Written in Fire

CHAPTER 32

“How many of you have fired a gun before?”

The soldier had a man’s height and muscle but a boy’s face, zits like bright stars burning through a cloud-wisp of beard. His uniform was brown, marked with a rising blue sun. Natalie wondered how old he was. Someone had told her that while the average age in the Holdfast was twenty-six, the median was closer to sixteen. He beat that, but not by a lot.

“None of you?” The soldier boy’s eyes darted over the dozen civilians in front of him. They looked at one another, shrugged.

“I have,” Natalie said. “With my husband. Ex.”

“A rifle?”

“Pistols. And a shotgun.” She remembered the day, more than a decade ago, before the kids were born. Camping near the Grand Tetons, vibrant green and birdsong, Cooper showing her how to brace the gun, how to press the trigger—not pull, press—and the roar and kick of the thing, the rough joy when she’d blown a clump of hurled dirt out of the air, the soil erupting into nothing. Afterward they’d made love as the pine trees whispered, and she’d thought life perfect in every detail.

“Close enough.” He bent to a long canvas bag at his feet, came out with a rifle that looked like a movie prop, dull metal and rounded plastic curves. “This is an HSD-11. Designed and built here. Open-bolt, selective fire, thirty rounds. Magazine release is here, safety here. It’s fully automatic if you hold down the trigger, but ammo is a problem, so don’t. Single shots and short bursts.”

He held it out, and she took it, shouldered it, keeping the barrel down.

“Good,” he said, sounding surprised. “Good. There are seven more, and ammunition. Runners will bring extra ammo later. You teach them.”

“What?”

“Teach the others. Be careful when you do, the round can be lethal to a mile.”

“You’re not staying?”

“No, ma’am.” He spun on his heel and headed for the truck.

For a moment Natalie just stared. Then, careful to keep the rifle pointed down, she hurried after him and grabbed his arm. “Wait.”

“I have a lot of rifles to hand out, and not a lot of time—”

“Listen,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the others. A pale man in a suit, his thin hair combed with great precision. A pudgy girl in a shapeless dress holding a squirming dog. A statuesque woman with strong cheekbones, her dreadlocks bound up in a brilliant headscarf. Turning back, Natalie said, “We’re all a little scared.”

“So?”

“So, there’s an army headed here, a militia of survivalists and soldiers, none of whom need to be taught how to use a rifle. What are we supposed to do?”

“Same as the rest of us.” He looked at her, and in that moment she saw that he was frightened too. A boy, just a boy, and like all boys he had played at war, but he had never faced one. “Fight for your lives.”

Then he was swinging up into the open back of the truck and thumping on the side. It pulled away in a huff of warm exhaust.

For a moment, she imagined running after it. Then she turned and saw the others looking at her.

Natalie said, “Right.”

It had seemed so clear in the kitchen, talking to Nick. Telling him that she would join the battle. She’d imagined herself with a line of soldiers, not boys like the one who brought the rifles, but warriors. Tested, calm, ripped. Like Nick’s buddies from the army days. She’d pictured fighting beside them, though really, that had meant behind them.

It wasn’t until the bunker that she realized this war would look very different.

The underground complex was a series of broad gymnasiums with rows of bunk beds, each room connected to the others, each accessible by multiple staircases. Like the air raid shelters she’d seen in old movies, only brighter and cleaner and filled mostly with kids. The walls were bare and the sound echoed, mothers and fathers cajoling and promising and putting on a brave face for children crying and clutching at them.

She’d been so proud of Todd and Kate for not going to pieces. In truth, they’d been stronger than she was. Natalie had started to waver the moment they arrived, and when she saw her son standing with a strained look of duty, hand on his little sister’s shoulder, she’d almost broken. Surely others would fight. They were too young to leave. She would stay, would climb into one of the bunk beds and clutch her kids to her and keep them safe through sheer maternal will.

“No, Mommy,” Kate had said. “You have to go.”

Todd had nodded, straightened. “We’ll be all right.”

They were her children, her babies. She had borne them and nursed them and cut their grapes in half and read them whole libraries of books and applied crates’ worth of Band-Aids. She had a mother’s nearly psychic connection with them, would sometimes wake in the night moments before they called out, or hear their thoughts echoing in her own brain. Right now, her ten-year-old son was telling himself that he had to be a man, had to protect his little sister, and the horror of that thought had nuances that went on for days.

There is no choice here. There was only one way to defend her kids, and while it would indeed involve will, that began by finding the will to leave.

So she’d hugged and kissed them, promised everything would be okay, and made herself walk out the door and wait her turn to talk to one of the harried people giving assignments. A young man staring at a d-pad had told her which van to board, and she’d joined a pudgy girl with a squirming dog in her arms and a statuesque beauty whose hair was bound in brilliant cloth.

None of them had spoken on the drive over. Most had cried at some point. Natalie hadn’t. She was remembering something Nick told her years ago, when she’d asked if he was ever frightened doing the things he did.

“Of course,” he’d said. “Only very stupid people aren’t. The trick is to make it work for you. Use it to make your thoughts clearer and your planning better, so that you get home again.”

And so she had tried to do that. To prepare herself for the fact that she might—would—have to point a gun at a human being and pull the trigger. She made herself picture it, over and over and over, all while staring out the window as the city of mirrors transformed itself into a battlefield.

She watched as a crew hitched a bulldozer to a bus and toppled it, the bus drifting and hanging and then crunching down, blocking the width of a street.

Felt the gut-rumble of chainsaws cutting down the gene-modified trees so every window had a clear line of sight.

Watched bartenders nail tables across doors. Teenagers haul floodlights. Cyclists distribute ammunition.

Smelled the smoke as outlying buildings were burned to deny the invaders cover.

Listened to:

Jackhammers.

Siren wails.

Gunfire.

And when her van started to slow, she took in the battlefield, the patch of earth she would be defending with her life. A complex of low-rise buildings, perhaps ten in all. The corporate headquarters of a firm called Magellan Designs. Atop the tallest building was a wireframe globe thirty feet across and glowing, a pulse of light circling it slowly. Magellan made expensive electronics; she remembered Nick drooling over one of their tri-ds, a sleek projector with sound that made her rib cage rattle. They hadn’t bought it, of course—it cost a month of his government salary—but now she wished they had. Wished they hadn’t been practical. They should have taken it home and watched movies all day long, then made love on the floor in front of it.

A long time ago, in a lost world.

The man with thinning hair turned out to be named Kurt, and he was the one who suggested they use the basement as a shooting range.

“Won’t the bullets ricochet?”

“We’ll stand here”—he gestured to one side—“and shoot at an oblique.”

“But—”

“Do you usually wear your hair back like that?”

“Huh?”

“Given gravity as a constant and variable values for flexibility and curl, I can generate a fourth-order nonlinear differential equation to describe the shape of your ponytail.”

“Right,” she said. “You’re gifted.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Standing here, you said?” She handed him the rifle. “No, not sideways. Face forward. One foot a little in front of the other. Brace the butt against your body, and press your cheek against the stock. Okay. Now—”

Five o’clock, and the sun was nearly touching the horizon. Cold whiskey light glinted on mirrored glass, battling with the pale glow of the corporate logo atop the neighboring building. The ring around it pulsed slowly, tracing, she assumed, Ferdinand Magellan’s course circumnavigating the earth. Every time his “ship” was in the Pacific, it turned her whole world violet.

Natalie could see a dozen other defenders up in other buildings. Like hers, their windows had been broken out, with desks and filing cabinets piled up to block incoming bullets. In one of the neighboring buildings, a handsome man in his fifties was doing the same thing she was, and for a moment their eyes met. He smiled and raised a closed fist. She returned the salute.

The complex was near the edge of the city, but the buildings beyond were all squat things, single story. A charging station. A restaurant. An empty parking lot beside the last stop of the light rail train. Cars had been towed and stacked in rough barricades of jagged metal and broken glass.

In the distance, out of range of her rifle, the enemy moved. Thousands of them. At this distance, she couldn’t make out any details, and that was somehow more menacing. Like it was a single formless creature out there, stretching across her entire field of view, a shapeless, ruthless beast waiting only for darkness to fall. Her belly spasmed and her hands shook.

Use the fear.

She tried to think what Nick would do if he were here. Plan his reaction when the attack started? Well, keep low. Aim carefully. Don’t waste ammunition. She practiced releasing the magazine from her rifle, grabbing a fresh one from the bag at her feet, and slapping it in. Squatting, she raised the rifle and sighted on the edge of a drugstore down the block, imagined a man stepping out from behind it. Kept her breathing easy, paused between exhales, visualized steadily pressing the trigger.

“Damn, girl, you look fierce.”

Natalie turned. “Hey, Jolene.”

“Brought you some food. Some firebombs. And this.” She held up a bucket.

“What’s that for?”

“Well, gonna be a long night. Not like you can head off to the ladies’.”

“Wonderful.” The sky was saddening, the shadows growing deep. “Hey, you should probably take that off,” she said, gesturing to the woman’s gold-and-scarlet headscarf.

“Huh? Why?”

“Too easy to see.”

Jolene laughed, a warm, throaty sound, then unwrapped the cloth. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“My husband. Ex. He’s . . . he was an agent with the DAR.”

“DAR? What you doing here, then?”

“Long story.” She set the rifle in the corner, took the sandwich Jolene had brought. It was the kind from a gas station, tired-looking and wrapped in plastic, and the purple light wasn’t flattering.

“He ever kill anyone? Your ex?”

“Yes.”

“Think you can?”

Natalie hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to imagine that all day. But imagining isn’t the same.”

“You know, I’ve shot thousands of people. Maybe tens of thousands.” She sat down heavily and smiled. “I play a lot of video games. Don’t think it will help. You got people here?”

“My kids. Nick. You?”

“My niece. Her momma left her with me when she was three, never came back. Kaylee’s nine and speaks eleven languages. Says she sees words as colors, so it doesn’t matter which language, she just uses the colors. Isn’t that something?”

“Yes,” Natalie said. “It really is.”

“And because of that, those men out there, they want to kill her.” Her voice was suddenly cold. “Oh, I know, it isn’t that simple. They lost people too, they’re scared, hurting. But you know what? It is that simple. Get me?”

Natalie took a bite of her sandwich. The bread was stale, the meat indeterminate, the lettuce like Kleenex. It was maybe the best thing she’d ever tasted. She thought of Todd, standing with his arm around his little sister; of Kate’s too-wise eyes.

It doesn’t matter that you’ll be aiming at human beings. It doesn’t matter that they have thoughts and feelings and parents and children.

And it doesn’t matter what happens to you. Not at all.

There are only two things that matter.

“Yeah,” she said. “I get you.”