The Farther Shore Read online

  “I think we all are,” I said.

  “This is fucking spooky,” said Cooper.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” I said.

  Cooper looked up at the sky. “Still.”

  Santiago wasn’t entirely stable, but I trusted him. I’d been on guard duty back at Fort Drum when the MPs brought him to stay in the barracks because his wife had filed assault charges against him. He was living too hard, but he often assured us that it was all a big lie, that his wife had been trying to get him in trouble for years.

  And in any case, she was there with his two babies when we left by bus for Griffiths Air Force Base. He’d made some questionable decisions in training, but they nearly always seemed to be an effective way of dealing with the situation at hand.

  They’d moved to the larger caliber guns, and the aircraft were concentrating their fire better. They were striving for a great opening night. They were desperate for the city’s submission, desperate for perfection.

  The Army was out there too, massing to the southwest and the northeast, along the main road that ran down the coast and through the city. We were to gauge the show of force against the level of resistance and report on whether the city was awed enough to accept help in forming some kind of government.

  Santiago stepped up behind us, the radio in his hand. “Spectre Six-Two, Spectre Six-Two,” he called. “Spectre Six-Two, Spectre Six-Two, adjust fire ten by ten north.” He set the handset back on the receiver, then crouched behind me for a moment, watching my section of the city. He was careful to stay away from the edge, just far enough to avoid the view of anyone who might be looking up for a sign of us. I peeked over the edge briefly, but I didn’t see a soul in the street below.

  “How long do you think we’ll be here?” Cooper asked Santiago.

  “Don’t ask me that,” Santiago said. “Forever. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll leave you here. What’s it matter to you anyway? What have you got to go home to?” He walked away before Cooper could respond.

  “Just wondering,” Cooper said. He was probably thinking about his virgin life and the girlfriend he planned to make his wife. The others gave him a hard time, saying that he had it all, that he had it all lined up the way a man should. It was such a lonely notion up there on the rooftop.

  “We’ll be home by Christmas, Coop,” I said.

  “That’ll be good,” he said.

  “I heard it from Shane, at headquarters,” I said.

  “Can you imagine so many cities so close together that you wouldn’t be able to see a single star for all the light?” He took his Kevlar helmet off and rolled over onto his back. “I’ve been there. Think about it,” he added, as Santiago walked over. “One day you won’t be able to see the stars because of all the light.”

  Santiago turned back to the bombing. Whenever a bomb exploded it briefly colored the darkness of the desert a bright orange.

  “Bullshit,” Santiago said. “You’d still be able to see them from the ocean.” He knelt down and took his helmet off. He ran a hand through his cropped dark hair. “There’s a lot of ocean in this world.”

  “If you got enough money to get out there,” Cooper said. “People like us don’t.” Then he took a long breath, as if he were trying to smell the ocean through the city.

  If I knew the names of all of the constellations and all those warriors, gods, and poets that they immortalized, I would have rattled them off, one after the other, for the amusement of Santiago and Cooper. But I know nothing about the stars.

  Cooper and I relieved Heath and Fizer of guard duty in the building’s only stairwell. It was three in the morning. Just two and a half more hours until dawn, and then we’d be at the stadium. There they’d pick us up in a Black Hawk and carry us out of the city, flying up the long stretch of coast, out over the desert they’d bombed, and back to the main camp a hundred miles to the north. Headquarters felt that getting out of the city would be the hardest part of the mission, so they were picking us up at the stadium, a massive structure no one had used for years. If for some reason they failed to pick us up there, we were to drive the van back out of the city.

  The darkness in the stairwell was hard on the eyes. I was trying to see something where most likely there was nothing. Looking over the railing, down into seventeen floors of darkness, I tried to distinguish between the ground floor and all the nothing I was staring into. I wanted to believe that I could see the front door. Finally, I put on my Night Vision Goggles. The wide stairwell was such that you could see clear to the ground floor. They didn’t make stairwells like that anymore.

  I’d brought an MRE to try and get some nourishment. I set my weapon aside and tore the package open. It was a slice of ham. I could taste it before taking a bite. The smell of the juices and preservatives made me feel like throwing up. I put it aside and forced myself to eat the crackers, hoping that they would make me thirsty, and perhaps help me hold down some water.

  We’d set up trip flares on the fifth floor and grenade simulators on the eighth and ninth, in case someone tried to sneak up on us. Santiago made us repeat this information aloud several times, so that we understood exactly where the traps were set. Fifth floor flares was a mouthful. Eight and nine simulators was easy to remember.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Cooper asked, tearing the top off an MRE. I could smell aluminum and spaghetti. My stomach rose to my throat.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I said. “Why?” I was trying hard to listen to the darkness, but I knew that Cooper was trying to lighten the mood, so I let him talk.

  He chewed slowly. The sound was nauseating. “I don’t know,” he finally said, “just that it’s night. Don’t you think violent places have more ghosts?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Actually, I guess I don’t really believe in ghosts. Maybe I haven’t seen enough to convince me otherwise. We’re always a little too eager to believe in just about anything.”

  “I just thought I’d ask,” he said. “I’m scared. But I believe.”

  “Somehow ghosts seem less frightening here,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said distantly. “If that’s what you think.”

  I could hardly make him out in the darkness. I couldn’t even see my feet, so all I had to hold on to was his voice. “Cancer,” I said, “now that’s something to be scared of. Sitting in this building is something to be scared of. Meteorites, high school, the Muppets. That’s the shit.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Wind chimes,” I added.

  “Wind chimes?”

  “They freak me out,” I said.

  He let out a tiny laugh, probably just to let me know he heard.

  “This girl, Angela,” I said, “sent me a book when we were back at Fort Drum, about all the strange sexual things that have happened to historical figures. There was this guy, a poet I think, who was afraid of his wife’s pubic hair. Think about that, the disappointment after the long wait.”

  “Yeah,” he said. But he didn’t laugh, and I wondered if he had even heard me.

  “I can’t wait to go to college,” I said, hoping to bring him back.

  “It’s just this place,” he said. “I never really knew it before.”

  “But you know more about it than the rest of us,” I said. “You could go it alone if you had to.”

  Cooper had been born here. It must have been a strange place to return home to. Some are born to the war, and others are not.

  “This is a bad place,” he said.

  “There are worse,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I was just trying to be scared of something else.”

  “Fair enough,” I replied.

  Cooper had a heat rash on his neck, which made him look a little younger than he actually was. He was nineteen, with dark brown eyes, and he dreamed of going to college and getting a degree in architecture. When he laughed he was all teeth and slaps on the back. He would put his hand out to touch you, to let you in on the joke.

&nbs
p; Cooper was the only virgin I knew. Or at least the only one that admitted as much. He was religious, more so than the rest of us, and I knew this had something to do with his virginity. Because we weren’t the same religion, he’d already assured me that I wouldn’t be at his wedding, that no outsiders would be allowed at his wedding. Otherwise, he said, you’d be the best man. It was a nice gesture. He had a girlfriend and he was waiting to marry her, waiting to be with her.

  Cooper told stories about how he and his friends could get anywhere in New York by going underground. They knew every tunnel, every hidden passage, everything about underground New York. He’d promised to show me what he meant if I came to the city with him one weekend, but I never did. We were always making plans to go, but then something else would come up, something like going to Quebec for the weekend because someone told a story about the women and the bars. Or we’d go to Syracuse because we heard a rumor about a hot rod.

  Cooper was the oldest in a family of eight. His grandmother had raised them after his mother and father were murdered just before he came to America. I never asked him about his trip across the water.

  I listened to the night, waiting. When Cooper finally leaned back, the darkness and silence settled into the stairwell. There was a lull in the bombing. Even the dogs of the city were quiet. It was so still that I could hear the hum of my body. There’s no such thing as silence, I thought, straining to hear something.

  I stood and looked over the edge of the railing, struggling to see a few floors down in all that darkness. The stairwell curled out of sight like a tail. I felt as if the night was being pushed into me. I wondered how much more I could hold. Fear was in my eyes and in my ears. The buzz of mosquitoes filled the air. I slapped at them a few times, then gave up.

  I let Cooper fall asleep, and got to wondering what people out there in the city were dreaming about. Then I wondered whether any of the girls I knew back home were dreaming about me at that moment. I was eager to fall in love. I’m always falling in love. Leave me alone for a moment and I’m falling in love with the very idea of a woman. But we always love what is lost to us, so all I could imagine were girls I’d never see again.

  Leaning against the railing, I stood and looked down into the stairwell. I couldn’t see anything, but I listened intently to the night.

  At first I thought it was the wind, but then I could distinguish voices. Someone was whispering at the bottom of the stairs, and somehow I knew that they were going to make their way up to us. They were careful to be quiet, but I heard steps, like the soft tap of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. They sounded far away, yet their silence was more threatening than anything that could be spoken.

  I touched Cooper lightly on the shoulder. I didn’t have to say anything. He was quickly awake and aware enough to not make a sound. He stood and stepped to the door that led onto the roof, opening it just enough to let a tiny sliver of light appear on the floor. Then he let it close gently. I keyed my squad radio so that the others would know something was wrong.

  Suddenly the stairwell filled with the silver light of a trip flare. Cooper quickly opened the door and motioned the others in. Santiago pointed for Cooper to stay where he was, and then he started down the stairs two steps at a time, the rest of us falling in behind him.

  We stopped on the ninth floor, waiting. I pointed out the trip line for a grenade simulator on the floor. Then the other grenade simulator went off on the eighth floor and something red and burning hot shot up through the stairwell and past my face. It looked like a piece of metal.

  Santiago pointed for Heath and Fizer to stay where they were and then the rest of us continued down the steps, two or three at a time. We could make out their shapes by now, two of them, running. I saw the shape of a gun in the darkness and dove to my left down a hallway. They were retreating down the stairs. Using the wall as cover, I found a target but held my fire. I followed it for a moment.

  Then there was a blast from the stairwell behind Santiago and me. Zeller lit into the darkness, his weapon rattling to life. My ears filled with a tremendous ringing. I started down the steps after Santiago. He cleared the distance between himself and the figures quickly, firing heavily into them.

  It was nothing but the red light of tracers by now, because I couldn’t hear. Rounds ricocheted off walls and I worried I’d get hit by one of the bullets. Then the firing stopped for a moment, until Zeller fired a three-round burst that dropped one of the targets. The figure went down and Santiago pointed Zeller to the person’s aid while we moved on, hunting the other one.

  As we moved past the fallen figure I told myself not to look, to keep going. If you looked at the fallen you paused long enough to join them. I followed Santiago, clearing with him to the next floor. I took aim at the target myself, but then noticed Santiago out of the corner of my eye, tracing the running figure. He took a knee and aimed. It was a difficult shot, but he dropped it.

  We moved toward the person he’d shot, and then Santiago waved me past, pointing for me to clear all the way to the bottom of the stairs, in case there were more. My ears were still ringing, and I couldn’t hear a thing. There was still a long way to the bottom, and I didn’t want to separate myself from the others just yet. I walked down a few flights, then stopped and put on my goggles. There was nothing. I looked up the stairwell and saw Heath and Fizer moving toward me.

  “What the fuck happened?” yelled Heath. He was close to me, screaming in my ear. He was dripping with sweat, and I could smell him.

  “I don’t know,” I yelled back.

  “What do we do?” screamed Fizer. The two of them looked at me, waiting.

  “Hold the front door,” I said, pointing them down the stairs.

  “We got to get out of here,” Heath muttered.

  “Hold the door,” I said.

  Heath shook his head and the two of them started off again down the steps.

  I found Santiago and told him we needed to move. Then I looked down at the body. It was small for a man. Santiago bent over the figure with an unrolled compound press, the loose white ends dangling beside him. He stood and said something, but at first I couldn’t hear over the ringing in my ears. Then he was screaming and it came to me in slices, getting louder, then duller, until I finally got it: “They’re just kids.”

  “I saw a gun,” I said.

  “It’s a stick,” Santiago said, pointing at a stick on the floor.

  “This one’s dead,” Cooper said over the radio.

  Santiago called Cooper down because the one he’d shot was still alive. The boy didn’t make a sound, but he was obviously fighting for his life.

  “You and Zeller get the gear,” Santiago said, pointing toward the roof.

  Running up the stairs, I slipped in the mess that Zeller had made of the other child. I stood slowly and walked carefully. I told Zeller we were to grab everything.

  They were all standing in a circle around the wounded boy when Zeller and I returned with the gear. The ringing had subsided enough that I could hear the others breathing heavily.

  “Goddamn it,” Santiago said to Heath and Fizer, “you two should have stayed at the front door. I’m not about to lose my squad because you two can’t fucking listen.” He pointed them back down the stairs.

  The boy had a hole in his chest. Cooper applied pressure to the wound.

  “We got to go, Cooper,” Santiago finally said, grabbing him by the shoulder and lifting him to his feet. The pool of blood beneath the boy was expanding steadily.

  Then we were down the stairs and out in the street. Standing in the open air, it was as if we’d set off a chain reaction. Machine guns echoed in the night, answering to the shots we’d fired. People seemed to be firing at the sky, down alleys, and all around us. It was as if we’d given a signal.

  The van was gone.

  “I can’t believe this,” Santiago said.

  People standing in doorways turned their heads to watch as we jogged up the street. My rucksack dug i
nto my hips and shoulders and my M-16 clicked like an insect as the shoulder strap bounced lightly against the weapon. My socks were already soaked in sweat. It was ten miles to the stadium in the southern part of the city.

  Most of the people we passed didn’t really seem to care about us. They were just like the inhabitants of any big city when something disastrous strikes: some were eager to stand on the porch and watch their neighbors suspiciously while others were curious to see what might happen next. But in this city, where people were routinely hacked up with machetes, shot in the streets, or dying of famine and disease, they’d seen it all before.

  Men with Kalashnikovs passed us indifferently, moving in the opposite direction. We might as well have been ghosts to them, haunting the wrong time and place.

  When we heard vehicles approaching we hid in doorways or ducked into alleys in case they were the technicals we’d heard about, old trucks mounted with machine guns and rocket launchers. At one point we hid in the front yard of what looked to have been a great mansion. We stood among empty pots and planters, in an area where a beautiful garden once thrived.

  About halfway to the stadium we stopped near a fountain that was the only decoration I could see in a massive plaza. It had been about forty minutes since we left the building. Kids mulled about. The fountain was empty and we took a seat on its lip. It was still unbearably hot in the city, but somehow the wind gave me a chill.

  An astonishing number of children milled about in the plaza. This was a city for desolate and abandoned children.

  Mangy dogs roamed among the children, in groups of three or four. For the most part people ignored them, but if they got too close people kicked them in the ribs.

  There were vendors everywhere. Heath walked over to one of them and bought a beer. Santiago watched him.

  “You brought money?” I asked Heath when he joined us again.

  “You didn’t?” he replied.

  “I couldn’t think of a reason,” I said.