A Song Called Youth (46 page)

Rickenharp said, in a voice kept carefully flat, “It makes a lot of noise coming. Even if it was close—must have been some of them got out of the building.
Must
have been.”

They looked around a little more. Found nothing alive; found pieces of their friends.

The sound of the Jægernaut was receding now. It was like an iron foundry walking away.

Another sound came. A humming, grinding of gears. Jeeps. Trucks.

“Fashes coming to check it out, man, Harpie,” Hard-Eyes said.

Rickenharp just stared around him, mouth slack, eyes smoldering with growing rage—a hair-trigger rage. Very carefully, Hard-Eyes laid a hand on Rickenharp’s arm. Rickenharp whirled and pointed the shotgun at him, squeezed the trigger, snarling.

The safety was on. Hard-Eyes swallowed to force his heart down out of his throat and said, “It’s me, Harpie. Jesus fuck.”

“Sorry. I . . . ”

“You
gotta
get off that blue mesc shit.”

“It’s not that . . . ” Rickenharp’s eyes overflowed. Tears streaked the grime on his cheeks. “They’re . . . ”

“I know. I’m telling you man,
had
to be some of ’em got away. Hey, the fashes are coming. We can kill some of ’em if we—if we get to high ground. Okay?” Rickenharp let Hard-Eyes take his arm and steer him out of the ruins. The noise of trucks got louder. Hard-Eyes saw a light stab through the smoke, seeking. “Shit, where’s—”

Then Claire and Bonham and Kurland ran up, coughing in the smoke. “There’s soldiers,” Bonham said, gasping. “Are they—”

“They’re SA,” Hard-Eyes said. “Come on.” He led them down the street, away from the sound of the approaching men. Out of the thick of the cloud, down one of the twisting, twenty-foot-wide side streets.

They paused here to catch their breath. “Shit, I’m exhausted.” Claire said.

Hard-Eyes looked down the alley, saw a man silhouetted at the other end. Carrying a gun. Hard-Eyes raised his assault rifle. But the man waved and spread his arms, gun out to the side, offering his chest as a target. Surrendering. Walking nearer.

Then Rickenharp said, “All
ri-ight!
”

It was Yukio, in khakis and black bandanna. Over his shoulder was a rifle fitted with an M83.

He walked up, his face blank, lowering his arms. Hard-Eyes put a hand on Yukio’s shoulder. The Japanese was rigid with grief. “There are two others who made it,” he said hoarsely. “But the rest in the HQ are dead. This is the second family I’ve lost to them.”

“Who made it?” Rickenharp asked.

“Willow and Carmen. They went out to find . . . privacy. We were having a party. This is why—we drank too much. Or we would have heard it coming. Steinfeld gave us the last case of wine.” He smiled weakly. “You missed the party.”

“Party?” Rickenharp’s tone was pure incredulity. “What the fuck?”

“For Steinfeld. Ten minutes after you go out, a call comes through: the Israelis captured an SA jumpjet. Room for two passengers. They sent it through for Steinfeld and Dr. Levassier. Steinfeld goes to direct the assault to get us out. It will fail.” He shrugged. “Steinfeld is out, though. He is safe, for now. He can go on. It hurt him to go. I saw it. But he knows where his work is. He went.”

“Steinfeld is out!” Rickenharp said. His mood did another wild swing. He danced around, pretending to play the shotgun like it was a guitar. “
Fuck
these fascist pricks!”

“Keep your voice down, Harpie,” Hard-Eyes said.

Yukio was staring at the newcomers. “From the pod? Colony people?”

Hard-Eyes nodded. “Let’s move out.”

“Where to?” Claire asked, slumping against a wall.

“Shelter, for now,” Hard-Eyes said. “Till we can regroup with another cell.”

“Gimme shelter, the man says.” Rickenharp chuckled. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I know a place. Wait’ll you see, Hard-Eyes. Come on. One block.”

Hard-Eyes sat with his back to a wall, his assault rifle across his knees. It was an old gun, from late in the last century, repaired twice in the NR machine shop. They were camped out in the wreckage of what had once been a music-supplies store. Yukio, Hard-Eyes, and the refugees from the Colony, hunkered behind the sales counter. There was a smashed-open cred-scanner lying on its side like the skull of a beheaded robot, and there were sheets of music printout scattered yellowing on the floor and nothing else except the faint glow of a Coleman and the flicker of the chemheater in the back of the hall.

Turned out Rickenharp had stashed the lamp and the heater here. This is where he’d come, those times he’d disappeared.

Down the hall, the Rimpler girl was lying on a bed of sheet music, near the chem-heater, snoring softly. Bonham and Kurland sat near her, whispering. Across from Hard-Eyes, Yukio sat with his head on his arms, arms propped on knees, knees tucked against his chest, muttering Japanese in his sleep.

Hard-Eyes whispered, “Rickenharp?”

Rickenharp’s voice from the other side of the counter. “I’m still on, man. Still wired. Get some sleep. I’m watching.”

Hard-Eyes put his head on his arms, imitating Yukio, and drifted into a fitful sleep, waking now and then at little sounds. He heard Rickenharp sniffing something up—probably synmorph this time, to take the edge off the blue, and to keep from thinking too much about the friends who’d been butchered, pulped, during their only celebration in six months. Drifting . . . 

Next thing he heard was Bonham and Kurland arguing; hearing Kurland’s accent more clearly now. “But we can’t know that these ‘fash’ people are, ah, you know, the way they are advertised to be by their—” Kurland lowered his voice. “—by their
opposition.
I mean, the opposition always describes the other side as bad news and bloody tyrants . . . Now, if we explain to these Second Alliance people we’re not subversives, we’re neutral, surely they—well, I think we should go to them, and—”

Bonham said, “Oh, don’t be stupid. They’d ID me; they know I skipped out on them. They’d ship me to one of their rehab camps. You they’d read as a possible accomplice—you took a bribe from us, so you’d worked in someone else’s employ against them. Claire worked against them, so they want her in their clutches. Forget it.”

“But, I say—”

“I said
forget it.
” A lot of authority in the weedy little guy’s tone when he wanted it.

So Bonham had collaborated. Hard-Eyes filed it away, and went back to sleep.

“Dammit, Hard-Eyes, wake up!”

Hard-Eyes sat up straight, wincing. His back ached from the cold concrete wall. “Whuh you want, man. I go on watch?”

“No, Yukio’s standing sentry . . . C’mere.”

Hard-Eyes stood, stretched, and, carrying the assault rifle, followed Rickenharp down the hall, past the Colony refugees sleeping around the metal shell of the chem-heater. Hard-Eyes glanced at Claire. Her face in sleep like something from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. He felt a pleasant tug, looking at her. He smiled, seeing she was sleeping with the machine pistol Yukio had given her; it was clutched to her chest the way a little girl sleeps with a doll . . . They walked past, down to the left. Down the stairs into a musty basement storeroom. Rickenharp switched on a flashlight.

“I was poking around here once . . . I saw these boards looked recently nailed on, like somebody was hiding something back here . . . ” He laid the flashlight on the top of a stack of cardboard boxes, so the beam faced the wall, spotlighting a door. The door was boarded over. He pulled at the planks and they came away easily. He’d pried them away before and then put them back; loosely reinserted the nails.

He tossed the boards aside with a crash that made Hard-Eyes flinch, shined the flashlight through the low doorway.

“Check it out!’

Hard-Eyes bent and went in, Rickenharp following with the flashlight.

It was a small room, twenty by five feet, just a long closet, filled with musical instruments. Mostly guitars, amplifiers, speakers, microphones, and PA equipment.

Hard-Eyes shuddered with intuition and a sense of displacement, staring at the hoard. To Rickenharp, it was the Treasure of Tutankhamen.

“Eyes, my man, this is Kismet.” His voice thick with conviction. “Destiny. I was intended to find this stuff. I feel like Ali Baba . . . I guess these were like demonstration models the music store hid down here when the Russians started shelling. There’s even a tuba over there. Can you believe it? I tried twenty music stores, man, before I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t busted. But I knew it was there waiting for me in one of ’em . . . ”

“Too bad you can’t use it. Got no power. And the fashes would hear.”

A grin lit up his corner of the room like an electrical arc. “Oh, yeah? Look-a-that!” He stuck out his hand. A chromium cube glittered in his palm. “You know what that is? That’s a Firestormer, made by Marshall Amps. Intense battery power for the biggest amp concentrated in that little thing. Costly sucker. Good for five days of top-volume playing. And scan this: Earphones. Two sets. They plug into the amp. Built-in volume controls. I can play and the fashes won’t hear a note. You wanna hear something? I already got the guitar tuned . . . ”

Feeling like he was denying food to a starving man, Hard-Eyes said, “Uh, not just now, man. I’m pretty tired, got a headache.”

“Headache? Great. Just put the headphones on. I’ll clear your headache up. There won’t be room for an ache in your head! I got me an old Telecaster here, ’bout fifty years old, works fine . . . I crank this sucker like so, jack in here, insert the battery here . . . ” The amplifier’s lights winked hot red in the semidarkness. Rickenharp had left the flashlight on the floor. He bent near it to snort a long line of blue mesc from the back of his hand. A bluish light bled up from the flashlight to accent his face eerily, as if he were glowing from the drug.

Hard-Eyes sighed, put on the earphones, and turned the volume low, prepared to listen to a twenty-minute self-indulgence, electric ego-swell tedium, maybe some interminable variation of one of Rickenharp’s favorite twentieth-century tunes.

Rickenharp strapped on the guitar, put on the earphones so he could hear himself . . . 

A hummm in the earphones . . . 

The first chord rang like a church bell. Long and slow and full. The second quivered bluesy like a woman wailing at a New Orleans funeral in the churchyard where the bell rang. Rickenharp was playing a funeral dirge for their friends, dead under the crystallized-steel jackboot . . . And then he played a theme that resonated anger, vengeance, renewal of purpose; picking up the tempo, doublepicking for a rhythm section, and he was off and running, rocking for real. The notes pealed and tripped, dashed into speed-rapper’s digressions, dashed on, paused like a comedian timing an irony, and then seemed to carry on a monologue that had a rhythm to it like Rickenharp’s style of talking. They segued back into the thematic riff and—okay, Hard-Eyes was impressed.

Finally, Rickenbarp was finished. Hard-Eyes took off the earphones. His ears rang.

“Rickenharp, man, I had no idea.”

“This is my instrument. Could have been custom-made for me.”

“You want a hit of this blue, Eyes?”

“No, hodey, come on, you know me better than that. But play another tune. I’m not quite deaf yet.” He put the earphones back on.

Rickenharp and Hard-Eyes were smiling when they came out of the back room.

There was no one in the hall. Hard-Eyes frowned and flicked the HK’s safety off. He led the way up the hall, thinking,
All that noise in the earphones, anything could’ve happened out here, we’d never know it.

They went up to the counter. Heard a rustle, an urgent whisper, couldn’t make out what was said. Hunched over, they moved around the counter, looked out into the main room . . . Room strewn with fiberplas crates, the guts of a smashed piano, broken glass. A little light bleeding across the room from the busted-in windows on the left. Movement to the right, behind the crates. Rickenharp turned that way, stepping out from the cover of the counter.

Then Hard-Eyes saw the men in the doorway to the left. “Harp—” he began.

But Rickenharp stepped into the open, and the darkness was splintered by muzzle flashes; the walls echoed with thudding automatic weapons. Rickenharp went spinning, falling. Two stray rounds slammed into the broken piano, making plaintive, discordant notes . . . 

Hard-Eyes bellowed and jumped out to fire at the door with the HK; it leaped in his hand, funneling his anger; the room lit up with strobe flashes from the muzzle. One of the men yelled hoarsely and fell. Hard-Eyes instinctively moved back to the cover of the counter.

In the strobe from the gun he’d seen Bonham and Kurland lying facedown on the floor, hands behind their heads. The men had come in, seen them in the main room maybe. They’d surrendered . . . Where was Claire?

“Rickenharp? Yo, Harpie!” Hard-Eyes hissed.

“I’m . . . okay, man.”

“Don’t move.”

Hard-Eyes peered over the top of the counter at the door. Saw no one.

He bent and moved on into the middle of the room, groped till he found Rickenharp. “Where you hit?”

“Leg. Hip.”

“I gotcha.” He slung the assault rifle over his back, bent to help Rickenharp.

But before he could pick Rickenharp up, light stabbed from the doorway. A man barked, “Hold it, drop your weapons!”

Hard-Eyes looked, blinking in the light. Above the glare he made out three men coming in, weapons raised. SA Regulars. No heavy body armor on them. But they had the drop on him.

“Harpie . . . ”

“I say fuck ’em,” Rickenharp said.

Rickenharp had his CAWS across his chest. Grimacing with pain, he sat up, fired across his body at the men in the door. The autoshotgun roared like a small cannon, booming and leaping in his hands, and the man in the lead was torn apart by four 12-gauge rounds at a range of thirty feet, his left arm separating from his shoulder; his body, seeming to liquefy, splashed back on the others. Then the booming stopped and Rickenharp hissed, “Fucker’s jammed!’

Hard-Eyes was trying to bring his HK into firing position, but it was too late, the other SAs were firing; Rickenharp grunted and fell back; 9-mm rounds were whistling so close by Hard-Eyes’ head he could feel the friction, and any split-second now one would—