FAMILY

John has seen me through these years safely, though I thought he had slighted me and insulted me all along. This once I have the chance to make amends, for I have killed us both and I am sorry.

The desert opened before the caravan like a parting sea. Ten pack mules in various stages of radiation poisoning trailed behind the six figures walking at a rapid pace. They were in a loose formation as they walked the desert ground, and something about them spoke of soldiery. Four of them wore uniforms of a dark khaki, and were carrying rifles. One spit on the ground and kicked dirt over it. The other two figures were more motley: a tall, robed figure and a weathered-looking man in an orange vest.

The dust of the road covered them all in a fine tan smudge, making them look hazy and washed-out. I could clearly see their postures from atop the rise I had climbed the night before. They were tired, had walked a long way, and probably fought some hard battles. That much was plain.

How to ambush an alert party of soldiers? I cannot say exactly how. I am not a man of fighting, not a man of action except vicariously. John was a soldier, but I am a scholar. The ways of books and thought and speech have gotten me as far as I am today, but by their prominence in my experience, other things have been forced out. My foot slipped as I stretched to see their progress along the drywash that served as a path. A cascade of rocks and powdery dirt fell down the slope, and I fell.

An enormous yucca dolorosa was all that saved me from death by descent. My body went sliding down the rocky slope, and by some fortune I grasped at the sole patch of green that I passed in my plummet. My hand grasped one of the thick stalks, above its cluster of white petals that shined wax-like in the morning sun. I could see in them the bodies of many small moths, dead and dry. Tegeticula, once a pollinator of the yucca before the war, when the plant's milky sap had been only mildly poisonous. The mutation of the yucca was my savior and my doom at the same time; it made for an enormous bush, five or six times larger than any yucca had been even thirty years ago. The stalk held my weight easily. Unfortunately, the plant was now almost carnivorous. Its juices were narcotic and acidic now, and volatile. The pressure of my hand was releasing it; my eyes stung, and I felt a deadly numbness in my fingers and arm. Still I held on with all my might.

It was not enough. Although the stalk held, the dissolving skin on my hand made it slippery, and I began to slide down the stalk. The waxy flowers popped off, sprinkling my face and falling to the ground below. The farther down the stalk I slid, the fewer the flowers between me and oblivion. The fumes were making my mind swim, and it seemed that the smoke rising from my hand swirled into familiar shapes. I fell.

It was so quick, and instead of splattering on the ground, as I had feared, I landed with a thump in the arms of the man in the orange vest. He had caught me without difficulty from a height of perhaps thirty or forty feet. He must have had prodigious strength.

"You ought to be careful, old timer. A fall like that could put you in a walker." He smiled, but without humor. I was gibbering, my hand smoking and my mind fading into gray. I at last managed to stammer the word my life depended on.

"Atropine…"

The man put me down, and turned his head to bellow. "DR. SCOTT, GET OVER HERE!"

I lay on my back, seeming to sink into the ground. The man who had caught me was bent over. Another face appeared next to his, but it was halfway concealed by the deep shadows on the inside. I could glimpse only a pale, gaunt face with thin lips pulled tight over a protrusive mouth. The hooded man spoke.

"What did he say?"

"He said atropine. I don't suppose you have any?"

The hood and its half face disappeared for a moment, and returned bearing a syringe, which promptly descended in a swift arc to pierce the center of my chest. It did not hurt very much owing to the narcotic effects of the yucca, but when the man calmly depressed the plunger, I was flooded with intense fire, sending me retreating into the darkness of my mind, where pain is only a remote echo and the light of day never shines.

I woke with the most terrible taste in my mouth. It was night. There was a dull ache throughout my body. I could tell somehow that I was on the ground, without anything beneath me but dirt and rocks. It was cold, even with what felt to be a horse blanket covering me.

"I see you're awake." The voice was dry, and hollow, in a higher register than seemed right. It belonged to the robed man, still wearing the hood that obscured his face. The shadow within was impenetrable, even with the flickering firelight that I now noticed. It was very eerie, even to me, who had always loved the shifting shadows of a darkened cemetery or an empty library. I shivered, and the man reached for me, moving very slowly and deliberately. He checked my vital signs with a speed that amazing for how slowly he seemed to move. "You're doing much better, though I would still take it easy for a while. The atropine is hard on your system. Might I ask how you knew to ask for atropine?"

I exhaled slowly. "DFP." He nodded. Slowly. "DFP, an antichlorinesterase nerve agent, like sarin, was found in the juice of the yucca, which also began to develop caustic properties and others too strange to understand with our inferior and declining technology. I think it would have been a goldmine of medicine and science in another age. Too bad. Oh… and of course you know that atropine detoxifies DFP. That's the long and the short of it, I'm afraid."

"What is your name, sir?"

"David. You can call me David."

The hood nodded, revealing no more of the face beneath it. "I am Dr. Mike Scott. We will move on the next night, and rest for today." He turned and disappeared from my field of vision. Something was so somber about Dr. Scott that you almost felt sad for him that he had skipped out on the joy of things.

Dawn came and with it uneasy wakefulness. You soon learn to catch slumber whenever you can, especially during the punishing heat of the day. I found the red light of the dawn comforting in my fatigue and in the wake of the poison injected to cure another poison. Those I was with were bedding down save one soldier who had the first watch. Dr. Scott was seated near me on a rubber mat, and was draped in a number of voluminous cloths. It seemed he was a member of some religious order, and chose prayer over sleep.

Eventually I found the solace of sleep. I had bad dreams to put it simply, nightmares of the long hard life I have led since my brother John returned from the war. The details of that day are forever in my mind, and will be until I no longer inhabit the Wasteland.

The technology boom hit a large peak in the middle of the century, and I was born. New developments were made publicly known as a response to growing tensions in the world, to bolster the confidence of Americans and their allies and make the fragmenting states eastward- with China just beyond- shake in its boots. The technology's specifics were kept secret; most people never saw the power matrices that lit the cities, or the neutrinotrons that eliminated toxic waste, when it wasn't just being dumped out the back of a truck somewhere. Of course, certain applications of the new technology, the dregs as it were, were trickled into the public world under tight supervision. The government told the people that these scientific wonders were products of wartime diligence, when the truth was that the technology was of alien manufacture. To this day, I am still not sure of the exact circumstances, but to the discerning scholar it is plain as to the major events of the day.

The technology, as all precious things, was very rare, and it was theorized by some that its coming advanced our civilization but slightly in the short term, and made a harsh dichotomy for our future. Either we would know such advancement as was undreamed, or be sent spiraling into an eternal dark age of human extinction. This was the speculative time into which I was born.

My parents, disciples of the fine arts, told me in adolescence that I was conceived backstage at a production of "Kiss Me Kate." In contrast, they said that John was conceived during a news program about a certain former baseball player's war against the libertine Batista technocrats of Cuba. Cole Porter had gone on to write and produce many more popular musicals, but the charismatic young revolutionary was killed by a Marine invasion force that seized Havana. The US didn't want the Batista's excellent technology to fall into Communist hands. Perhaps these things set the tone for our lives.

I was a sickly child, prone to fevers and being bedridden for weeks at a time. I turned my attention to my father's extensive library, and exhausted it by the time I was eight. Following this was a dreary period of schooling and teaching, writing, reading, and researching. Indeed, the knowledge that was my bread and butter for most of my life is only an idle pastime now. I'm sure that if I put my mind to it I could have remedied some of mankind's problems that developed in the time after the war. However, I find that I simply do not have the strength to put things right unless it has been forced upon me.

A word about John; he was a golden boy in his youth, tall and strong and gregarious, a joy to my parents and everyone around him. My younger brother was a source of jealousy and embarrassment to me. I came to hate the strong Apollonian mind and figure that dominated our household. He of course heaped nothing but scorn upon me, disguised in false brotherly love and concern. I do not suppose that I will ever escape his damned shadow, perhaps even not in death.

Where I became a professor and scholar, John decided to become a soldier from an early age, and with his background, apt mind, and sheer charisma he was bound to an officer of great attainment. Of course, John craved action, as he always had, and became a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Special Military Police. He was a great leader of his men and an undercover agent extraordinaire. His work infiltrating Nazi and neo-fascist groups was a source of great pride for him and our parents. It left a foul taste in my mouth, though, to be so closely tied to a golden hero.

Before I knew it the seventies had arrived and I was already on sabbatical in my chosen haunt of northern Montana. I received word that my expertise in certain subjects was required at a think tank of the US Government. Not desiring the ire of the government, I accompanied stern soldiers, SMPs like John. I was flown to a base somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains and thrown together with a number of other crackpot scientists and military eggheads. They weren't alone. They were being guarded by a contingent of the Air Force, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Covenant, my brother.

I was pushing 40, a stooped man of learning in well-worn clothes. I was thin, and the hair that had turned completely white at the age of 29 was now receding over my skull and coming out of my ears. John was tall and broad, impressive in his uniform. His hair was short cropped and a distinguished dark gray. I could almost smell his familiar charisma, how everyone fawned and cringed, bringing back memories of taunts and nausea and loneliness.

He had very little to say to me, perhaps ashamed of the man I was. It didn't matter after a while though. I became privy to unimaginable secrets at that meeting. I learned of the Roswell Crash and the technology that was retrieved from it, and of the magnitude of the advancements that had been made since then. I also learned of the Citadel Starstation, the orbital weapons platform, and the discoveries it had made. The proposed civilian Mars expedition had been shelved in favor of this high-profile military project, and that was a lucky break for earth. It seemed that Mars was the forward base for another alien race, this one vicious and warlike. The Serpioids, as they were called, were conquerors unlike the Gray aliens that were content to confuse radar and perform the occasional anal probe.

The meeting had been called to formulate some opinions on how to deal with these Serpioids. I was an advocate for diplomacy. I simply felt that we were not ready for an all-out war with another race. I felt that we could not win. The majority of experts assembled there were defense contractors, so the military thinking prevailed. An assessment of immediate attack was made. I went home.

In Montana I went to my cabin in the woods and brooded. I thought that the aggression typical of our species would only bring us ruin now, but I could not know that I would be wrong.

I was alerted to the first stage of the end of the world just like the rest of us- I saw it on the television. A rash of dictators and despots in the third world, and tensions between the US and Chinese were the big news. Everyone seemed ready to go to war with each other. I wondered if anyone knew of the danger from the Serpioid menace, or if anyone cared. Everything seemed to escalate, tempers flaring. I was removed from contact with the world except by the television, which I soon abandoned altogether- there had been no mention of any military action in space, only the rapidly escalating war with Red China. I threw that idiot box out the window and began to take long walks in the woods with my copy of The Aeneid.

It was on one of those walks that I received the shock of my life. Stalking my way down an accustomed trail, my nose in the book, I was greeted by the rude sight of on the path in front of me. More specifically, they were boots, shinier than any I'd ever seen.

My gaze went up and I saw my brother. He was in his full dress uniform, and he was carrying an automatic rifle over his shoulder. This was perhaps the first time I have ever seen John Covenant worried. The marks of concern had branded themselves in the lines of his face. This was a different man from the one I had always hated. I still gave him a chilly reception.

"Come to bury me literally this time, John?"

He looked surprised.

"Jesus, David, haven't you heard?"

"Hmph. Heard what, the same old Cool War stuff? I thought you military men would have gotten us killed by the Serpioids with your machismo already." I kept walking, and he was forced to keep pace with me. It galled me that he had no trouble at all.

"David, we never attacked! We tried diplomacy first, like you wanted."

I stopped. Then I turned, and looked into his face. Though he had signs of worry, and he had been tempered with the sort of wisdom that military leaders get, there was still something there of the golden boy. "I convinced them that you knew what you were talking about. You always have been right. But… but it didn't work, David."

"What do you mean?" I had advanced up into his face. I had never done that before, and I don't know why I did that now.

"An initial contact was made with the Serpioid ships in orbit. They wouldn't respond to any communication, and mobilized immediately into Earth orbit. First they destroyed all orbiting satellites, and then destroyed the Citadel Starstation. The nuclear exchange began forty-five minutes ago."

I was speechless, but not for long.

"How did you get here then?"

"I left early, David, to come make sure you were okay." Bastard. "We could have taken them by surprise… their moon base is very small, and they didn't even pay attention to us. But once they knew we knew, they acted and…" He pounded his fist into his leg. It would felled a man had he been boxing. As it was, I just grimaced, and kept grimacing.

"To make sure I was okay… you bastard! So it's all my fault that the world is ending? Is that what you want me to believe? I've had my fill of your fewmets, John, and I won't swallow this much." I pointed to his M19. "You're just looking for an excuse to use that aren't you? You've always wanted to get rid of your embarrassment of an elder brother. Goodbye, John. Rot in HELL!"

On this last word I flung my book in his face. As I turned to run, I saw that it bore the most pained expression I have ever seen, and I doubted for a moment all that I had ever believed about him. But just for a moment. I was running up the trail towards my house, and then I saw them.

There were five men in my path, soldier-types in camo with M19s. Oh no, I thought. John brought the cavalry to get me. I had stopped in indecision when I heard his boots thumping the path behind me, and then his gun began to spit. I knew that he was shooting me, and in the roar of bullets fell to the ground. My mind cleared, and I noticed the men before me had fallen, all filled with holes. John had shot them.

I felt his hand grab my shoulder.

"Are you alright, David?" The concerned look on his face was concern for me. Genuine concern for me. "Those survivalists have a camp up the way. I figured they'd be here for your supplies, so I…"

I was running. John was an athlete, and I am a stooped old scholar, but shame gave me wings. I raced up the path and was gone.

Later, in the woods, I finally came to a point where I could not hear him calling for me anymore. All thoughts had disappeared, and I was experiencing a moment of tranquility that will haunt me forever. I began to walk, and at nightfall came upon the camp.

Stupidly, I had stumbled right into the camp without noticing. Had there been a sentry, he would have shot me. As it was, it seemed that the five John had shot were the only ones left. Their campfire had burnt out hours ago, but there was still food on the picnic table, and the door to the shelter, which was built into a rocky cliff, was still open.

The survivalist camp became my home for a year. It had everything I needed to sustain myself, and more besides. I was a hermit for that year, contemplating nothing and savoring the loneliness.

At last I decided to return to my home. I was sure John had moved in after failing to find me, and I was something of a woodsman myself so the house was amply provisioned. On my mad flight I noticed his truck on the road, stocked with all manner of equipment. John would be fine, like he always was.

I didn't know what to say to him after a year, but as I approached my house I knew he wasn't there. There was no truck, and no smoke in the chimney. When I entered it was a ghost house, clean and neat, but dusty. He was long gone, but had left a cryptic note that said VEGAS, RANGERS. So that was where I began to travel, taking with me very little. It's been years since.

"An interesting story."

The high voice belonged to the Doctor. I hadn't realized I was awake.

"Did I…" Shame brought a blush to my face, hopefully unseen in the dark.

"Indeed. From Cole Porter to the note in your house." I groaned.

My eyes had adjusted to the flickering firelight, and I saw that Dr. Scott and the man in the orange vest were sitting around the fire where my blankets were, along with two of the Rangers.

"You heard everything. You know that I caused the war, that…" I felt surges of fever return, my head swam. Doctor Scott moved to me and pushed me back down in the blankets.

"Take it easy. I gave you antibiotics and a vitamin shot. You're a little unsettled." I felt a prick at my arm, and Scott made a glistening hypodermic disappear. The fog of sedatives moved over my brain, and I relaxed into the blankets.

"Sedatives. He'll be out until tomorrow night. We'll move then."

"You believe all that, Sergeant" asked one of the rangers.

The other Ranger, an older man, replied with a whistle. "I tell you what, Corporal Townshend, Colonel John Covenant is one of the best Rangers in all of New Nevada. I happen to know him, and I also happen to know that he claims to have no brother." He spat into the fire, and it sizzled.

Then the man in the orange vest spoke, his face unreadable. It was the last thing said before a long period of silence around the fire that lulled me into a deep medicated sleep.

"Lighten up, gunny. Family problems are a bitch."