The scent trails told me Pinkston hid within the mess hall. I directed Devon to search in that direction.
They caught Jeff in the act of sawing at his bonds with a steak knife.
Devon called someone to block off the secondary exit, to keep their fugitive in check.
Jeff dove below a table, but Devon did that American Indian sort of battle signing, silently sending men to various points of the tables to run interception.
Jeff somehow got his hands free enough to crawl around Devon's guards, and would have taken a hostage at knife point had someone not spilled a soft drink on the back of his head when he made a grab for the victim.
The pot bellied man with the red cheeks, alarmed at nearly being attacked, punched Jeff in the head, struck him across the face with his cafeteria tray.
Jeff retreated, and, upon finding the exits blocked, bolted for the kitchen.
Van Cleve got in his way, but Pinkston shoved his knife deep into the man's chest.
Devon called a medic and ran after the suspect. I and Pain came with him, out of curiosity, perhaps also in aid, if things got bad enough.
Only one woman manned the kitchen, a baker, judging by the oven mitts and the tray full of uncooked biscuits.
Upon seeing Pinkston, she grabbed a fire extinguisher, blasting him in the face.
Once she got past him, and out the door, Devon's men opened fire.
Jeff threw things, pots, cutlery, plates and bowls. Not exactly dramatic — it's not cost efficient to send breakable dishes in bulk through space. Dalgren did get scalded by a pot of stew, but that's the extent of it.
He retreated into Food Storage, ironically bearing straight for that ventilation duct that got me into all this mess.
Grabbing an automatic screwdriver a repairman or someone left behind, he undid the panel.
Devon caught up with Jeff as he was crawling in, ordering for him to come out.
Jeff refused.
Devon told his men to fire into the duct.
Jeff tried to crawl away, but he at last succumbed to multiple bullet wounds, curling up and dying like the pathetic gutter crawling rat that he was. In my heart, I had forgiven the man, but the Lord had wrought justice, regardless.
The incident with Jeff left a very untidy aftermath.
First came the debate about what to do with his body.
Burial? Cremation?
"A burial's too good for a man like that," somebody said. "How about we just feed him to Bert?"
I raised my claws and shook my head, probably making everyone think of a spoiled child saying no to the bowl of spinach being passed around at dinner.
They would have just thrown Jeff into the corridor for other Ss'sik'chtokiwij to eat, but we'd bombed an avenue clear all the way to the exit.
Someone else suggested we throw the body into the rain, but Devon said it would be like bait, and they'd never reach the satellite to send the distress message.
And then someone got the brilliant idea of driving the body all the way to the far end of the base, or out in the middle of nowhere, and dumping the body there.
Of course I'd been volunteered, as I'd also been assigned to assist the sending of the distress message and fixing the wiring.
Devon's people no longer pointed guns at me. Although they kept them close, they relaxed their guard somewhat. For that reason, I could move freely about their fortification, when I asked politely.
I found the children safe, and dressed in their normal clothing, overalls and long sleeved shirts.
They shunned human contact now. Armed with knives and a gun, they hid inside maintenance tunnels and air ducts, fleeing passerby, stealing from Food Storage, obviously not through the same duct Pinkston had died in.
Their new hiding place: A maintenance tunnel behind a small dwelling shared by Dalgren, Weideca, Shelly, and five other people, across the hall from Boger's place.
I met the children at this location when I told them about my new mission. "If it works, it may be your only ticket home."
"I've never been to earth," Rebecca said. "This is my home."
Timmy nodded, but looked sad about it. "Home's on the other side of the base,"
"Then you need to find a new one. Somewhere where you'll be safe. Away from my people."
Their expressions became unreadable as I said this. I couldn't tell if they agreed or not. Maybe even they didn't know.
"Will you be all right by yourselves?"
The children glanced at each other.
"We're coming along," Timmy blurted.
Rebecca gave me a nod.
"It could be dangerous. There's others like me all over the base. Other Ss'sik'chtokiwij. You would be safer with other humans. And Pain."
Incidentally, I had introduced them to my friend, who now rested on my shoulder. I thought she and the children got along well enough.
The two looked at me like I had asked them to sleep in a rattlesnake nest. I don't think Pain was the problem.
"We're coming with you," Timmy repeated.
Devon had instructed me to meet the technician near the entrance of the corridor I'd helped clear. When he noticed Pain curled around my shoulder plates, he asked me, "Is that thing...vegetarian?"
In English, Pain said yes, but the man still regarded her with suspicion.
Devon asked what the children were doing with me. Timmy quickly answered that they wanted to watch what I was doing.
"Well, don't go outside. It's not safe out there."
The boy answered, "It's not safe in here."
And then we reached the barricade.
Our radio `repairman': A black haired woman named Bambi Carrendish. Short in height, standard gray jumpsuit, a pair of narrow rhinestone studded eyeglasses perched on her elfin nose.
A cigarette hung from the curly haired woman's thin, narrow little mouth, which she promptly extinguished when Rebecca and Timmy approached.
When she discovered that the children wanted to come along on our little suicide mission, she balked, telling them to go back and stay with the colonists.
Timmy was adamant about it. "We're going with Ernie. Where he goes, I go!"
Rebecca gave a slight nod.
Bambi looked pained. "No. I can't let you go. I can't have children's deaths on my conscience." She tried to drag Timmy back to the mess hall.
Timmy screamed, and so did Rebecca, not out of pain, but to draw attention to her. Timmy wept. People stared at her.
"I am sorry," I said. "They've been through a lot."
Bambi frowned. "I heard."
She narrowed her eyes at me. "You don't seem like a very good guardian to me. How do I know you'll actually protect them?"
"For months, I have preserved these children's lives. Risking my own to save them from others of my kind."
She looked at the children, then at me.
"You know, I really shouldn't. It's dangerous outside. You'll be exposing them to threats that they have no business being exposed to. But...They really seem to trust you."
I thought she'd say yes, and we'd be on our way. Instead, she asked the children, "Where are your parents?"
I had to explain the whole situation to her.
"That's terrible!" She gave the children a look that queried, `Is this true?'
The children confirmed it with their facial expressions.
Bambi let out a reluctant sigh. "Okay. If you kids...trust...Bert, I guess I will too. But you'd better stick close. No running off. Got it?"
Both children nodded.
She stuffed a black leather Star Wars rucksack with repair equipment, electronic devices, firearms, and ammo clips. A small cart, covered in plastic, contained some additional devices, which, due to size, could not be so easily carried.
I, of course, had with me a low six wheeled cart with a fat corpse slumped over it, wrapped in a bed sheet.
[0000]
Timmy retained the gun.
"You know, I have two kids of my own," Bambi said as we set off down the outer hallway. "One's thirty five, the other's forty."
She grinned at Rebecca. "I don't look that old, do I?"
Rebecca looked as confused as I felt.
Bambi sighed. "My ex took them both in the divorce. I couldn't figure out what to do with myself, so I volunteered to go live on this ball of dirt. I owe my perfect complexion to my time as a human Popsicle."
Rebecca only stared.
"They froze me. It's called cryogenics."
"I know what it's called," Rebecca snapped a little impolitely.
Bambi rubbed her head. "I bet you do. What grade are you in school?"
"Second."
"Here's hoping you can make it to third." She sighed. "But yeah. Cryogenics. Ships took a lot longer to get places back when I left earth. It's weird, having your kids being physically older than you..."
We crossed one of the demolished hallway intersections.
"You ever been to Disneyland?" Bambi asked the children.
They looked at her like she was crazy. Timmy even seemed a bit disgusted, due to the situation with Mr. Pinkston.
Bambi smacked her forehead. "That's right! How could you? You were born and raised here, weren't you?"
"I've seen Disneyland in simulations," Timmy said.
The woman rolled her eyes. "I was actually there. In fact, I drove there. We didn't need to take boats to the Epcot Casino Barge. Florida had roads."
They stared at her, wide eyed.
"Pretty cool, huh."
We exited the base. Bambi owned a hot pink umbrella with a picture of a zombie on it. When we came outside in the torrential downpour, she let the children use it.
She tried offering Rebecca a Mickey and Minnie Mouse rain poncho, but both the girl and her brother refused to touch it, so Bambi used it herself.
The woman fought to get the barricade shut behind her. "Guys, we're going to be in for a walk. It's closer than the atmospheric processors, but it's still a walk. In the rain. Are you sure you don't want to go back and stay with the others?"
Timmy swallowed. "The sooner we're in the vehicle bay, the sooner we'll be dry."
"Smart kid." She slammed the gate shut, waving the children forward. "Let's get to where it's dry, then."
We set forward at a brisk pace, down a long wide paved road in between the two sections of the base, overshadowed by the interconnecting bridges.
Timmy marched past the bar, ahead of her.
"You seem to know the area," Bambi remarked. "You been in the vehicle bays a lot?"
"My parents were wildcatters. We salvage abandoned camps and vehicles for stuff. Sometimes there's dead people."
"What happens then?" I asked. "Do you bury them?"
Timmy shrugged. "Sometimes."
Bambi slipped on the wet pavement once, Pinkston's body fell off my cart a few times, once because it hit a pothole, but besides that, an uneventful voyage.
We arrived at an immense garage. Bambi pushed her cart of electronic supplies to a small door on the side, but I left Pinkston out in the rain, preventing him from becoming Ss'sik'chtokiwij bait, or baiting one into the vehicle bay.
A dimly lit concrete and metal building. A few of the light fixtures appeared to be requiring maintenance, new bulbs, perhaps.
Sparse decoration. They had a Coke sign, a Mobilgas sign bearing the image of Pegasus, and a machine that dispensed something called Spaceman Cola (locally produced carbonated beverages). A cartoon green man on the top of the machine offered a bottle to the buyer.
Rows of large insect-like six wheeled solar-electric hybrids stood in rows inside this structure, all filthy with mud and dirt from the field, despite the scrubber machinery nearby. The all terrain wheels, reinforced struts and shock absorbers, and elevated height ideal for driving anywhere on the Archeron landscape.
One driver had painted the front of their vehicle with a shark's mouth. Another had a rosary hanging from the sun visor. Someone else had painted a 1940's style pinup girl on their door. I saw a hood ornament of a metal fist holding Thor's hammer, and one of Rat Fink.
Not all of them looked classy. Some had been wrecked, lacked parts, or sat knee deep full of trash, a few of them nothing more than chassis with wheels.
As we marched past these rovers, examining each for defects, a dark shape dropped from the ceiling, throwing Bambi to the floor with a scream.
The shiny black adult Ss'sik'chtokiwij pinned Bambi to the dirty concrete, claws reaching around her throat.
I waited, but the creature didn't move. It just bore its weight upon her, as if exhausted and needing rest.
"Gun," the woman hissed to me. "Gun please!"
"You have it. It's in your bag."
I approached the creature, sniffing it.
"Timmy has a gun," she pleaded.
I ignored her, speaking to my kin. "Hello, could you please get off my friend?"
The Ss'sik'chtokiwij didn't answer.
Bambi picked up a wrench, striking the Ss'sik'chtokiwij across the head. It toppled to the concrete with surprising ease.
There it remained, limbs frozen in the same exact position as before.
Bambi, now free from the weight, aimed her gun at the stranger, clicking back the hammer.
I raised a staying hand. "There's no need."
I grabbed the Ss'sik'chtokiwij's head, rolling it back and forth. "She's dead."
"Yeah? Then why the hell did it jump me?"
I pointed to some chains dangling from the roof. "Ss'sik'chtokiwij blood is acidic, and those are ordinary metal."
Bambi rubbed her face in annoyance. "Why would they hang that up there?"
I shrugged. "Your people mount the heads of deer upon their walls."
She poked the body with the tip of her gun.
"Can you imagine how I feel about this? It's like seeing a man hung from hooks."
"I'm sorry," Bambi blurted a little too fast to be sincere.
Satisfied the Ss'sik'chtokiwij was indeed deceased, she straightened, stowing the weapon. "I can't wait to get out of here. This place is giving me the creeps."
"There!" Timmy pointed to a beat up vehicle standing between a rover with the Jurassic Park logo and one with the Toyota logo jokingly soldered to its front. "That's ours!"
Timmy hopped up on a tire, climbed a short ladder and opened the door hatch with a security code. We followed him in.
A cramped compartment, due to the sleeper cabin and mini kitchen in back, an area you practically had to crawl to get into. A plastic rimmed carpet caked with old dry mud.
Timmy typed a code into the control console. The engine rumbled to life.
Bambi loaded her things aboard in a hurry, afraid, I suppose, of the boy driving off without her. She jumped in the driver's seat. "I'll take it from here."
The cab consisted only of a pair of bucket seats and a rear passenger bench.
Up until this point, I never really bothered with chairs. No one had thought to offer, and even if they did, I wouldn't have seen the appeal. When I attempted to seat myself in the front passenger seat, my spinal blades got stuck, and it took me a fair amount of effort to extricate myself.
After ripping a jagged hole, I gave up and sat on the floor.
A few button presses (Timmy again), and the garage door rumbled open. Bambi drove us through the opening, knocking off part of the door frame in the process. "Honestly, guys, never driven one of these in my life, so bear with me."
Once outside, I had to deal with the ugly business of stowing Pinkston's body. I hefted him on my back and went through all the effort of using my slulwidmi before discovering the vehicle had a special pulley/winch system for this kind of job.
At any rate, we got him hooked up in back. Timmy closed the garage up behind us via remote, and we rolled down the alley between buildings.
"You seem like a good parent," I told Bambi. "Why did you lose your children?"
She winced. Touchy subject.
"I'm sorry."
Bambi took a deep breath. "Honestly, because I got caught driving while intoxicated."
"Alcohol?" I asked.
She smirked a little, but didn't seem that mirthful about it. "Pot. It probably would have been better if it were actually alcohol. You can legally smoke it, just not behind the wheel."
An awkward silence followed.
A drafty vehicle, even with the heater on, and rainwater trickled down the seams to pour off the running boards into the world outside. Bambi remarked that the vehicle had many similarities to a Jeep in that regard.
The children, still damp from the rain, brought some towels out of the back, drying themselves off. Bambi took one as well.
[0001]
The rain pounded down so hard that sometimes the wipers did nothing to clear up the distortion, but we had a computer that sensed obstacles and pedestrians, so everything still looked good.
"Probably the first time this thing has been washed in months," Bambi muttered, pressing play on the stereo.
Lorne Greene's Ballad of Ringo.
She pushed the forward button a few times.
Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox by Joe Diffie.
Something Like That by Tim McGraw.
Goodbye Marie by Malcolm Yelvington.
Ghost Riders in the Sky.
And then, bizarrely, Three Months to Kill by Huelyn Duvall.
"Yee haw," Bambi chuckled as she listened to Rawhide. "Your folks were country music fans, I take it."
"Mom likes Elvis and the Beatles." Timmy frowned. "She did."
"Oh, I dunno, maybe she's up in heaven right now, listening to the Beatles."
"You think she's thinking about us right now?"
Bambi gave him a warm smile. "I'm sure she is."
We rolled out to the end of the base, our only scenery a wall of metal facing a flat muddy expanse.
The woman steered around a rock. "Let's get rid of this dead guy. "It's really awful that you kids have to see all that."
"I'm glad the bastard's dead," Timmy muttered.
Rebecca nodded. "Anyways, it's nothing new. We've seen lots of dead people."
"This is why they need to go to earth," I said. "This is no place for children."
Bambi eased down on the accelerator. "No argument here! This base is no place for anyone! I promise we'll get that distress message sent ASAP."
She glanced at the map on her screen, looked out the left and right windows. "So. Any preference on where we bury this guy?"
The children gave her looks like they didn't care if she just dropped him into a crater.
She waved her fingers over the digital topographic map. "Eenie meenie..."
"Just open the back," Timmy said. "Let him roll out in the dirt."
"Geez. What—" The woman frowned. "I'm sorry. You're right. He was a bastard."
We stopped at an outcrop two miles from the base, dropping Jeff unceremoniously at the foot of a boulder.
I thought we would just leave him there, but Bambi piled loose rocks over him. I just stared.
"I know what they said, and it's raining, but he's still a human being. Help me with this, will ya?"
I felt so touched by the sentiment that I cried a little.
"I know." She dropped a large rock on Jeff's stomach. "It's freaking cold out here. Maybe we can get you some chicken soup or something when we're done. How about that?"
"That sounds...interesting." I wondered where she would get the chicken from.
As we built this rough cairn, I recalled passages about Abraham and Elijah building an altar before the Lord, and how they and others had been commanded not to use stoneworking tools. Perhaps this was an altar.
The children just watched from the vehicle.
Once finished, Bambi hurried back to the cockpit, drying herself off with the last clean towel.
Our next stop: A small machine station to the side of the atmospheric processing station, its attached satellite pointing uselessly at a ridge of mountains, rather than the sky.
Bambi brought her bag of tools up to a large rectangular device, pausing beneath her zombie umbrella to light a cigarette.
She unlocked a little padlock on the satellite's cover. The transmitter resembled something between a circuit breaker box and an old style telephone switchboard, with little computer panels in places.
The wires and fuses looked clean, the main error being the lopsided alignment of the dish itself.
Bambi did have to replace a fuse, and stick a loose cord into a socket, but mostly she only tinkered with the computer interface, turning the dish back into a correct position.
I watched with fascination as she worked.
"Can you actually see?" she asked me.
"Yes."
"I don't see any eyes."
"Still, I have them."
She waved her hand in front of my face, and I waved back.
"For some reason, I thought you were doing all of that by smell."
"I do have a highly developed olfactory receptor. But I can also see."
"Okay...Anyways...pretty self explanatory. All we're doing is watching the crosshairs on this computer and pushing the lock button when the X and Y match the numbers on the receiver screen."
She stuck a little thumbdrive into a socket, flipping a switch that said `Repeater'. "Once it's locked, I'll push the transmit button. It'll going to send the message over and over until someone hears us."
I think she gave me these instructions in case the device malfunctioned and I had to go back out to fix it. "How very interesting! I do very much enjoy watching people do things like this. It is like an educational program."
She grinned. "You're very weird, Bert."
"Actually, it's Ernie."
"Well, at least I got the program right, huh? My kids used to love that show!"
For a few minutes, we just stared at the numbers.
"Do me a favor. I saw a case of soda in the back of the rover. Could you please go get me one of the red ones?"
Eager to please, I hurried to the vehicle, relaying the request to Timmy.
When he returned with the red aluminum can, the boy froze, his mouth hanging open in shock.
The can dropped to the rocky ground, its seals breaking, sticky carbonated glop spraying all over the dirt.
I heard the squeal of rending metal, and gunfire. Bambi screamed.
I turned just in time to see one of my aunts slashing the woman open from throat to stomach.
The noisily sparking panel with its ripped wires told me we had little if any hope of successfully sending a distress call.