever grumbled about being so close to growing flora or having enough light and fresh air. And having foodstuffs inside the city when the crops outside the walls could not be accessed for whatever reason brought peace of mind against the possibility of a long siege.

  Weiss and the Novice moved quickly through the streets toward Gate Six. By the time they reached it, armed militia members were out of their homes and making their way to their appointed positions, though many seemed as if they wanted to join the growing civilian crowd. Weiss found Kendra McQueen and the armed escort she had led to meet the twelve and their guests. The Novice seemed only too glad to be dismissed.

  “Lieutenant,” Weiss said, “what’s our sitrep?”

  “They arrived at the entrance to the gatehouse a few minutes before we showed up, sir. I don’t know how they got here before us, but they’ve been holed up in there ever since.”

  Weiss squinted. “You mean you haven’t seen them?”

  “No, sir. None of us in the escort have. And the captain of the guard on duty said all she could make out were our twelve people flanked around four robed figures of varying sizes.”

  “Varying sizes? As tall as Orangemen?”

  “The guard wouldn’t know, sir,” she said. “Not having ever seen an Orangeman.”

  Weiss raised an eyebrow. “Why didn’t you go in and find out?”

  Kendra bit her lip. “The twelve won’t let us, sir.”

  “‘Won’t let’?”

  “They’ve barred the door, told us they were all right but needed some time.”

  “Who specifically told you, Lieutenant? Whose voice did you hear?”

  A pause. “Grace Davison.”

  “Grace?” Weiss looked down and chuckled. “Figures.”

  Kendra shrugged. “No one wants to have it out with the last of the real old-timers.”

  “Of course.”

  “And she specifically said that you and I couldn’t go in.”

  “Really?” Weiss asked. “Did she say why?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I assume it’s because we’re the only ones outside of official delegations who’ve seen an Orangeman in recent years.”

  Weiss put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. “That was a long time ago, Kendra. And I can’t imagine that—”

  “Jake?”

  The voice that spoke his name was thin and wheezy but still somehow strong and firm. Weiss turned to see a familiar caramel-colored face crowned by short white hair that he could recall being salt and pepper for the longest time and—if he thought back far enough—jet black. Grace had been as much a mother to him as his own, with all of the emotions that accompanied such a relationship. Behind her wrinkles were still the eyes of the youngish woman who had educated him and so many others. From her lips in their first one-room schoolhouse he had learned of the beauty of biology, the glory of Walt Whitman, the bittersweet history of human achievement, the miracle of the Scriptures. As she stepped through the darkened doorway of the gatehouse, Weiss realized that despite his being commander of the Defense Forces and an authority second only to the Council’s, he would have a hard time denying any request Grace made.

  Weiss gave her a courteous nod. “Grace. Good to see you. Mind telling me what’s going on?”

  She walked in short but steady steps toward a low stone railing. She leaned against it, then tilted her head back a bit to look him in the ey
e. The soldiers gathered to listen. “I speak with the unanimous authority of the twelve relating to matters that we will put before the Council in our biennial report.”

  Formality. Not good.

  “Grace, while I understand and respect your ambassadorial authority, as commander of the Defense Forces, I have to insist that—”

  She held up a vein-ridden hand. “I need three representatives, one from each of our people’s generations, to enter this gatehouse with me to verify who is inside and spread this truth to all members of their generations. Jake, you’ll represent the Remnants.”

  Weiss leaned in. “Now wait just a damn minute—”

  Grace ignored him and set her eyes on Kendra. “My dear, I helped your mother deliver you. You will represent the Seconds.” Grace now looked past both of them into the crowd, hoping to find her final representative among the armed escort and guards.

  “If you need a Firster, how about me?”

  All eyes turned to see a woman, tall and slim, coming toward them. Though her mane of red hair was now slit with gray, it was hard to mistake the striking and indomitable Petra Giordano for anyone else.

  “Petra.” Grace’s voice was quiet and filled by a growing smile. “I couldn’t have asked for a better Firster.”

  “No,” Weiss said flatly, without turning, as Petra joined them.

  “I’m not under your command, Jake,” Petra said happily enough.

  “Which is exactly why you’re not going in. This is a defense issue, Petra. I can’t have a civilian in there.”

  “At least not one who believes your macho defense posturing is a lot of bollocks.”

  “Enough, please.” Grace straightened, ready to climb the stairs back up to the gatehouse. She looked from Petra to Weiss and back again. “This isn’t a defense matter. It might make it simpler if it were. Now come with me.”

  “What are you going to show us?” Kendra asked, one hand on her rifle.

  Grace touched her arm. “Nothing you’ll need that for, dear. But something that will shake your expectations as much as the Jews’ were when the Messiah came as a lamb.”