Dragons Don't Have Fleas -- Part V
A Short Story -- Science Fiction
Dragons Don't Have Fleas -- Part V
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Edgar had not lived long past the madness known as revenge. Daniel lay now upon a rock writhing in pain, his right arm a charred, blackened mass of dead flesh with a few slabs of pink where the outer muscles had flaked away. The bone was nearly all that kept it attached to his body.
Joshua placed the tip of his intensifier on Daniel's arm above the wound area and just below the deltoid muscles. For a moment the burning and the smell was intense; Daniel blacked out and Joshua lost his stomach.
He did not die. Joshua could not afford it. He loved Daniel. Daniel was all he had left to love. Joshua tended him, held him, cried over him. He gave Daniel all his strength, all that a father or mother or lover could give. And he did not die. Not then. He survived but his spirit had been burned away with his arm. His eyes had been opened to the futility of his existence. One night he sat staring into the campfire and began to snicker. "Did you ever . . . " he started saying.
"Did I ever what?" Joshua asked.
"Did you ever dream you would someday be the last man on earth?" Daniel stopped laughing when he saw how unmoved and serious Joshua looked. "Didn't you ever wonder, Joshua?" He waited but no reply came. "When you were a kid didn't you ever wonder what it would be like to be the last person on earth? I did. All children do, or did. Well, I am not the very last, but I've got a damn good idea, now."
"There are others." Joshua put a little effort into sounding optimistic if not actually feeling that way. "We will find them."
"Are you joking?" Daniel's sarcasm perched on Joshua like a dunce cap. "Why are we still alive? We should be dead along with everybody else."
There was a long silence. Why should we be dead, Joshua wondered. Staying alive is, after all, only a natural need.
"Who started this damn war anyway?" Daniel muttered. The question did not seem to be addressed directly to Joshua, but to everything, person, or place, and to nothing.
Long ages seemed to pass in the space between the asking and the answering when Joshua softly said, "I did," to everything, person, or place, and to nothing.
It took Daniel a few moments to sober to the string of words falling effortlessly from Joshua's mouth. He caught snatches of acronyms such as Cameo. There were fleas, viruses, antifleas, and operations like Fleabag and Crop Duster. A horde of words so unassuming made him understand that for the last five years he had been compatriot to the beast who destroyed his world, his life, and now he played the devil's own confessor.
This man is my friend, Daniel thought. He has finally cracked, and his addled imagination has taken liberty with his tongue. But no, he knew the words for what they were -- the truth. The revulsion he first felt had swelled to hate then burst to become pity. He felt like a child who just found out he was adopted and that his father was not his real father. He still loved him, but it was different now. Funny how a few words can change whole relationships. He closed his eyes as he lay by the fire and slept while Joshua talked on into the night to the dying embers.
When Joshua awoke the next morning, he was alone. He did not understand why Daniel had left until after trailing him for four hours he heard the distant rumble of an explosion. The kind a weapons pack made when set for overload/destruct. Daniel had gone to make peace with the Eurorusk. Joshua hoped that many Eurorusk had shared in that peace.
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No, Joshua decides, she is not the last. She is very young and very scared, but she is not the last one. The strangeness lingers still around her presence. He turns and leaves her to continue his mission at the meadow. He feels no fear at offering his back to this one. It is an odd sensation for him.
"Wo fahrst do hin?" the girl calls after him.
He pays no attention and moves on, treating her as an apparition in a dream. Twenty minutes later he is within one-hundred meters of the meadow and approaching it cautiously. The meeting with the girl has faded from his mind as if it happened a hundred kilometers ago. He concentrates solely upon the ambush. His tension snaps like a blood vessel in the brain when a low, urgent voice calls to him.
"Vorsicht!" The soft, anxious whisper startles him from a few meters behind. The girl is quietly coming to him. Her actions suggest a necessary stealth in approaching the meadow. "Vorsicht! Die Gefahr." This time she points toward the meadow.
Joshua pushes aside his first fear that she has come to betray him to whomever may be in the meadow. Renate takes his arm and leads him across the stream and through thickening undergrowth. They angle away from the stream's entrance to the meadow and toward a rock outcropping that borders the little field. Joshua eases through a jumble of boulders to a crevice that gives a limited but adequate view. Framed by the crevice the world displays a new shape. Among the handful of Eurorusk soldiers are many men and women of a pale hue, flattish faces, and almond eyes.
It is very plain that the well-fed, well-equipped soldiers in the uniforms of the New Chines Empire are the ones in charge. For Joshua the pieces begin to fall into place. These backward barbarians who reverted to old Mao ways after the splintering’s of failed revolutions of reform in the early 1990's had both flea and antiflea well before Joshua and Marion. Marion had been wrong. Joshua had not made the antiflea too soon. He had done it just in time. Well, so much for the Russian propaganda about victory in the Sino-Soviet conflict of twelve years past, he thinks.
Those sons-of-pirate-bitches, Joshua scowls. Then, lying prone on the rocks, with his face buried in the crook of his arm, his body begins to rock and heave with suppressed mirth. Renate looks at him with a mixture of surprise and anger. She grabs the untanned skin covering his shoulder and pulls him around to face her. The tears running down his face and tangled beard shocks her into letting him go, and her anger leaves her.
The gravity of the situation is lost to irony as he cries and laughs at himself. It was partially on behalf of the Asians that his odyssey began five years ago. He had been wrong about so many things. Marion had told him how naive he was and that the world was too complex for simple solutions. Had they planned this, he wonders, or had the implementation of Cameo caused them to retaliate? He is curious enough to walk out and ask one of the Asian officers. It would not be the first idiotic thing he has done, but it would probably be the last.
But why now and how? Wasn't it the Eurorusk who bombed and invaded North America? For five years he had seen only dead and dying Eurorusk soldiers, Renate's people. He stares at her and wonders. As he wonders he notices that just inside the neck opening of her ragged shirt is a blue mark. He reaches slowly towards her to not frighten her and pulls the shirt awkwardly to one side. She calmly accepts this action because it has been done many times for authorities to check the official seal and set of numbers tattooed just below her left collar bone. His forefinger gently feels the bump of an RF seed also. Yes, Joshua thinks, they would have inoculated the few remaining. But not until fear, death and the threat of extinction had brought the whole consortium of nations to heal. Had not Cameo predicted it? He remembers with regret the two young soldiers he killed just hours earlier. Now the Asians rule the world.
He rises and turns to go, and Renate catches his arm. She casts a baleful look towards her comrades then to Joshua.
"Not this time," he says, and he shakes his head. He is sure she understands, but still, she clings to his arm and stares into the meadow. He knows her torment and vexation and sits silently with her in meditation.
With a deep breath and exhalation, she ends her reverie. "Lebe wohl, Roule," she utters softly, and with no second thought, turns and pulls Joshua back to the forest.
It is Joshua who looks back, not the girl. How easy it is to leave and not look back. He has never looked back since the day he opened swollen eyes and beheld Edgar Scott's kindly bulldog face. Nothing in the past promised a secure future. That is what makes it easy not to look back on the bits and pieces of life scattered over the last five years. It has been ages since his mind and thoughts were drawn up short to look back, and now he looks back to the meadow. Someone there has shared moments, good and bad, with this young woman, Renate, but no bond of future promise could be possible in a war and flea-infested world. It is so easy to leave and not look back.
Joshua feels better than he can remember feeling in a long, long time. Optimism is flowing back into him. He travels quickly and gleefully; he almost must suppress giggles as on the day he found the antivirus.
Renate. He likes the sound of her name. She will make a good compatriot, he thinks. In his heart he knows there are others, the ones like him who have survived and those like Renate who have and will find their freedom from their new masters. And Marion, that tough old bird, may even be wandering the hills of Mexico. As impossible as it seems he schemes of doing his old work. His mind aches at the thought of being six years out of the research lab. He wonders how dull he has grown.
END