"The World All Before Them Ch 5" by B. Landon Hurley

It was truly a miracle, the difference that hope made. The Seer had visions all the time now, Sir Nicholas was even more bubbly, if that was possible. And the Writer -- each night he remembered more and more literature that he had read. And Arthur had miraculously found a ball point pen in his coat pocket. The Writer wrote desperately, hungrily, frantically in his joy. There was no paper, so he wrote on his clothes. He was an odd sight, with beautiful words parading over his plaid shirt and now stretching onto his khakis. As always, the guards did not comment or care. They watched the work being done with their eyes like pits and did not speak.

Arthur located a few grains of sand on the cement floor and picked them up by licking his fingertips. He stood up quickly, feeling his back muscles scream, and found himself face-to-face with George Mallory.

"Mr. Mallory!" Arthur cried.

Like all the others, Mallory showed no expression. The eyes were almost as empty as those of the soldiers. Mallory held out a hand for Arthur's grains of sand.

Arthur held onto them. "Can you tell me, did you make it to the top before your fall?"

The face was young and smooth (he had died on the mountain, as a young man) but there was something terrifyingly old about it. The real Mallory was lost somewhere in the depths of those black eyes, like the senile who are lost in memory.

"Don't you remember your own name?" Arthur cried in frustration.

There was no reaction from Mallory, but the Colonel raised his eyeless head. "Keep quiet!" he roared.

Arthur still clutched the sand. "You used to climb mountains when you were alive, mountains!" he cried.

At the word 'mountains,' Arthur thought he saw some spark of recognition. The head raised just a little, he was sure of it! But the Colonel barked, "I said back to work!" and the light died. Mallory took the grains from Arthur and shuffled away.

Arthur stood and stared after the sad, slumped figure. His head was ringing. Mountains...mountains...

The Colonel was looking away. Arthur dug into his coat pocket and quickly rifled through all the photos he had taken.

There! It was the picture of the towering black spire. It was real, not an illusion: even in this place, the camera could not lie.

Mountains. You used to climb mountains. Why would Mallory be the first person he saw upon his arrival? Out of all the dead, the endless sea of dead, why him?

"Mallory!" Arthur shouted, his voice ringing in the silent courtyard. "I call you a Bringer of Skill!"

The shuffling stopped; the shaggy head swiveled. But the next moment, Arthur heard the Colonel's voice in his ear. "Enough!"

And Arthur was tumbling helplessly into the dark muzzle of the gun, spiraling into shadow...

"Honest, Dad, I don't know what happened to your medal..."

"Art, the ribbon's torn. What did you do to it?"

"I didn't!"

"Art, I'm very disappointed. Do you know what this medal is?"

"No, Dad."

"It's a purple heart, son. I earned this, fighting in the War. It was the most terrible experience of my life, Art. All the army could offer me in return was this medal, and I earned every inch of it. And now it's been damaged. Do you understand how disappointing this is to me?"

Ten-year-old Arthur was close to tears now. "Honest, Dad -- I didn't -- I just wanted to look at it!" The guilt and shame were as fresh as the day it actually happened.

Arthur lay face down on his cot and did not talk for a long while. The cried of the children outside seemed even more oppressive than usual on this night.

"Writer, do you believe that the soul is immortal?" Arthur mumbled.

The Writer paused; he was sitting in his boxer shorts and had been scribbling busily on his pants. "I know that my body is dead, Arthur, and I know that this shell I have now seems to live on," he said. "So yes, I believe the soul to be immortal."

"But I don't mean this." Arthur pointed to himself. "This -- I don't know what it is. But it isn't a soul. A soul is an identity, who you are, underneath all the shells. And when I looked into Mallory's eyes today...I saw the back of his head. He, like everyone else, has been eaten away inside." Arthur pulled the blanket over his head. "This morning, I had to think hard for a long while before I remembered my name."

"Nevertheless," the Writer said gently, "I will continue to believe that there is a part of us that can never die. It is that part of us that is pure life. The people here have been beaten down to within an inch of their existence -- but they are not dead. Look at me, Arthur. I thought I was lost, until you reminded me who I was. The fact that I can't remember my name doesn't matter. 'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.' I am a Writer, and that can never be taken from me." He paused, and the dark beetle eyes were twinkling. "This is good, I've got to get this down," he said, and resumed scribbling.

Arthur's hands tightened on the camera that hung around his neck as always. His eyes were bright and diamond-hard. The camera cannot lie. It shows truth in the same way the Seer's eyes do.

When Arthur stood up from his bed and began walking down the dark aisle, the Writer did not question or protest; he was lost deeply in his hastily scrawled words. The Seer, too, was asleep, her Eye exhausted after being put to rigorous use for the first time in five hundred years.

Arthur walked quickly, humming a marching tune his father had taught him under his breath to drown out the voices of the ghost-children. When he was a young boy, his father used to line him and his older brother up in the back yard and march them about. "'Eft, right, 'eft, right, lift your knees high. Swing those arms! You're soldiers of the United States of America, boys!"

It could have taken Arthur days to walk down that unending aisle and find Mallory's bed. There was no pattern to it, no organization; it was just an unending row of sleep-closed faces in the dim light. But he was lucky; it did not take so very long at all.

The man lay as if in a coffin, stretched stiff and flat on the cot with his bone-white hands folded neatly across his stomach. There was a climbing pick at his side, as well as a coil of rope.

Arthur did not hesitate. Still moving with his brisk march, he stamped up next to the cot, raised his camera for a bird's eye view, and took the shot. The flash made Mallory jerk; he sat up quickly, and for a moment light flooded into the dark eyes as Mallory struggled to understand what was happening.

Arthur thrust the photograph in the man's face. "Look. Look here, this is you, George Mallory. You climbed Everest, man! You wanted to touch the sky!"

The face before him was as smooth and blank as a lump of clay; the thin dark hair still neatly parted, the straight long nose and thin white lips; the man, pick in hand, was still dressed in the tweeds of an English mountaineer gentleman from a bygone era. But the lips were opening and closing. Something, something was struggling to the surface. The white hands clenched and unclenched; the mouth worked as thought sounding out words.

When the sound came, it was a half croak, half whisper. "Everest." The eyes stared and stared at the picture Arthur held.

"Yes!" Arthur cried. "Everest! The mountain, that you climbed, Mallory, the mountain!" In his excitement he didn't notice that the man in the next cot over had sat up and was watching them intently. Arthur sat down on the end of the cot in his eagerness, took the limp hand and put the photo in it. Arthur grasped the pick and held it in front of Mallory. "Do you remember what you used this for? Do you remember snow, and ice, and stone? Bitter winds and frostbite? Do you remember how it felt being on top of the world?"

The eyes were on him now, and they were alight and conscious. "Yes. Yes! Who are you?"

"I'm Arthur." Arthur offered his hand. "And I come here because -- we need you to do it again." He showed Mallory the picture of the towering monolith. "Can you -- climb this?"

Mallory was grinning, and tears squeezed out of his bright eyes. "To get out of this place, I would climb the walls of hell!"

The man next to them suddenly stood up, then knelt before Arthur. He was Japanese, tall, muscular, stony-faced, and dressed in the traditional Samurai garb of two centuries past. "I thank you," he said in heavily accented English. "You have meant only to help this other man, but you have helped me remember myself as well. I am in your debt."

Arthur was completely flabbergasted. "But -- how?" he stammered.

The man's intense brown eyes were reverent. "You brought light with you."

And Mallory nodded solemn agreement.

"I will serve you to whatever end, to repay my debt," the Samurai murmured.

Nothing happens without a reason, thought Arthur. "Yes...yes. Then join us. We're going to escape this place, and wrest away Death's tyranny! You are a Bringer of Skill, Mallory, and you are a Bringer of Strength! We will need everyone to accomplish what we want. Now come on -- the others will want to meet you both."

Suddenly, things couldn't happen fast enough. "If we wait too long, we'll just get mired down here like all the others," Arthur told the little group clustered on the beds. "There must have been other escape attempts; we have to be the ones who succeed." His voice was shrill with desperation. The eyes of the people clustered around his bed were large and white, like frightened children.

Gradually, a plan began to appear on the hem of the Writer's pants, spreading through the weary nights and up and around the waistband. It would be at night, of course. And it could only be on the night of the next new arrivals, when the doors were unlocked. They had no way of knowing what sort of guard was on at night; during the day there were only three or four impassive soldiers perched on each wall, those rifles that fired things far worse than bullets resting easily on their hips. The main gate was barricaded steel, festooned with barbed wire, but it was also studded with enormous, oily bolts, and that was all Mallory needed to climb it.

To be sure, it was a haphazard and desperate plan. No one even knew if the Samurai's arrows would have any effect; if their empty-eyed captors could be killed at all. The Seer shook her head when all the eyes shifted expectantly to her. "During crucial times like these, nothing can be seen. The future is not fixed. No one has a destiny; they might be destined for something, but even that is not certain."

"But what about this entire quest? Your seeing me-" Arthur gulped uncertainly - "as a Bringer of Light?"

The Seer's dark, lovely eyes gazed into his seriously. "That was not a question of prescience. It is a truth. You always have been and you always be a Bringer."

Arthur clenched his fists. He wanted to pull out his hair like clumps of grass. He wanted to kick Death in the ribs. He wanted -- he wanted all the bad things in his life not to exist so that the soldiers would not hold that terrible weapon over him. "And if we fail?"

"Still." She nodded around at the quiet circle. "We are still Bringers."

No one spoke anymore, but by the casual contact of hands on shoulders and elbows brushing elbows, they all felt linked together, in a circle of friends, and drew comfort from each other as hungrily as a starving man with a feast laid before him.

The newcomers would arrive in three days.

It was sometime in the late afternoon, and an enormous dusty pile of sand still awaited Arthur. He wiped his forehead with one hand, and when the hand came down from his eyes, a ragged and white-faced band of dead had appeared in the courtyard, escorted by gun-toting soldiers. "Keep moving!" the Colonel Arthur had come to hate most of all barked.

The newly dead shuffled and skittered when prodded by the muzzles of those terrifying guns. Their eyes rolled like frightened horses as they trickled past the workers in tight little clumps. One man was babbling frantically in a language Arthur did not know, gesticulating at the iron gate that was closing, the grey world outside. Suddenly, the Colonel leveled his rifle at the man's forehead. The effect was as rapid as a shotgun's retort; the man fell back and down as if struck, instantly unconscious.

Arthur shuddered violently and lowered his eyes as the Colonel stalked past. To think they would have to take that on...

In the bunker, all was in quiet readiness. The Seer was meditating; the Samurai was sharpening his curved sword with quick scrapes of his whetstone; Mallory checked and rechecked his ropes and pick. Sir Nicholas hummed nervously to himself, twiddling his thumbs.

Only the Writer seemed uneasy. He gave Arthur a sharp look with one deep brown eye, and Arthur jumped off his bed and came over. "What is it?"

The man laid a hand on Arthur's shoulder. "This is difficult to say," he muttered. "But there's a good chance that not all of us are going to make it out of this place."

Arthur nodded heavily.

"But -- the quest -- it has to go on," the Writer whispered urgently. We all have to agree that if -- someone gets left behind-"

"I agree," the Seer said suddenly, her eyes still closed. "There is no time for heroics. All effort must be for the quest."

The heads nodded solemnly all around.

The Samurai stood up. "Now. We will leave this place."

A few carefully placed blows from Mallory's pickaxe dismantled the iron bed frames, giving everyone a steel staff the height of their hips. Arthur stuffed his thin blanket in his jacket pocket and followed the others to the massive warehouse door. It was silent tonight -- to give the newcomers one day of rest before the ending of their lives, Arthur thought. But they would use it to their advantage.

There was a barred window high, high above the door. "We have to see what guards there are," the Samurai barked. He pointed to Mallory. "Climbing man, go up there and look."

Mallory nodded curtly. The door was crisscrossed with bars and rafters for strength; he didn't even need his rope. Arthur stared in astonishment as the Englishman shimmied and scrambled up the door with monkeyish ease.

"Just like in the daytime," Mallory said presently. "No one outside the door or in the courtyard, but quite a few marching on the battlements."

"Baaatelmens?" the Samurai repeated.

"On top of the walls," Arthur said quickly. He waved to Mallory to come back down, which the man accomplished in a tenth of the time it had taken him to get up.

The Samurai was thinking. "The big open space-"

"Courtyard," supplied Sir Nicholas.

"The courtyard is no good. The soldiers can take us all from high up. We must stay against the wall, one at a time."

"Single-file," said Sir Nicholas. He rubbed his hands briskly together. "All right then, what's stopping us? Nothing? Then off we go!"

Arthur clenched the metal leg torn from his cot as the door groaned inwards. Was this how his father had felt at seventeen, shivering in the dark hold of a ship off of Normandy with a semi in his hands? Not knowing what he would meet?

The Samurai slipped outside when the doorway was only partly opened. After a few tense moments, he gave a soft bird call. Arthur, then the others, poked their heads around the door.

The sky was the formless grey of false dawn; the cement courtyard looked like a smooth tract of snow, flawless and dazzlingly empty. The wary adventurers pressed their backs against the corrugated iron warehouse and sidled until the rough cement wall towered over their heads.

The Samurai laid an arrow on his bowstring, stroking the bow lovingly before drawing it back and aiming for one of the silhouetted figures high on the opposite wall. Arthur dug his fingernails into his sweating palms and his breath froze in his lungs -- now they would know if their enemies could be killed...

The arrow whistled high into the darkness and thrummed into the dark figure's back. It crumpled soundlessly and Arthur felt his heart in his throat, choking him -- They can be killed, they can! he wanted to shout, but fear and the pressing night held him back -- suddenly everything was new and bursting with hope again, they could win, they would live again, he would hold Marilyn in his arms, he would smell something apart from the burnt ash in his lungs --

The Samurai did not seem moved; he was aiming at another shadow slinking down the wall. "Go to the gate," he hissed. "I will follow."

They all jumped like startled deer and then skittered along the side of the wall. As the Samurai struck again, a siren began to wail, low and keening like a cow in labor. "Keep going!" Arthur shouted, at the back now and pushing them forward. There were many boots now, tramping hurriedly on the concrete, and all of Arthur's new hope was wrung out of him like sweat. A searchlight swept and looped abruptly across the vast empty courtyard: it was like something out of a cops and robbers movie, with the faded black and white tones and the whole cluster of them darting along the wall. But there was something more terrifying than any Hollywood cop about the blank-faced, dark-eyed soldiers marching unhurriedly across the courtyard now, rifles on their shoulders.

They were at the gate. "Hurry!" the Seer cried, as Mallory swung his rope over the towering cast-iron framework. His congenial British lope vanished into catlike movements, hugging the wall, fingers and toes caressing the rigid bolts in the frame, head craning up to the rings of chicken wire at the top. In the distance, soldiers continued dropping soundlessly, yet the block of them moved on. Seconds seemed to pass like hours now -- Mallory crawling over the edge of the massive door, hacking at the barbed wire with his pick -- the little group was hunched back against the wall, defenseless against those rifles already aiming for their foreheads -- each was picturing those darkest moments of their own lives, fearing that this time might claim them once and for all...

The Colonel jogging in front called, "We shoot to kill! We will take your souls once and for all this time!" Just as Mallory's rope dropped down from above. There was no time -- the soldiers would take them all-

Suddenly Sir Nicholas was jogging out into the deadly white space of the courtyard, huffing and puffing, his fleshy bulk jouncing up and down. "Hello there, over here!" he shouted, throwing an arm in the air as if he were carrying the Olympic torch. "Come on, I'm the one you want!" His red face was still beaming. "You think you can frighten me with the bad times in my life? Well take your best shot!" And he began laughing, that lovely rolling laugh glowing like daffodils.

Whereas the shouts and taunts had not deterred the soldiers, the laughter seemed to draw them. It might have been the first time they had ever heard the sound in this place. They turned away from the people clustered by the wall and bore down on Sir Nicholas.

Arthur thrust the Seer forward to the rope. "Climb!"

She was frozen. "But -- Sir Nicholas-" the Writer cried.

The Seer began, "We have to help him!"

"Stay!" Arthur's voice was a cold command. They looked at him in shock.

"He was the Bringer of Laughter," said Arthur simply. "He did what we asked of him."

They looked at him and at each other, then the Seer leaped onto the rope and struggled up it. The Writer followed. The Samurai came running over, his quiver empty, and climbed effortlessly. When at last Arthur reached the top of the wall, he looked down into the courtyard that could have become his narrow universe and saw the soldiers gathered around Sir Nicholas. Each new rifle turned on the man caused him to jolt and sink lower to the ground, but still he was laughing. They were desperate to quell that sound, but their guns could not defeat him until they killed him.

Arthur's whole body shook. Hot tears crowded at the corners of his eyes, but he scrubbed angrily at them and went on, lowering himself down the other side of the door. Right or wrong, they had to keep going.

They were on the deserted train platform, polished wood worn smooth by the tramping of countless feet. The siren was moaning behind them.

"Get down lower, it is harder for them to shoot!" the Samurai shouted, and lowered himself into the train bed. He started running and the others scrambled down into the ditch and followed. They didn't know if they were being chased. No one looked back at that place.