The Last Hour of Gann (27 page)

She drowsed for a few minutes to let them have their male-bonding time during the morning pee, and when she heard their low voices begin to pick up again under the wind, she got up. She rolled up her blanket, stuffed it in her duffel, picked up
Nicci’s roasting stick, and headed over to join them.

“—unless we can provide them with some kind of future,”
Scott was saying, but he stopped when the others looked at her and turned to see her for himself.

He blush
ed, which was a weird reaction. “This is a debriefing, Miss Bierce. Please go sit down somewhere. I’ll pass out the MREs when we’re done.”

There were so many things she wanted to say about the democratic process he kept insisting they still had in this so-called colony, but instead, she forced on a smile, held up her hands, and said, “Truce, okay?”

They all looked at the stick she was holding.

“I’m aware that you haven’t sorted out the priorities yet,” began Amber, picking her way very carefully toward her goal in her most diplomatic tone, “but when you get around to wanting a closer look at those animals, I think it would be a good idea if the people in your scouting party had something like this with them. Just in case, you know?”

Eric reached out and plucked at the tip of the stick.

“You’re not anywhere on my list of people to go on that scouting mission, Miss Bierce,” said
Scott bluntly. “So get it out of your head right now. I need people in peak physical condition for that.”

“
No fat chicks, I get it.” Amber made herself stop there, then pinned up that smile again and started over. “Even if I can’t do the running around that’s involved, I can at least help with the preparations. If I could borrow your knife, I—”

“Not a chance.”

“—could spend the whole day making grown-up versions of this,” Amber said stubbornly, but softly. “So when you get a team organized—”

“That is not where my priorities are right now, Miss Bierce.”

“Then let me do it. I’ll ask for volunteers, I’ll make the spears—”

Scott
stepped forward so fast and so unexpectedly that she jumped back, banged the back of her knees into a crate of pipes, and went down hard on her ass. He leaned over her, absolutely furious, but barely speaking above a whisper, careful not to wake anyone in the camp beyond them. “Before you start re-enacting
The Lord of the Flies
around here, you might want to remember what happened to Piggy. You’re not the only one who ever thought of sharpening sticks.”

Before Amber could decide how to respond to these bizarre but unmistakably hostile statements,
Scott turned around and stalked off.

Baffled, Amber looked over at
Eric and Dag. “What the hell was that about?”

Eric
shook his head, looking away in a vague manner, frowning.

“It’s from a book they made everyone read in school,” said Crandall. “About some gay Brit kids who get stranded on some island.”

“Did he just call me a pig?”

“There was one in the book.”

Amber eyed him narrowly. “What happened to it?”

“I think the kids fucked it or killed it or
both.” Crandall shrugged. “Yeah, it didn’t make a lot of sense in the book either, but I had to write a whole page on how incredibly fucking profound it was, I remember that.”

“So…” Amber sent a searching gaze across the camp, but
Scott had gone inside his tent. She tried to laugh the whole thing off, but no one joined her in it and the sound she made was clearly an angry one. “So what the hell kind of threat was that?”

“You just need to back off a little,” said
Eric quietly. “That’s all.”

“Back off
what
? All I want to do is think about hunting! I didn’t say it had to be today! I just want him to plan for it! How is that so wrong?”

Eric
and Dag exchanged another set of glances. She followed their gaze afterwards to the stick in her hand.

“What?” she said, tightening her grip.

“It just doesn’t look good,” said Eric. “Arming yourself. Calm down. It’s nothing serious.”

She turned to him
fast and hissed, “He! Doesn’t!
Feed
me! That feels pretty fucking serious to me!”

They shuffled a little and avoided her eyes.

“I asked for his permission! I gave him every opportunity to go back and pretend like it was his idea! Does he think those stupid rations are going to last forever? What does he think we’re going to eat when they’re gone?”

Eric
shrugged, still not meeting her eyes. “He’ll come around. Just let him figure it out on his own. Let him decide when it’s time.”

Amber threw up her empty hand and slapped it
loudly down on the top of the crate. “Wait until the food runs out, is that it? Look, we don’t have guns here. We don’t even have bows. We have Scott’s pocketknife and a whole lot of stupid sticks.”

“I know, I know—
”

“No, I don’t think you do. I don’t think you get it yet that when it comes to hunting, we’re going to have to chase things around and stab them! How many meals do you think we’ll have to skip before th
at becomes impossible?”

“Okay, calm down.”

“I don’t want to calm down, I want
you
to get pissed! Scott can talk all he wants about how a human being can live three weeks without food, but I guarantee you, two days after we eat the last of those crappy ration bars, no one is going to be able to run down one of these fucking deer!”

Eric
and Dag went for Round Three of the meaningful looks. At the end of it, Eric sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “Yeah, I know,” he said, and sat down on a stack of cement bags.

“Then why aren’t you helping me?” Amber demanded. “If we all talked to him together, we could make
him do something!”

“Oh, he’d do something, all right.”
Crandall snorted and kicked a crate. “Look, Bierce, you’ve got balls, no one’s saying you don’t, but it’s obvious you didn’t do too well in school.”

“What, because I never heard of the Lord of the Pigs? Who the hell cares about that now?”

“Flies,” Crandall corrected. “And also because you suck at basic math. So let me help you with your homework, honey. The four of us, and maybe Yao, plus alien critters we know nothing about, minus guns, plus pointed sticks, equals somebody getting hurt. Guaranteed.”

“But we can’t just—
”

“Shut up a sec, I’m not done. So far we’ve been really lucky and so far people have stayed pretty calm—that’s some more math, see if you can figure it out yourself
—but when we come back from our first big hunt carrying some bloody, screaming mess that used to be you, people are going to freak and they might not stop.”

“Used to be me, huh?”

“And when it happens,” Eric said quietly, “Scott is going to be right there telling everybody how sharks can smell blood from ten miles away and who knows what could be out there tracking you down. You’ll be gone, Bierce.”

“He can’t throw me out,” she scoffed. “He can call himself Captain or Commander or King of the fucking Fly-People for all I care, but he can’t
make me leave if I don’t want to.”

Crandall gave her a crooked, scornful smile. “
There’s this other book they made us read in school called
Animal Farm
. Bet you never read that one either, huh?”

Amber rolled
her eyes. “No. Is there a pig in it?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, there’s two. One’s a real smart pig who wants to help all the dumb sheep and dogs and chickens on the farm, you know
, live a better life. The other one’s pretty much a talker. Guess which pig takes over and which one disappears?”

“
What happened to the sheep?” asked Amber.

Crandall quit smiling.

“Come on, Bierce, we’re on your side,” said Eric, with a warning glance at Crandall. “All he’s saying is, Scott wouldn’t have to do anything to you but what he already does, and that’s talk.”

“Is that
what you’re scared of?” Amber demanded. “That he’ll talk at you?”

“Not at us,” said
Eric, with just a hint of disdain in his expression even though his tone remained even. “Against us.”

“I’m shaking.”

“You should be.”

“Basic math,” said Crandall again. “Even if you got the three of us to stand up for you—and I’ll tell you right now, I wouldn’t—and maybe Yao and, sure why not, that whiny little bitch of yours, he’ll get all the rest of them.”

“He’s got most of them already,” Dag commented. “Just because they’re Manifestors like him.”

“He’s out there every day and night telling people they don’t have to worry,
this is all temporary and no one will ever get hurt. And what are you saying?” Eric asked, now blatantly contemptuous. “That we have to kill aliens to survive.”

“We do!” Amber exploded. “For God’s sake, I’m not sending anyone out after
giant bugs or dinosaurs or those…those fucking black-banana-headed things! They’re
deer
! They eat
grass
! They’re
tiny
!”

“They’re almost as tall as we are, they have horns and tusks, and they fight each other constantly!”
Eric shot back. “That’s exactly the kind of bullshit that makes it easy for him to talk people onto his side, because you act like this is no big deal and it fucking well is!”

She’d never heard him swear before and it rattled her. Amber looked at her spear, picking strips of bark away from the unfinished point, still angry but unsure how to argue.

“We need to figure things out. I admit that, Bierce. I agree. I’m on your damn side! But you have got to back off and let Scott come around in his own time!”

“We’ll talk to him,” said Dag. He put out his hand.

She looked at it, at her stick, then at him again. “What?”

Dag sighed and
Eric said, “Give it up, Bierce. You’ll get it back, I promise.”

“No.”

“Okay,” said Crandall, smiling. “Give it up or I’ll knock you down and take it.”

Eric
murmured something too low for Amber to catch.

“The hell I won’t, man. I show up with that thing in one hand and Bierce with a black eye in the other and that prancing little prick will probably give me a medal. Nothing personal, sweets, but then again, you are starting to piss me off.”

Dag looked at Amber again. He sighed and held his hand out further.

She gave him the
stick. “This is wrong and you know it.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t change the way things are
and
you
know it.” He put the stick on his shoulder like a rifle and walked away, heading for Scott’s tent.

Eric
followed. Crandall stayed.

“You know what your problem is?” he asked, not without
a careless sort of sympathy.

“Pretty sure I’m looking at it.”

“Ha ha, but only sort of. Your problem, Bierce, is that you expect us all to be survivalists just because we’ve survived something. The fact is, those people you’re pinning all our future hopes on are Manifestors. That means they were sheep before the ship crashed, so why the hell you think they’re not going to be sheep now is beyond me.”

“Because our lives are at stake, goddammit.” She kicked at the ground and glared at him. “And some of those sheep are supposed to be soldiers.”

“Soldiers?” He laughed at her. “Lady, I ain’t even old enough to drink. Nine weeks of basic training, twelve weeks of so-called deep space training, and I’m in the Fleet. You call that a soldier? I call it a forty thousand dollar check I’ll never get to cash.” He leaned out to look back toward camp, where more and more people were waking up, then settled back and just studied her for a while. “You gonna live?”

“Are any of us?”

“Little Miss Sunshine.” He glanced over his shoulder at the nearest stand of trees and looked at her again. “Want to fuck?”

“Excuse me?”

“I didn’t stutter. And you ain’t blushing, remember?” He ran an eye over her shirt-front in an interested way, but somehow without leering. “We probably got a few minutes before people really start to get underfoot. I’ll settle for a blowjob.”

“You’ll settle for jerking off.”

“Suit yourself, but this is opportunity knocking here. You ought to know that Scott’s already talking about taking you off the MREs completely.”

“What? He can’t do that!”

Crandall shrugged. “See, this is what happens when you don’t play ball nice. The biggest boy picks it up and goes home.”

“I don’t need you to take care of me.” Amber stood up and pushed past him while he smirked at her. “But you go right ahead and t
ell Scott I don’t need his rations. If that’s the way he wants to play it, I can make a spear without his stupid knife.”