Earth Afire (The First Formic War 2)

To his left was another body. The female soldier. Bingwen instantly knew she was dead, even without seeing her face, which was turned away from him. She had too many wounds. Her skin was white and lifeless. Her clothes were burned. Her arm was twisted behind her.

In the fields, the corpses had looked asleep, peaceful even in some instances. Not so here. This had been a hard death. Quick most likely, instantaneous even, but it terrified Bingwen more than anything he had seen thus far.

There were lines in the dirt from the aircraft to the woman's body where her boots had dragged across the soil. Mazer had pulled her from the fire, Bingwen realized. Wounded as he was, Mazer had pulled her from the flames. Bingwen could think of no other explanation. And then somehow Mazer had tried to treat his own wounds. Bingwen knelt beside him. Yes, one of the packets from the kit was still in Mazer's hand. Bingwen should have noticed that instantly.

"Mazer."

No answer.

Should he try shaking him awake? No, that might tear something inside him. Instead, Bingwen reached out a tentative finger and poked Mazer in the arm. The skin was warm. The tip of Bingwen's finger came back bloody. Mazer didn't respond.

Then Mazer's chest rose, just slightly, almost imperceptibly. A shallow intake of breath. Then an exhale. He was alive. Barely maybe, but he was breathing.

Bingwen had to get him back to the farmhouse, back to Grandfather. But how? He had hoped to find the soldiers awake and able to walk. And if they couldn't walk, Bingwen would build a travois for the water buffalo to pull and then ask the wounded soldier to climb up onto it. But Mazer couldn't even do that; he couldn't move at all. Bingwen would have to lift him somehow onto the stretcher.

Bingwen ran back to the water buffalo, tied it to a tree, and came back with all the supplies from the tool pouches. He found a grove of bamboo nearby and chopped down three large stalks with the hatchet. It took him forever because he had to do it one-handed, using only his good arm. He then chopped one of the three stalks into shorter lengths and built the travois, lashing the bamboo together with the rope. The shorter pieces went between the longer two, making a ladderlike surface for Mazer to lie on. Bingwen then cut out the bottoms of a few of the harvesting bags and pulled those up over the two shafts, creating a flat surface like the bed of a cot.

The travois was heavy when Bingwen finished, almost too heavy for him to drag with one hand, but he heaved and strained and pulled it across the dirt until he had it on the ground beside Mazer. He had hoped to pull Mazer's body up onto it, but after a few tentative tugs it became obvious that wouldn't work. There was too much dead weight, and he couldn't pull with his broken arm. He'd have to lift the body, suspend it in the air, slide the travois underneath, and then lower Mazer carefully onto it.

By now Bingwen was sweating and thirsty and tired. He hadn't brought any water; he hadn't wanted to take any from the little supply the group at the farmhouse had. Now he wished he had. There wasn't any drinkable water nearby, and even if there had been, he wouldn't have drunk it, not with the mist in the air and the threat of contamination.

He ignored the thirst and got back to work. He had built pulley systems out of bamboo before--he and Father had made a small towerlike

structure to lift the bags of harvested rice up onto the load trucks last season. But this would be different. Mazer was twice as long as a bag of rice and far more floppy and collapsible. Nor did Bingwen have Father helping him or two good working arms.

It took him hours to prepare everything, chopping down the bamboo, cutting the proper lengths, separating the threads of the rope into twine because he needed more rope than he had. He used scrap from the wreckage as well. There was a winch in the cockpit with cable and D-rings and fasteners. He was aware of charred human remains in the seats, but Bingwen held his breath, averted his eyes, and retrieved the equipment quickly.

Then he started building. He made a series of A-frame structures with a long shaft between them, then slid several thinner bamboo shafts underneath Mazer at his shoulders, lower back, buttocks, and bend of the knee. He made a special pouch for Mazer's head so that it wouldn't loll back sharply when Bingwen lifted him. He lashed both ends of the bamboo shafts underneath Mazer to a lifting pole that hovered above Mazer, running the length of his body. Then Bingwen threaded the rope through the three pulleys he had made from narrow cuts of bamboo.

The sun was far in the western part of the sky, dipping toward the horizon, when he finished. He was hungry. His arm ached. His whole body was slick with sweat and covered in dirt and soot.

The structure was elaborate; it looked like a giant bamboo spider standing over Mazer, ready to seize him and wrap him in its webbing.

Bingwen pulled on the ropes, and Mazer's body lifted gently off the ground, his head holding steady. All that work for so little movement, he thought.

Bingwen tied off the line, slid the travois underneath Mazer, and lowered Mazer onto the stretcher. Then he moved the pulleys up the crossbeam toward Mazer's head and lifted the front end of the travois high enough to tie it to a harness he had made for the water buffalo. The hardest part proved to be getting the water buffalo to stay still long enough for Bingwen to do the lashings. Finally, though, everything was set.

Bingwen gathered all the supplies from the med kit, including the small, flat digital device that Mazer had used to scan Bingwen's broken arm. Bingwen examined it, brushing off the mud and grime from the screen. There was a crack across the glass, but the device turned on at Bingwen's touch. The home screen was bright and colorful and gave him a variety of options: SURFACE TISSUE SCAN, ULTRASOUND, BLOOD EXAM, SURGERY TUTORIALS, PHARMACY. Bingwen put it in his saddle pouch then did a final scan of the wreckage for more supplies. He didn't see anything else worth taking until he spotted the combat vest the female soldier was wearing. It held several cartridges of ammunition like the one currently snapped into the rifle.

Ammunition they could use. Without it the rifle would be useless. But retrieving the cartridges wouldn't be easy; Bingwen would have to turn the woman more onto her side in order to undo the straps that held the cartridges. And that meant touching a dead person. The idea made Bingwen sick to his stomach; he couldn't bear to look at the woman, much less touch her.

He was being ridiculous, he told himself. Selfish even. They were dead without a weapon, dead without ammunition.

He ran to the woman, his eyes half shut, his lips pressed together tight, and pushed the woman's shoulder to rotate her body. She was stiff and bloody and didn't roll easily with her arm bent back behind her. But Bingwen dug in his heels, and finally the woman's torso moved enough for him to reach in and pull the cartridges free. They clattered to the ground in front of him, and Bingwen scrambled back a heartbeat later, scurrying away on all fours and hating himself for being such a coward.

His eyes were wet with tears, he realized, and he wiped at them quickly. He got to his feet, collected the cartridges, and dropped them into the tool pouch. Next he tied a rope around Mazer's chest, securing him to the stretcher; then, after one final look back at the wreckage, he took the lead rope and pulled hard. The water buffalo moaned in opposition and resisted, but after another hard jerk from Bingwen, the animal followed.

Bingwen had heard aircraft all day, most of it far away, but now the skies were quiet. It was dusk, and he figured he wouldn't reach the farmhouse until well after dark.

They arrived at the valley of corpses and found that the aliens had killed all the remaining crops. Without any healthy grass to walk on, Bingwen cut north, looking for another place to cut back toward the mountain. He found one a kilometer later, another wide field of crop without much standing water.

There were more bodies here: people and animals. A family of pigs. Three water buffalo. A group of children.

And Mother and Father.

Bingwen saw them from fifty meters away and stopped dead. They were lying facedown in the mud, Father's arm draped across Mother's shoulder, as if comforting her.

Bingwen didn't move. He couldn't see their faces, but that was Mother's shirt and Mother's back and Mother's shape. And that was Father's clothes. And Father's boots and Father's hair. And the glint of sunlight was off Father's watch on his left wrist where he wore it.