Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [290]
He woke remembering that they'd won. The details were gone; there had been dreams, vivid and mixed with memories of the past few days, and as the dreams faded so did the memories, leaving him only the word. Victory!
He was lying on the floor of the front room, on a rug and covered with a blanket; he had no idea how he had come there. Perhaps he had been talking with Maureen and simply fallen to the floor. Anything was possible.
There were sounds in the house, people moving, smells of cooking food. He savored them all, the sounds and smells and sensations of life: The gray clouds outside the window seemed infinitely detailed, vivid and brilliant as sunlight; the bronze trophies on the walls were a marvel that needed investigation. He treasured each moment of life and what it might bring.
Gradually the mood faded. It left him desperately hungry. He got up, and saw that the living-room rug itself looked like a battlefield. They lay where fatigue had dropped them. Someone had lasted long enough to spread blankets … and had run short. Harvey spread his own blanket over Steve Cox, who was coiled into a ball against the cold, and followed his nose toward breakfast.
There was bright sunlight in the room. Maureen Jellison stared in disbelief. She was afraid to get out of bed; the bright sun might be a dream, and it was a dream she wanted to savor. Finally she convinced herself that she was awake. It was no illusion. The sun came in the window, warm and yellow and bright. It was over an hour high. She could feel its warmth on her arms when she threw back the covers.
Gradually she came to full wakefulness. Terror and blood and a fatigue like death itself, the memories of yesterday ran together like a too-fast movie film. There had been the horror of the morning, when the Stronghold forces had to hold fast, retreating slowly, letting the Brotherhood into the valley but never on the ridges; the gradual retreat that could not seem too obvious, with troops who couldn't be told the battle plan for fear that they would be captured; finally the general panic, when they had all run.
"When you run they bunch up and follow," Al Hardy had said. "Randall's reports make that pretty clear. Their commander goes by the book. So will we, up to a point."
The problem had been to hold along the high ground, so that the Brotherhood would stay down in the valley; to give way along the valley floor until enough of the Brotherhood had crossed the bridge. How could they get the ranchers to fight and not run until the signal? Hardy had chosen the simplest solution to that. "If you're out there," he'd said, "if you stand, some of them will stay with you. They're men."
She had resented that, but it had been no time to give Al Hardy a lecture; and he'd been right. All she'd had to do was hold on to her own courage. For someone who wasn't sure she wanted to live, that had seemed a simple job. It wasn't until she was actually under fire that she began to have doubts.
Something unseen had ripped Roy Miller's side. He tried to block the wound with his forearm. His forearm nestled neatly in the great gap of torn ribs. Maureen's breakfast rose in her throat … and in his last moment Roy looked around and caught her expression.
A mortar shell had exploded behind Deke Wilson and two of his men. The others rolled over and over and lay sprawled in positions that would have been hideously uncomfortable if they hadn't been dead; but Deke flew forward and upward, his arms flapping frantically, and fluttered downhill like a fledgling just learning to fly, down into the yellow murk.
Joanna MacPherson turned to yell at Maureen. A bullet whispered through her hair, through the space where her skull had been only a moment before, and Joanna's message became frantically obscene.
A fragment