Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (38 page)

“Well, fuck,” she said, surprised that she found herself smiling instead of throwing up. “Now I’ve got the full set.”

Marcus put his hand out and pressed down slowly on the barrel of her Longshot.

“Let’s talk,” he said.

PELRUAN, LATE AFTERNOON.

Dom knew it would happen sooner or later, but it still hurt when it did.

As he walked through the streets toward the bar, he saw Maria.

She was in a group of men and women clustered around a small truck, checking off wooden crates of something that might have been food—butter, cheese, whatever, but something in identical glass pots. For two seconds, she was solid and vivid enough to stop him in his tracks and make his stomach flip over. Every detail froze sharply for a moment, just to hurt him more; he could even see her necklace and her checked skirt.
It isn’t real. This kind of shit happens
.

Was it really her that I shot? Couldn’t it have been someone else?

But he had her necklace, and she’d been wearing the skirt when he found her. The more he stared in that slowmotion moment, the less she was there, and he found himself looking at a dark-haired woman who was actually nothing like her.

Bereaved people saw the dead, and they weren’t ghosts. Dr. Hayman had told him it would probably happen to him, too, and then it would stop after a while. For a woman who spat acid, she’d been almost patient when he wanted to ask her questions about Maria. He described what Maria had been like when he found her; Doc Hayman had nodded and said words like
ataxia, dystonia, nystagmus, bradykinesia, ocular toxin deposition
, and by the way, did he realize what those scars on her scalp were? Dom didn’t have the technical words, but yes, he knew all too fucking well that Maria was already long dead when she stumbled toward him. Doc Hayman said that she couldn’t cure any of those things, and what was left of Maria would have been a long time dying if she’d tried.

I’m not allowed to shoot patients. I’d be a better doctor if I did
.

Yeah, Hayman was a tough bitch. But she was honest, and that sometimes did folks more favors than kindness. Dom found himself hearing her voice whenever he started to waver and berate himself.

“What are you staring at?” the not-Maria woman demanded.

“Sorry.” Dom didn’t actually feel embarrassed at all. “You reminded me of my dead wife.”

Yeah, honesty really worked best, most of the time.

He found Marcus and Bernie sitting in the bar with Hoffman, spaced around a circular table like they were waiting to start a seance. Dom could smell the residue of an argument. Of all of them, Hoffman looked the most pissed off.

“Hey, I bartered cleaning the kitchen for some beers on the tab.” Dom tried hard to lighten the mood. “Anyone drinking?”

“I’ll take a rain check,” Hoffman said. “I intend to claim it, Santiago. But it’s time I prepared the goddamn carpet of strewn rose petals for the Chairman’s arrival.” He stood and picked up his cap. “I want to talk to you before I head back, Mataki.”

Dom collected beers from the wooden trestle counter and tried to work out what had gone on. Back at the table, Marcus and Bernie looked grim.

She raised her glass. “The Unvanquished.”

Dom followed suit. “You think they’ll reinstate the old regiments one day?”

“Whether they do or not, I’ll always be Two-Six RTI, and that’s all there is to it.”

Marcus stared at his beer for a while and didn’t join in the sentimentality. After a few moments, though, he lifted the glass, focused on it for far longer than it took to line it up, and took a pull.

“We found our third rapist,” he said.

Dom assumed the obvious. Hoffman was edgy because Bernie had done something that he now had to smooth over. “Oh. With the scumbags here, yeah?”

“It’s a shrinking pond.”

Dom waited, but no explanation followed. “Are you going to tell me?”

“We’re debating whether me slicing his balls off and feeding them to him would bring about the final collapse of human civilization,” Bernie said. “Eh, Marcus?”

Dom didn’t get it. “What’s the problem ?” The guy had committed a crime that carried the death penalty in Jacinto, and Bernie could ID him. Maybe she didn’t want a trial. She seemed more embarrassed than traumatized about the whole thing, for whatever reason. “Haul the asshole in. Shit, do we even need a trial?”

Marcus just deepened his frown. “Let’s save this for later.”

“You still believe in legal systems after what happened to you?” Dom asked. Marcus was still a Fenix, all let’s-not-talk-about-it and heavy silences. “Death sentence? Remember that?”

“I was guilty,” Marcus said.

Dom would have carried on, but he could see Bernie squirming. He didn’t want to make things any worse for her. The past was going to take a long time to shut up and leave them alone, all of them.

“You want to talk about a nice roast leg of lamb?” she asked. “We made friends with a farmer today.”

Food was always a good topic for distraction. Nobody could possibly get upset about it. Dom couldn’t recall the last time he ate lamb, and was debating the merits of a proper steak when the door opened and every head in the bar turned.

Dizzy Wallin walked in with his daughters, and—automatically, not really thinking too hard about it—Dom greeted them with a nod. So did Marcus and Bernie.

“Well, ain’t this nice,” Dizzy said, ushering his daughters to the table. “Can’t remember the last time I saw anywhere
peaceful.”

Dizzy wasn’t the most fastidious of men—he usually stank of sweat and booze—but he’d done his best to tidy up today, beard combed and nonregulation hat brushed clean. Dom wondered how long he’d keep that up. Being back with his kids seemed to have made a new man of him for the time being, but he still had that distinctive odor of a heavy drinker, a faint methanol smell that soap didn’t remove. And no amount of armor would make him look like a military man.

Marcus looked him over and nodded. “So you’re the advance party?”

“Flown in special to get them old rigs in the dockyard going,” Dizzy said. “I got the magic touch. Betty’s gonna be jealous.”

Betty was his battered grindlift rig. “She’ll understand,” Dom said. “A rig in every port, right?”

Bernie moved chairs around so that the two girls—Teresa and Maralin—could sit down. They were twins, maybe sixteen at most, with that numb, scared look that said they’d been bounced from place to place and didn’t know what
safe
meant. Dom could imagine the kind of life they led in the Stranded shanties after their dad was conscripted. It brought home to Dom how damned hungry they must have been for Dizzy to enlist just to guarantee food for them. They looked like nice kids—clean and tidy, their long reddish hair pulled back tight in ponytails. At least they could make a new start now.

“I’ll get the beer,” Dom said. “Juice for the ladies.”

Ellen, the woman who ran the bar—and who’d been sweetness and light to Dom earlier—just lowered her chin and looked torn between annoyance and embarrassment.

“Another beer, please,” Dom said. “And have you got anything without alcohol?”

“You can’t bring them in here, Dom.”

He thought she meant Dizzy’s daughters. They were too young to buy a beer in Jacinto, that was for sure, but he didn’t think folks would be that strict out here. “Hey, I’m sorry, I forgot the age thing.”

“It’s not that. You know the rules for their kind.”

“What kind?” Dom felt his throat tighten. “Gears?”

“You know what I mean.
Stranded.”
She lowered her voice. “Look, I know he’s in uniform, but… we can see what he is. They’re going to have to leave, him and the girls, before we get trouble. He’s lucky nobody shot him as soon as he got into town.”

The bar was one single low-ceilinged space, more like a sprawling living room than a bar, without one glass or chair that matched another. Dom realized he wasn’t having a private conversation. The whole bar was watching and listening.

“He’s not Stranded,” Dom said. “He’s a Gear, just like me. And if he’s a Gear, then his kids are Gear’s kids.”

Silence was a strange thing. It wasn’t just an absence of noise. It was unnatural and frozen—tensed muscles, held breaths, spit unswallowed. Dom turned to check what was going to come crashing down on him. The room just had that feeling. It wasn’t exactly an ugly crowd, not like some of the bars he’d ended up in and wished he hadn’t, but it reeked of hatred.

But it’s only Dizzy. He’s a great guy. He’s one of us. What the hell’s going on?

Dizzy bowed his head for a moment. “We didn’t plan on staying. Come on, sweeties, let’s go. Got work to do.”

“This man saved my ass.” Marcus put his hand on Dizzy’s forearm and pinned him where he sat. “If you’re attacked by Stranded again, he’ll save yours.”

Bernie leaned back in her seat. “Yeah, we’re all Gears. If he’s not welcome,
we’re
not welcome.”

Dom waited for someone to make a move. Nobody did. In a way, he would have felt better if they’d just thrown a few chairs and swung punches, because that was easy, honest, simple. Instead, they just
looked
, and the looks on their faces said that they didn’t like Gears much, either.
Great idea to remind them, Bernie
. This was their island. They hadn’t a clue what had gone on over on the mainland, but whatever it was, they didn’t want any of that shit messing up their nice tidy lives. It was like they couldn’t connect the pieces of the world and understand that they couldn’t opt out of it.

A few grubs would have straightened you out, assholes. You really need to understand what it’s been like out
there
.

“Okay, that was a beer and two juices, yeah ?” Dom abandoned the goodwill of barter and slapped his remaining bills on the counter. “That’s still legal tender. It’ll buy you something useful at any COG base.”

Ellen didn’t say anything more, but she got him his drinks and took the money. Regimental honor had been satisfied. It probably didn’t make Dizzy and his daughters feel any better, but Dom
knew
. He met Marcus’s eyes, then Bernie’s, and it was what Baird called a primal moment. The Gears bond was unbreakable. And that included Dizzy. It was the indefinable tribalism that held an army together under fire when any sane man would have been running for his life, and it was as powerful as any emotion Dom had ever known. His heart had been broken so often by now that he wasn’t sure what it felt like to be his old self, but he knew that heady bond, and it gave him hope.

The noise level in the bar slowly ratcheted up into normal hubbub as everyone tried to pretend they hadn’t really tried to kick out a Gear for not being human enough. Marcus looked as if he was counting down the minutes until he could walk out with Dizzy without looking like they’d been driven out.

“First thing we do,” Bernie said, “is make sure there’s a sergeants’ mess set up in VNB.” Vectes Naval Base had become a familiar acronym overnight, just through repetition in fleet signals to the Ravens. “Even if we have to wait for the beer to arrive. I’d rather drink water in the right company.”

Marcus glanced at his watch again. It was hard to have a conversation under the circumstances. Eventually an older man passed their table and leaned over a little toward Marcus.

“You were awarded the Embry Star, weren’t you?” he said. “Aspho Fields.”

Marcus braced to repel hero worship. Dom watched his jaw set. “Yeah. So was Private Santiago here. And Sergeant Mataki got a Sovereign’s Medal.”

“I remember,” the man said, and moved on.

Dizzy scratched his beard. “Damn, never knew we was drinking with a bunch of heroes.”

“You’re not,” Marcus said. “You’re drinking with your buddies.”

After thirty minutes, Marcus seemed to decide that the point had been made, and got up to go. Dizzy showed off a huge, ancient truck that he’d driven up from VNB, and they killed some time debating why it mattered to drag Pelruan into the fold if they were going to rebuild Jacinto to the south anyway. Anya was overoptimistic—

Dom would never call her crazy—if she thought that it was going to make for a better society in the long run. It was all about numbers; Jacinto’s remnant had them, and Pelruan didn’t.

Teresa edged closer to Bernie and eventually managed a few words. Dom was beginning to wonder if the two girls were so traumatized that they didn’t talk. That bothered him.

“They hate us, Sergeant Mataki,” Teresa said. “Is it going to be like this everywhere?”

“Not if we have anything to do with it,” Bernie said. “Right, Delta?”

Dizzy seemed to pick up on Bernie’s embarrassment. “Some Stranded are halfway to bein’ real people, sweeties.
Domesticated.”

Bernie looked chastened. After Dizzy and his girls drove off back to the base, Marcus stood staring at the dwindling taillights for a few moments.

“Never thought you had any time for Stranded, Bernie.”

“Don’t recall seeing any Stranded in that bar,” she said. “And don’t think that Dizzy didn’t make me feel guilty, either.”

Dizzy had chosen to be a regular human as far as she was concerned. Dom thought it was interesting to watch where people drew their lines. Marcus just nodded.

“Don’t forget Hoffman’s waiting to talk to you,” he said, and walked off in the direction of the Ravens.