A Grey Moon Over China (59 page)

“All right, there . . . easy, now. Down easy.” The baritone belonged to an enormous, black-skinned man who leaned down just then to look into her face.

“Fetal heart’s down.”

“Oxygen, please.”

“Induce?”

“Can’t afford the contractions . . . easy, now, there you go.”

“We’re going to need her back in surgery, you know that, don’t you? Or some portable gear.”

“You saw what it’s like out there. Just hang on and wait. Let’s see what happens.” The woman cried out weakly, barely conscious.

Charlie Peters leaned forward with an effort and looked down at the medics in their dark green and the silent woman in white, and at the frightened faces of the farmers and clerks and machinists pressed in around them. He watched the activity in the circle of light for a moment, then leaned back against the wall.

“Father Charlie, you hurt more than you say.” Pham got up. “I get medics, okay?”

“No.” Peters put out a hand. “They’ll be wasting their time on an old man like me. They’ve got more important work at hand.”

Pham knelt down again, and sat back on her heels with tears on her face. Whether for the mother and her baby, or for Peters, or for Michael Bolton, I couldn’t tell.

For me, I couldn’t believe Bolton was dead. Several times I found myself thinking he must be on the floor below, out of sight in the shadows beneath the mezzanine. But the only image I could bring to mind when I tried to think of his face was of the drone in its cage, watching as I passed through the smoke that last time.

“Do you have a radio, Mr. Torres?” A man was looking up at me from below.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“We don’t know what the situation is outside. We’ve got guns, but no radios.”

“No, please.” Pham moved quickly to the railing and looked down. “No guns unless no choice.”

The man was skeptical. He held one hand against an arm heavily band-aged and soaked in blood. “Maybe.”

Behind him a medic shielded her eyes from the sun overhead and leaned down to her instruments, then spoke quietly to the others. “We may have a choice here, guys.”

“No,” said the black man, cradling the woman’s head in a giant hand. “She won’t survive a section if we do it here. If we go ahead it’s only to save the child.”

“Christ. What a crummy, goddamned way to go.”

“Yes. Ease her back up a little there.”

Outside there was an explosion of masonry, out across Trinity Square. It wasn’t clear what the drones were doing, unless they really were looking for the case hidden below. The case the prisoner had told them I had.

“Tuyet, lass.” Peters had his hand clasped around the cross at his neck, and had been speaking to himself quietly. Now he opened his hand and held out to Pham a tiny, stoppered phial.

“Take this down and place a little on the woman’s hand. There’s a good lass. Two drops, if you would. One for the mother, and one for the child.”

She took the phial and held it uneasily in her hand, and finally Peters reached out and folded her fingers around it. “Extreme unction,” he said. “ ’Tis my duty as a priest. Go now.” He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, then began to speak to her again. Pham stopped him.

“I know,” she said. “The words, I know. Old priests in camps say them every day. Too many times.” She went down the stairs and made her way
through the packed bodies to the woman’s side, and stepped into the circle of sunlight. She still wore only the thin white blouse tied above the waist, and her lightweight pants tied around her hips with a cotton string. She was out of place among the packed bodies with their heavy work clothes and uniforms and slung weapons.

One of the medics stopped her, not understanding what she was doing, but she spoke to him quietly and they both glanced up at Peters. Then she knelt down next to the stretcher and worked a drop of the oil into the back of the woman’s hand, speaking quietly. She looked at the woman for a moment then and hesitated, then returned up the steps and handed the phial to Peters.

“Not for the baby,” she said.

“Well, then.” He closed his eyes again.

None of us spoke for a quarter of an hour. Peters and I leaned against the outside wall while Pham knelt next to him. Indecipherable sounds came from outside, and tense voices from below. The medics were worried at some new sign of fetal distress.

“Well,” said Peters quietly, “ ’tis a foolish life I’ve led, isn’t it?” He lifted his head from the wall with his eyes half open. “Tramping about with a bottle o’ ointment in my waistcoat, waiting for something grand. For the sound o’ trumpets, a fine, blue ribbon for virtue at the close of a mean little life. But there’s no ribbon out here in the black, is there? Just cold.”

“Father—”

“Claiming a calling from God like some poor novice dressing up the abbot before his vows. A cowardly man is the truth, afraid to leave his mark like other men. Prattling on about fine Christian principle.” He paused, struggling for breath. “ ’Tis the height o’ arrogance, don’t you think, a man contriving a god so he can tell himself he’s been chosen by him, that he’s been vouched for in some high purpose? But what is it I’ve done, really, except meddle like an old man?”

“Father, you’ve done—”

But he wasn’t listening.

“And here I am now,” he said, “with an eye against the black and my faith shriveling up like a virgin’s womb, saying if there’s a god why don’t I feel him, why can’t I reach out and touch his face, now when I’m in need of it, now when it’s so cold—”

Pham had reached up to unfasten the buttons of her blouse, and now she lifted Peters’ creased old hand and pushed aside her collar with it. She moved it down to rest over her heart, his palm open against her bare skin. Peters closed his eyes and leaned slowly back.

I walked to the railing to watch the medics below. One sponged the woman’s forehead while another tried to fit a pressure bottle onto an air
syringe. Her hands were shaking, and she couldn’t get it on. A big black hand reached across to take it and finish the job.

I moved to the window. Drones wandered across Trinity Square, some of them milling around the doors to our building. Beyond the wall of the dome more ships had landed, and the black, midday sky above was filled with them as they spread farther out across the landscape. No help would be coming anytime soon from the fleet; if it was true that the drones overlooked unarmed and non-threatening vessels, still, no one would have the courage to fly any down—and unarmed ships would do us little good, in any case. Our only chance lay in slipping out to the remaining shuttles, or waiting out the attack—assuming it would ever end. But pressure continued to drop under the dome, outside the building, and we had no suits.

A shout came from below.

“Flutter on the mother. Skip! Two . . . three . . .”

“Massage, keep it high.”

“. . . six, seven . . .”

“Fetal’s dropping. We’re losing the baby, people.”

“All right, here we go. Here to here, there’s your mark. Sponge with the gown.”

“You two, hold her down. There’s no anesthetic.”

“Longer cut . . . all right, there’s the wall. Convulsions . . .”

“Baby’s heart’s gone! He can’t take that.”

“All right, get to the cord
first
, the minute you see it in here. And then you—yes, you, that whole bottle there into the mother. The minute they’ve got the cord. Okay, right lumbar—get ready to turn her.”

Charlie Peters sat forward a little next to me so he could see.

“Eddie,” he said.

I sat down and he put a hand on my arm. He didn’t say anything more, but just watched the activity below.

“Got the cord—barely clamped.”

“Turn the mother. All right,
now
, Atropine”

“Okay, there’s the head . . . I don’t like that color.”

“A boy—did she know?”

“Yes. Suction! Again. Okay, that doesn’t look too bad. Oxygen now, blow it in.”

“Sixty-five seconds since he went out—he needs air . . .”

“There he goes! All right, son, give us another one like that one. Another breath. God Almighty, there you go. If you can keep that up you’ll be all right.”

“I wish those legs looked better. He isn’t ever going to walk on them, I’ll tell you that.”

“Yeah, well I just wish he had a mother.”

“God, look at him take that air—that’s enough of a miracle. One minute of life and counting.”

Charlie Peters next to me shook his head. “No,” he said, hoarsely. “No, he’s always been alive. He’s only waking from a dream, is all. A dream about God.” I could barely hear him. “ ’Tis a dream he’ll forget, though, as the days pass. Like the rest of us.”

A medic swaddled the baby while another lifted the stretcher’s sheet up over the mother. No one else in the building spoke.

And in the middle of the floor, in the center of the circle of pale white light shining down from above, the baby struggled to open his eyes. And next to me, Peters closed his.

“A dream about God,” he said again. His grip on my arm loosened and he turned a little to one side.

Charlie Peters died in Pham’s arms without another word. And at that same moment, down on the floor below, the baby cried out once and then was quiet again.

I walked away. Near the window I stopped and looked back.

I looked at the baby, held now in the arms of the great black man below. I looked at Peters, quiet at last. And I looked at Pham, gazing down at him with tears in her eyes, stroking his brow.

Each of the three was alone in that great, cold building, I thought, surrounded outside by the drones and by the empty wastelands farther out still. Each was alone, and in some way not alone. And not one of the three was aware of me at all, there where I stood looking back at them from the window.

M
r. Torres? Eddie?”

I’d fallen asleep. Peters’ body had been moved into a corner and covered with a blanket. Pham stood by the window in the afternoon light, whispering to me. I watched her for a minute before answering.

“Yes?” I said.

“Come look.” She made room for me at the window.

The square was empty. Smoke hung in the sunlight, indicating that there was at least some air left in the dome. The fleet of black ships still waited across the wastes, although there seemed to be no more activity near the dome.

“How long will it last?” I said. “We need to go out and find a trailer, and pull it up against the building. Then if we can load it up and slip it out through the tunnel, we can reach the shuttles. They still look intact.”

“Yah, okay. Let’s go.” She flitted down the steps in her bare feet, then with a brief word to the nervous guards at the doors we cracked them open and she and I slipped out into Trinity Square. We were helped through by a sharp gust of air from the pressure behind.

It was strangely quiet in the aftermath of the attack. The afternoon sun slanted through the haze, and the air stank from the fires and bit our nostrils with the stench of burned power cells. Even without the smoke it was difficult to breathe; the air had become too thin by now, still leaking out faster than the converters could replenish it. If they were running at all.

“Pham, listen. I think there’s a trailer behind the barracks, but if all the cells have been destroyed, then none of the tractors is going to work. We’re going to have to try and bring the shuttles in through the lock, or else pull their cells out for the tractors—and either way it’s going to attract attention. Otherwise we have to send everybody out to the shuttles two or three at a time in the only suits we have. Christ, what a mess.” I was whispering, at the same time tightening the ablative armor under my tunic. It was too quiet.

“So, okay, we look around,” she said out loud. She seemed unreasonably lighthearted.

“Look for what?”

“I don’t know. The horse, maybe he learn to sing, what you think?” She started off across the square, flitting in and out of the slanting shadows, looking unbearably vulnerable in the little she wore. I moved to catch up with her, digging my boots into the dust, studying the few glimpses I could get of the waiting drone ships out past the dome.

“Tell me something, Pham,” I said as I caught up. “I thought you hated Peters.”

“No, I never hate him,” she said. “I treat him pretty bad, though, poor guy.”

“Poor guy? You seem pretty cheerful for being sorry for him.”

She stopped and faced me. “He dead, Mr. Eddie. While you asleep in there maybe I cry a lot, make stupid noises, but he dead now. Before, I waste a lot of time, I think, so I say okay, but now not so much left. So come on, we see what we find.”

I thought about it while we looked into the recreation center, and poked around through the piles of equipment Polaski had left behind in the barracks. Some of it was intact and some of it burned in two, but there were no undamaged power cells or suits. In the roadway leading along the dome wall to the rear of the barracks we found the empty troop trailer, apparently intact but with no tractor. “Damn it, Pham, the air in that building isn’t even going to last the night; we don’t have time for this. We have to find a radio that’s—”