Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 29
They camped against a massive snowdrift hulked up behind a hill, circling the dogs for protection against the wind. Khulan volunteered to clean the dogs’ taloned feet of snow and ice. Sarnai clunked around in her leg braces, keeping her balance with a ski pole as she kicked out a place to set up the heat source. She and Khulan hunched over the heat-emitting blue orb and warmed their tea pouches. She sucked hers down without ceremony through a straw that clipped through her respirator.
Khulan reached into his environmental suit and handed her a bottle of whisky.
“Those best prepared survive out here,” he said, and chuckled.
A cawing sound came from the west, and the dogs’ ears perked up.
“Sounds like stinging lilies,” Sarnai said.
“Too close to the core settlements,” Khulan said, but he peered to the west.
“How long do you give us?” Sarnai said. “Two hundred kilome- ters?”
“A thousand, at least,” he said and held out his hand to get the whisky back. “If you won’t drink that, I will.”
She snorted and handed it over. “I prefer red wine,” she said. In truth, she didn’t want to drink any alcohol on this trip because the more she drank, the more she’d have to cath out through the stoma in her abdomen. But then, if she was going to die anyway, who cared if she had to cath out every three or four hours instead of every six? She very nearly snatched the whisky back.
The cawing sound crackled across the sky again. It was already dusk; days were about six hours long on Narantu during the long winter season. In the summer, the small red eye of the second sun would appear and give them a little more light for an additional six hours while they danced through one another’s orbits, but not much more heat. Already Sarnai could see the brightest stars peer- ing down at them through the darkening sky.
After they ate, Khulan went off to urinate, and Sarnai changed her colonoscopy bag, then they were lining up the dogs again and mushing out across the tundra. Sarnai looked back, again, wonder- ing if she would see the stinging lilies, but she saw only the low, round mounds of the last of the core settlements fading fast behind them, their glowing house markers sprinkled across the tundra like tough little diamonds.
They traveled like that for two days until they came to the end of the core settlements and reached the truly wild tundra. Sarnai al- ready longed for a shower and cursed her greasy hair. Living inside of a suit for as long as she intended to was going to get itchy and uncomfortable. What a fool she’d been to come out here. She could have survived tumbledown if it hit the core settlements. What did she care about the people on the edges? They had been dumb like her parents, to live out there all alone. But did their children de- serve to die for it? That’s what kept her up at night. That’s what she dreamed about under the brilliant stars. She dreamed of her dead parents, and her brother screaming that he had seen a man with a dog’s face while he tried to cut off his own hand.
The third day, they packed up the sled and Sarnai must have nodded off, because when the sled jerked to a halt, it woke her. The dogs were squawking and barking. Sarnai leaned over and saw the whole front end of the sled tangled in creeping black tendrils. As she hauled herself up out of the sled she saw Khulan forty paces away on the other side, taking great swings at the creepers with a machete.
Sarnai grabbed a flame pistol from the gear box in the back and sprayed at the black creepers. The creepers hissed at her, untangling their little hooked claws and swarming toward her. She jerked the pistol again, spraying more fire. This time the tendrils retreated.
Khulan yelled. Sarnai turned just in time to see him fall down, clutching at his arm.
Sarnai went around the sled, picking her way over to him as quickly as she could. Khulan lay in the snow. He convulsed. Sarnai tried to bend over. She didn’t want to sit because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to get back up. Her braces were already getting clotted with ice here outside the sled.
“Khulan!” she said. “Khulan!” He was motionless.
She gave in and shifted her weight, signaling to her braces that she wanted to kneel. They complied, plopping her onto the snowy ground beside Khulan. Sarnai ripped off her glove and checked for a pulse. Nothing. She removed his respirator and put her ear to his mouth. No breath. Not a sound. She knew this. She had seen this before, in older people in the settlement. Their hearts gave out, especially in the winter season when they picked up a shovel or a carcass as if they were fifteen again.
“Khulan!” she yelled again. Sarnai knew basic first aid, but it had been years since she had cause to use it. She checked to make sure his airway was clear and kept her respirator clear so she could breathe into his mouth. He was warm but so, so still, and with both their suits unsealed, that heat would not last long. Sarnai pumped his chest, counting off out loud as the dogs yowled behind her. Her fingers went numb, and she had to put her glove back on. Soon she was light-headed, winded. It was full dark now, and as she worked she took little breaks to shoot her fire pistol at the tangled creepers and seal herself and Khulan back into their suits. The temperature was dropping now, tumbling from forty to fifty below, and she knew there were bits of frozen mercury that had flitted into her suit. They couldn’t go on like this much longer.
How long she kept breathing and pumping, she didn’t know. But Khulan’s body was cooling, and she was breathless. Finally, Sarnai let herself fall beside him. Tears stung her eyes but froze before they could fall. She put on her respirator and resealed her suit. She listened to the rustling of the creepers. Her lips tasted of whisky; the last tipple Khulan had taken. Sarnai gritted her teeth. She took up the fire pistol again and used the ski pole to help her- self up. She waded through the snow, spraying long lines of fire at the creepers until they retreated back into their burrows.
Sarnai pulled out a blanket from the gear box and rolled Khulan over it, then wrapped him up and secured him using chemical tape. She grabbed his body and pulled and pulled until sweat rolled down her face and her arms ached, but she managed to get him to the sled. “I have to go back,” she said to Khulan’s body. “We are both going to die for nothing. The plague will come here and rip through all of them. And what do I care? I’ll live! I’m immune!” She yelled and swore until her voice was hoarse, then collapsed against the side of the sled.
She heaved in a breath. One breath, another, as she had done with Khulan. She let out a long, deep sob and pressed her gloved hands to her face. She could turn around. She was only three days out. She could go back. Sarnai stared long at Khulan’s body. If she went back, then Khulan had died out here for nothing. Khulan, who had been born on the ships and first set down his feet here when he was five years old, the last link they had to some other time, some other place. He believed in their survival here.
Did she? Sarnai struggled to her feet again. She rolled Khulan off to the side of the sled and tucked him into a snowbank. He wasn’t going to go anywhere, though a predator might take him— that was a possibility. She took a shovel out of the gear box and covered him as best she could, then planted a long red pole into the snow beside him, one of the emergency markers they kept. If any patrols ran out here, and they were few, they might find him. She left a recorded note on his pop-up display explaining who he was and where she was and where she was headed, then clunked her way into the sled.
Sarnai whistled to the dogs, and off they went, clucking and snarling toward the north, ever north.
“We are the chosen people,” Sarnai’s mother had told her while they huddled in the warmth of the blue globe that was the center of their home. “No other people have a world like ours, one so rich in resources. When the air is cleared we will trade with others, and we will sleep on piles of soft furs, and we will never be cold.”
But her fathers had told her a different story. They were both lean men, but what she remembered most was the rumble of their voices and the roughness of their hands. “We will survive here be- cause we care for each other,” her older father had said, the one with the thick white beard. She had called him Baba, and the other, with the soft black beard, Papa. “We are all here for each other.”
Her Baba patted her head and squeezed her arm, and it was now, in this memory, this dream, that Sarnai realized why she had not minded Khulan patting her arm. “No matter how terrible,” her Baba said, and he smelled of lavender soap and sunshine in that moment, “we have one another. This world is harsh, but we have each other. You understand?”
She didn’t, then.
Sarnai woke with a start. She felt cold and stiff. She lay in the bed of the sled, tucked neatly in its comforting embrace. A little sunlight peeked through the seams of the door to the tube, which she had closed the night before. She opened it, releasing six inches of snow into her lap. The world outside was brilliant white, and she closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her face, reflexively. Her head throbbed. She sucked in a deep breath and started to work her arms and shift her braces. She chanced another look out across the creamy white expanse, and there, over the heaped forms of the dogs curled up together, she saw a dark shape moving at the base of a sea of mountains in the distance.
She crawled out of the sled and fed the dogs the protein pellets from the gear box, all the while keeping her eyes on the figure. It wasn’t human, and it was lumbering out in the far distance, but still looked huge. That meant it was likely one of the massive preda- tors that stalked the settlements between the core and the rim.
Sarnai secured the fire pistol on her right leg brace and slipped back into the sled. She called to the dogs and off they went. In some ways, this journey was easier with one. There was no one to haggle with. No one to say when to stop or go. She and the dogs kept the pace. But it also meant that every hundred kilometers, she was the only one who could stop and feed the dogs and clean their feet—twelve dogs, forty-eight feet—all by herself. She was exhausted at the end of every day. The days began to blur and shift together. The migraines hit her hard on the sunny days, and she could barely raise her head to call to the dogs during those hours. She was ex- hausted, and she stank, and after six days on her own, she became convinced that she was lost.
Worse, she was lost and something was following her.
Sarnai fed the dogs and sighted her route using her spotty GPS. There were still a few satellites aloft that had been released by the first settlers, but there was often weather-related interference. She snarled up at the sky and tucked the GPS back into the gear box. How terrible must that other world have been, for her people to travel across the yawning maw of space to land here? Sarnai set- tled back into the sled and yelled at the dogs to embark. The sled lurched forward, then jerked to a halt. She yelled again, but the dogs were yipping and cawing.
She struggled up in her seat and saw what they had caught a whiff of—the big, hulking thing that she had seen days before, on the horizon. It was a five-ton bear, and the long line of spikes along its spine were rippling. It snarled at the dogs from its perch twenty feet up on a low rise.
Sarnai yelled, “Go on! Get!” like it was some domestic animal. Instead, it trundled forward, toward the dogs. She had a terrible memory of Erdene arriving in the hub of settlements with just half her dogs and one arm missing, and it invigorated her. Sarnai called for the dogs to race forward, and they did, despite the bear. Sarnai raised her fire pistol at the bear as it plowed toward them, and pulled the trigger.
The bear’s coat caught fire. It was so close she could smell the scent of burning hair and the stink of rotten meat that clung to its matted fur. The bear roared and broke off.
Sarnai called to the dogs, spurring them onward, ever onward, and they obeyed, kicking snow and dust behind them at the fastest pace she had seen them make on the wintry white terrain that made up the world between the core settlements and people on the edge, people like her.
How many kilometers had she crossed, now, since Khulan’s death? Five hundred? No, much more. A thousand, easily. Sarnai hooted up at the sky as the lazy yellow sun crested the horizon. Whisky in a glass. A yellow-brown smear. She went to sleep that night exhausted and euphoric. She emptied out her waste and screamed at the sky because there were only her and the dogs to hear.
She had made it a thousand kilometers, easily. More than Khu- lan. More than many would have, she knew. And when the stink of the bear wafted in, she snorted and spat in its direction and waved her gun in the air, firing off plumes of flames.
“You can’t hurt me!” she yelled. “You can’t have me!” It came for her at dawn.
Sarnai was sleeping fitfully. She dreamed of running. Running and running from something terrible. When she would look back, in her dream, it was only her Baba and Papa, but in that moment they were terrible beasts, frightening. She had never felt so terrified. She woke violently to the stink of rotten meat. The bear’s face was just inches from hers, and it bawled when she opened her eyes, and she screamed and gripped the pistol and let off a snarl of flame into its face. The flames singed its fur and feathers, sending a heady stink into the air.
The dogs were barking and squawking, and she didn’t know how she had not heard them sooner, but the bear had crept upon her from the north, and the wind was coming from the south. The dogs had not noticed it. In that moment, she wanted to shoot them too, until the bear roared and snapped up one of the dogs into its great jaws. The bear was a massive thing, matted and shaggy, with a gory hooked beak and feet as big as Sarnai’s head.
The dogs let up a great howl and cry. Sarnai shot her pistol again, singeing the bloody dog’s hide instead of the bear’s. The bear swiped a paw at her and caught her on the arm, slicing clean through her environmental suit and carving into her skin. Sarnai shot again, and again until the bear retreated.
She screamed at it and called the dogs, but they were not lined up. She had to scrabble out of the sled and get their tack in order. Once she was back in the sled, she watched the bear standing on the next rise as it snacked on its doggy treat, its great beaked face smeared with blood and offal.
“Fuck you!” Sarnai screamed, and then, to the dogs, “Go, get!” and then the sled was moving again, following the sled track on and on again, farther and farther from the bloody snow and the promise of death.
The halfway point between the core settlements and Batbayer came upon Sarnai suddenly. She had completely lost track of time, and she wasn’t sure what she was seeing, even with the aid of the glitchy GPS.
The halfway house was little more than a humped shack in the snow, some old thing printed back when the first ships landed, and not upgraded since.
Sarnai was barely conscious when they arrived. She was aware of an old woman standing over her, tapping at her leg braces.
“When was the last time you emptied your bowels, girl?” the old woman said, and she put her gnarly hand to Sarnai’s forehead and sighed. “You’ve got an infection, girl. Come now. Let’s put your dogs to rest and get you tended.”
Sarnai bumbled out of the sled and into the hut, only half-aware of where she was and what was happening. The woman was much stronger than she looked; she helped haul Sarnai inside, and it must have been the old woman who tended the dogs, because when Sar- nai next became aware of her surroundings, she was in a warm bed, and the old woman was prodding at her belly. “You’ve got a urinary infection,” the woman said. She had a face like a rotten apple, all puffy and pockmarked. Sarnai recognized a ruddiness to her com- plexion that indicated mercury poisoning.
“Not a big deal,” Sarnai slurred, and she wondered if the woman had given her something for the pain, not realizing Sarnai couldn’t feel anything.
“You could die from it,” the old woman said. “It’s serious enough. Hate to say this to a woman like you, all buff and beat up, but simple things kill.”
“A bear got one of the dogs,” Sarnai said.
“I thought so,” the old woman said. “I can smell the fear on the dogs. That bear is tracking you. You won’t shake it. You’ll have to kill it.”
“I have to make it to Batbayer. They are dying. Tumbledown.” The woman tapped her leg braces. “You had it, the plague. Tum-
bledown.”
“A long time ago.”
“You know why they called it tumbledown?”
“For the village,” Sarnai said. “The first village it killed. Called Tumbledown.”
“No,” the old woman said, and as she took a cup into her hands, Sarnai saw a rash that spread up both her arms, turning her skin flaky. “It was a dark joke, from those who came to rescue them. They said they all fell down. Tumbled down.”
“That’s a bad joke.”
“We are not all good people,” the old woman said, proffering a cup. “But girls like you, they want to save everyone. They don’t want to just fall down, eh? They want to get up.”
“I can’t make it the rest of the way.”
“Of course you can. Batbayer is only sixteen hundred or so kilo- meters from here. Your dog team is nearly intact. It’s possible. The only thing that could get in your way is you.”
“And the bear,” Sarnai said. “You said, the bear.”
“The bear is just a bear,” the old woman said. “You’re a woman.” “That’s worse.”
“Exactly,” the old woman said.
Sarnai blanked out then, from exhaustion or infection, she didn’t know. When she came to, she was able to sit up. The old woman had taken off her leg braces, and when she saw that Sarnai was up, she brought her a bowl of soup.
“You’ll need to cross the mercury sea, seven days out from here,” the old woman said, raising a spoonful of broth to Sarnai’s lips. Sar- nai could feed herself, but she accepted the help because the world still felt so hazy. “That will be the worst of it, I think. That and the lonesomeness of it all. It is the lonesomeness that kills quickly. You have to beat your own head. That’s what will kill the bear and the despair.”
