A Private Little War(135)

Looking down the tent line, he didn’t see another living soul. He crouched down and ran a palm across a tuft of silvered grass, its gilding of frost melting under his hand. It seemed to him that he’d woken to a world made of glass and had been given the power to destroy it with his touch. The silence was narcotic. The sound of his breath, his heartbeat, the squelch of his pulse were the only sounds in the universe, and he was as alone as anyone had ever been until Lambert, the mechanic, came around the edge of his tent in a filthy jumpsuit and face blackened with oil.

“God, I thought everyone else had died,” Lambert said. He had an accent that made him sound like a news commentator. Every word was a pronouncement. From his squat, Carter looked up at him and marveled, slack-jawed, as he grunted out a huff of steam. And even after Lambert had passed on in the direction of the field and the longhouse, Carter wasn’t sure that he hadn’t just imagined him.

He’d left boot prints in the frost rime.

Carter thought he might be imagining those as well, so he touched one—fitting his hand into the smear in the glaze of ice and considering it for a moment, feeling the odd sizzle of the sublimating ice against his palm.

He stood. He fished a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket, and the sound of the crinkling foil was like a peal of thunder. Squinting down the line, he felt something bump against his ankles and looked to see Cat butting its head against the leather of his boots, scales gone a dirty gray-brown, nails scrabbling at the dirt inside the door.

“Cat,” Carter said.

Cat didn’t respond. The thing never had, its name meaningless to it like the names of everything else here were meaningless to Carter.

“I was looking for you last night, you know.”

Carter reached down and touched the little animal, bumping the tips of suddenly terribly sensitive fingers down the soft fuzz of its scales. Crouching in the doorway, Carter smoked and he stared—watching for movement, feeling for life beyond.

“How long did I sleep, Cat?” he asked, the words so close in the cold dawn that it sounded to him like he was whispering into his own ear. “Forever, I think.”

Under his hand, Cat’s body was warm like a gun. Carter’s cigarette burned down to the filter, and the smell of it was like burning aircraft dope, chemical and sharp and sour, which he didn’t like at all. It reminded him of Lefty. Carter looked at the smoldering ember and wrinkled his nose at the stink. He flicked it disdainfully out into the perfect snow.

Under his hand, he felt Cat tense—ready to bound off after it, to play its game with Carter. But then, Cat didn’t run. It relaxed instead, opened its little mouth, hissed and spit a couple of times around its bright, needle fangs, then lowered its head, turned, and slunk back to its bed of tattered rags by the door and started tearing at it with a fury.

Carter watched. He felt there was some kind of lesson there. Some indictment or vital message that Cat was trying to get across, but he couldn’t figure out what it might be. It was just the day, he decided. Everything felt portentous. He ran a hand through his clean hair, sniffed at the stinging, astringent air, and stepped out into the beautiful, empty world alone.





Fenn woke before dawn to a quiet like death, like he was the last man alive. He was half-frozen, sore all over from sleeping with his head on a table, his back arched like a cat ready for a fight. There was no coffee. In the night and darkness, someone had come and thrown a musty blanket over his shoulders, but it’d slipped off to puddle around his feet on the cold ground.

He stood and stretched and, for a minute, saw lights sparking behind his closed eyelids like the blooming flares of antiaircraft fire. He had to sit down again. Without his armor on, the cold was even more ferocious and seemed to have leaked inside him as though through a thousand pinhole wounds.

There was just enough light to make out the frayed selvage between land and sky through windows turned into portholes by frost rime—closing apertures of ghostly diffusion, looking out upon a snow-globe world made marvelous by brief peace and the snow’s disdain for detail. His breath steamed like a soul continually fighting for escape. In his head, he imagined the smell of eggs scrambling and toast burning and ham in a pan. A pine fire. The blanket joy of comforts, dimly recalled.

The worst of the mess tables was stained permanently with blood that had been scrubbed and bleached from the wood but still showed in dark smears. In the galley, he found a cleaver but felt it inadequate to the task he had in mind. He rooted around until, near an old potbellied stove, rarely used (though, had he known about it, one that would’ve made his night considerably more comfortable), he found an axe. He applied the axe to the table with some vigor. He tore up cardboard cases once used to hold bags of powdered egg. He pulled splinters from the rough wood posts used to hold up the tent canvas. By the time he was done, he’d worked up a sweat that froze against his skin every time he paused for breath, but had the makings of a decent fire. He piled his fuel, his tinder, his shredded cardboard, in the middle of a space he’d cleared on the floor and lit it with his lighter in ten places. He blew carefully on the guttering flames, coaxing them to spread, then squatted on his haunches, humming distractedly to himself, and waited to see if they would take.