The Beachhead Read online

  Silence.

  Silence as exactly 144,000 pairs of eyes looked to the sky. Silence as these bitter dregs of mankind beheld a pair of humanoid beings—orange skinned and about seven feet tall, with heads slightly larger than the human variety and big iris-less eyes as slate gray as a chalkboard—hovering about twenty feet off the ground. Both were naked except for their grayish loincloths and gold metallic belts and sword scabbards, their bare chests revealing that one was seemingly male and the other female. No hair covered their bodies, not arms or chests or eyebrows, except their heads, which were closely shorn. Flapping translucent wings arching from their backs held them aloft.

  It was the first time that any still-living member of the human race had seen the beings they would come to call the Orangemen. Whether those forms were their true ones, no one had ever yet proven, even these long years after they had come to consider them both their greatest enemies and their truest protectors.

  The female one began to speak in words that somehow could be understood by everyone. “We have brought you here so that your race may enter into a new life. We do not wish to see you harmed any further. We assure you that you will be left in peace to do as you will.”

  “Peace?” a voice, hollow with loss and longing for death, cried out from somewhere to Grace’s right. “You bastards leave us in peace? You destroyed us! Destroyed our worlds! Our whole fucking civilization!”

  The male Orangeman gestured. “In these containers you will find food, animals, supplies—all basic tools taken from your old world. You will also find some of your weapons, so that you may hunt and protect yourselves from the indigenous wildlife. We have salvaged as much as we could find of your literature and history. Learn from it and build anew. Repopulate your race.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “You burned our world!”

  “You killed us all! My whole family!”

  “Everyone’s dead! You goddamn bastards!”

  The Orangemen waited for a lull in the commotion. The female continued: “Nothing can be done to change the past. The past is fixed, the future unwritten. Turn to the future with virtue. The last days are gone, the suffering gone. And the world can be made anew.”

  “Are you sorry? Do you feel any remorse, you inhuman monsters? Answer me!”

  Both of those impassive orange faces turned to face their accuser below them. A pulse seemed to pass through the male’s jaw. The female turned to him, but after a moment she faced the crowd again.

  “We will visit every two years from this day to check on your progress. We will not interfere with you or harm you—but we will protect you from those who would harm you. Leaders of your tribes should visit us here on this beach. We will come unarmed and ask you to do the same. We will walk together, speak together—perhaps someday we will even share a meal. Until then, love one another.”

  With a great flap of their translucent wings, they were gone, riding farther and farther into the blue sky until blotted out by the sun. No human being would set eyes on an Orangeman for the next two years. And by then, things would be much different.

  All eyes had been on the sky. Grace didn’t see her children approach, didn’t hear Ernest’s voice until he was nearly on top of her, couldn’t believe he was there clutching Nancy’s hand as if they were still young children. As she swallowed them in her embrace, she saw over their heads other parents finding their children, everywhere, all around them, at the very same moment.

  Cries of joy and reunion at exactly the same instant.

  A miracle.

  Then a flash far up in the sky caught her eye and was gone.

  “Grace? Grace?”

  She opened her eyes. Hard to see, but it looked like someone was calling her into the Council’s chambers to give her testimony.

  Weak old eyes. She shook her head and stood up, feeling strangely more peaceful and assured than she had in the last fifty-two years. Weak old eyes but God willing a stout heart.

  “Anytime you’re ready, Grace,” Andrew Weiss, the chairman of the Council, said once she had taken her seat at the witness table.

  “The twelve met the Orangemen on the beach as usual,” Grace began, looking at the Council on the raised dais and at the representatives of the First and Second generations seated at a table perpendicular to it. “None of us expected that it would be anything other than the usual sort of meeting: the Orangemen there to check our progress and offer encouragement and advice, not to render aid or services, and to assure us that the Hostiles were still unaware of the human race’s continuing existence.”

  She took a sip of water from a cup that had been set before her. “We described how many people had been sickened during the last warm season by that diphtheria outbreak. Told the Orangemen how hundreds had suffered for weeks and dozens had died before the season passed. We explained we didn’t want intervention, only answers to some questions that we were sure people had solved in the years before the holocaust. We said we were fairly certain that humanity had discovered a diphtheria vaccine, since none of the old medical textbooks told us how to treat it.”

  The two Orangemen—a pair of males she did not recognize—had been typically impassive about the request. Grace noted how as the twelve had walked along the moonlit beach with their guests, airing grievances, seeking assurances, none were prepared for what came next.

  The shorter of the two Orangemen—more than a foot taller than Grace had been at her zenith—turned to her. His grayish eyes reflected the flames of the signal fire they had lit to mark their location. “What if we were to tell you that there might be someone who can help you with your medical needs, someone who would not disturb our pact of noninterference?”

  Grace looked at the one who spoke, then the other, and snorted. “I’d say, with respect, that I already ask God for help every day.”

  “It is said,” the Orangeman replied, with an almost-smile on his statue-like features, “that God does his work in mysterious ways. Please follow us to that rock outcropping ahead.”

  He gestured with long, expressive fingers. The group followed toward a narrow cove. Grace could feel the youngest Remnants—Felix Collins and Enrique Cordova in particular—tense up. But as they approached the outcropping, they could discern no force of Hostiles hiding there, no clusters of winged soldiers ready to slaughter them. They saw nothing except four robed figures waiting silently between the rocks and sea, framed by a night sky thick with stars.

  “It is my belief, Council members,” Grace said now, “having spoken to these four Newcomers, that we are witnessing the age of the Millennium, the end of our thousand years of peace, as foretold in the book of Revelation. These Newcomers—the Tylers—are the beginning of the pagans being raised for judgment.”

  Petra Giordano gasped at Grace’s pronouncement. The old woman glanced in Petra’s direction and nodded, her mouth a confident line.

  Each pair of eyes in the room turned to the chairman, looking for guidance. Leaning on his elbows, Andrew gave his heavy jowls a rough rub and looked at Grace with wary and hooded eyes. “Are you certain, Grace? Did the Orangemen tell you this specifically?”

  She held his gaze. “If I’m right that Revelation is reaching its fulfillment, then the birth of the New Nations is at hand and the New Jerusalem will soon descend like a bride from the sky. But first we are going to go through a great trial—and we need to be ready for it.”

  “A trial?” Gordon Lee wondered aloud from his seat. “Would you please elaborate?”

  “A war, Gordon,” she answered with a quiet sadness. “The last great rebellion against God. What we do with these Newcomers will decide our fates in this coming life. I ask you to now judge. Judge wisely.” Then she stood up and left, with the other eleven members of the beach party following in her wake.

  The six representatives of the First and Second generations began to murmur among themselves, none more so than Lee, who was shaking his head and sputtering in disgust.

  Sitting on their raised da
is, the Council of Twelve watched the commotion in the chamber for several moments before Andrew Weiss used his pumice-stone gavel to bring the room to order. Long considered the more genial of the two Weiss brothers, Andrew imagined many in the room were surprised to find him so red-faced with annoyance. Then again, all of the current Council members had served numerous times and no such outburst had ever occurred in chambers.

  “Order, order! I remind the representatives that you are all here at Grace’s request. Please show some respect for this institution by controlling yourselves. You’re not children, any of you, so don’t act like it.”

  Lee snorted at the last remark. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chairman, but the Millennium? Really? Has a thousand years passed since the end of the world? I’m not going to just sit here and have anyone, even someone as respected as Grace, make such absolutely baseless pronouncements without—”

  “Gordon, believe me, I sympathize with you,” Andrew interrupted. “Now if you are all done, I’d like to ask one of you to go into the anteroom and ask the guards to bring in the Newcomers. Tell them the children don’t have to come in unless they wish to be with their parents.”

  He watched as Petra rose from her chair and opened the door to the main entrance. Her son and his handpicked guard detail were waiting with the Newcomers on the other side. Kendra could clearly be seen trying not to speak with the children, who were fidgeting and asking lots of loud questions: Are there a lot of kids in the city? Do they like to play baseball? How many people were pilots before they got here? Have you ever had ice cream? Do Orangemen ever laugh? Kendra, wincing a grin, averted her eyes.

  “Go on.” John put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “We’ll take good care of your kids. They seem to want to tell us all about this baseball thing.”

  Andrew watched as William and Eva Tyler stood in unison and entered the Council’s chambers and heard the heavy wooden door shut smoothly behind them. The simply built candlelit room of wood and stone could have been any kind of common meeting place, from a court of law to a Lutheran church.

  “Please.” Andrew gestured to them to approach the witness table. “Come forward.”

  “I want your assurances as leaders of this community that no harm will come to our children,” Eva called out.

  Andrew climbed down the dais’s three steps and met them in the center of the main aisle, arms open. “My dear lady, I promise your children are in safe hands. I swear this to you as a father and a grandfather. Here we consider every child a blessing, each a gift and a hope for the future.” He waved them forward. “Now please.”

  As they approached, Andrew returned to his seat and Hector Phillips, the most junior member of the Council, came down the steps to swear them in. The Tylers placed their hands on a very heavy Bible so they could promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Even Andrew thought the ritual both serious and absurd, yet he hoped the Tylers were comforted by the idea that they could testify together. He glanced around. One member of the Council was taking handwritten notes, as were most representatives of the First and Second generations.

  “We’ll tell you what we know,” William said. “But you have to tell us how you got here, how this—it’s all so unbelievable—”

  “In time. Now if you please—”

  The bearded man glanced at his wife and sighed. “All right, here goes. My name is William Tyler. This is my wife, Eva. We have two children, Peter and Tess. I’m an engineer—was an engineer—at the Mars colony. My wife is a doctor. She did research in the colony on the long-term effects of low-gravity environments on human physiology.” He looked at Andrew. “Do you know a lot about the Mars colony?”

  Andrew almost shrugged. “We’d like to know about it from your perspective.”

  “Okay. Well, the colony was composed of about a hundred or so families like ours, who rotated in and out every Martian year—roughly every two Earth years. We were all normal, everyday people doing work we thought would one day hold the key to human survival.” He laughed.

  Eva gave him a knowing glance before she took up the story. “I guess each of us thought it possible that humanity could easily be wiped out. A meteor could destroy all life on Earth—or a plague. We believed it was important to spread humanity out so the race could survive. A lot of colonists thought as we did. We went to bed at night dreaming of a terraformed Mars, with a breathable atmosphere and a warmer climate, and spent our days trying to make that happen. It all seemed so possible—and we were willing to do the work.”

  “Then the attack came,” William said. “We didn’t know about it right away on account of the lag time. And at that point in the year, the delay was about twenty minutes because Earth and Mars were at their farthest distance from each other. Not that it would’ve mattered if we had been closer. We couldn’t have helped. All we could’ve done was hear civilization being murdered a little quicker.”

  Eva squeezed her husband’s hand. “We did not know who had attacked Earth or what was happening. No one had heard of any intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms—and certainly none of us would have believed that they would wipe out humanity like some silly old science-fiction movie.”

  “Is that what you thought?” Petra asked. “That the Earth was destroyed by aliens?”

  “Petra—”

  She shot Andrew a look. “Mr. Chairman, why are we here if we’re not allowed to question the witnesses?”

  “You’ll be able to, Petra. Just let them have their say first.” He turned to the Newcomers. “Please.”

  Eva frowned. “In any event, we did not know what had happened. We tried to raise Mission Control in Houston, then Star City, then Jiuquan—all nothing but static. Then we tried the other outposts. The lunar colony first, then the mining colonies in the asteroid belt. We even tried to hail the Chinese-manned mission that was heading out to the Saturnian system. Nothing. We did not know if anyone could respond, if anyone anywhere was still alive. But we knew one thing: we were probably going to be next.”

  “We always thought the attacks were simultaneous,” Lee said, scratching his ear. “We didn’t realize there was a delay in the attack on Mars.”

  “Gordon, please,” Andrew said. “They’re still giving testimony.”

  “From our point of view, every outpost was attacked simultaneously except ours,” William continued. “If there was a delay between the other attacks, we can’t tell you. I can tell you that on the Mars colony it was utter chaos over the next few days. No one knew what to do, not one of us. There were just over four hundred of us, lots of kids. We had no weapons, no way to defend ourselves other than blowing up our own nuclear power plant and likely killing ourselves in the process.”

  “We did not have to wait long,” Eva added, then turned to her husband. “Was it even a week? Long enough to worry about what might happen, but not enough time to prepare for it. Our nuclear power plant was the first thing hit, from orbit it seemed, then the laboratories and dormitories a few minutes later. Not nuclear attacks, more like flashes of lightning, electromagnetic pulses knocking out everything. The power, it was almost biblical.”

  “Indeed,” Petra said quietly.

  “William thought we would be safest underground, in the lower levels, which were the most heavily shielded from radiation. He brought us all down there, myself, the children. He pleaded with the other colonists to come along, but . . . it was all just too crazy. He had been working on something in the lower laboratories in his spare time—something that could function on the planet’s geothermal energy in case of a system-wide failure of the nuclear plant.”

  “It was a cryo-chamber,” he continued, clearing his throat. “I’m not sure how familiar you are with cryogenics—”

  “Mr. Tyler,” Andrew said, “I ask that you please just assume our ignorance.”

  “Okay.” He looked sheepish. “Cryogenics studies the behavior of materials at very low temperatures. In this case, we had been experimenting with cryobiology. Should ou
r station suffer some sort of catastrophic failure, it would be necessary to freeze the inhabitants in suspended animation while a rescue team traveled from Earth. As my wife mentioned, these chambers would be powered by the planet’s own geothermal heat. We knew it worked on lab animals, even on the colony’s dog, but we had no idea if it would work on people or for how long.”

  “You can’t imagine the screams,” Eva added. “It was—”

  “It was a chance for survival,” William said flatly, “and we took it.”

  “And it worked,” Eva continued, “until the day the Orangemen—as you call them—woke us from our sleep and brought us here. Wherever this is.” Her gaze traveled across the men and women on the dais. “Were they the ones who destroyed the Earth?”

  Andrew looked back at her for a long minute, chin resting on his outstretched thumb. “Not the same ones. But fallen ones—a faction of Orangemen we call the Hostiles—did wipe out most of mankind.”

  Eva’s eyes held no recognition. “‘Fallen ones’?”

  “Fallen angels,” Petra answered. “Demons.”

  “Fallen angels?” William rubbed his beard. “Well, anyway, we’re still not sure how long we slept. We’re hoping you might be able to help us with that too.”

  “The children think it’s only been a few weeks,” Eva explained. “We have let them think that. They were terrified when the Orangemen took us from the cryo-chamber. And then there was that—whatever it was that brought us here.”

  “I know it’s difficult,” Andrew said. “But would you tell us about it? Where were you just before you got here?”

  Andrew could sense as he posed this question that every member of the Council awaited the answer with tensed interest.

  William looked at his wife and nodded. “A white place—comfortable enough but completely barren. It’s hard to remember for some reason. I think we were well treated by the few, er, Orangemen we saw—but everything was so sterile, so cold. Food without flavor. Water—water as if it was purified to perfection.”