Magda stares at the map. She knows what it means – though she’d lost the signal for a moment – but she now has no idea where she is on it. None of what she’s seeing lines up with any landmarks in her field of view. “I… I don’t know,” she whispers.
Behind the OT-64’s wheel, Alexei shakes his head, fighting off a wave of fatigue. A stray ray of sunlight pierces the incoming rain clouds. It’s lower in the sky than it should be. He frowns and looks at the APC’s fuel gauge. The needle is well below a half-tank. He doesn’t remember driving that much. No one in the vehicle can remember eating lunch, nor the last time they hydrated.
Red squeezes his forehead against his pounding headache. “I really don’t want to do this, but I’m going to have to bluescreen all of these people.” The blank expressions around him remind him that he’s the only one present who knows what a Windows 95 is. He sighs, sets his carbine inside the Hilux’s cab, unbuckles his pistol belt, and gestures for Magda to do the same and join him.
The two walk over to the Poles’ gun truck. Captain Majewski is leaning against the fender, staring blankly at nothing in particular. He collects himself at their approach. “Kapral. Status?”
Magda is so unaccustomed to being addressed by rank that it takes her a few seconds to realize she’s the corporal in question. “I don’t know where we are. We’ve been… we haven’t been going in circles, exactly, but how many times today have you seen that barn?”
Red glances ostentatiously to either side, then leans in. “Captain, I need to tell you something I haven’t been advertising to a lot of people, for reasons I think you’ll understand. I’m a doctor. Not a nurse, not a paramedic… an actual doctor.” He waits for Majewski to acknowledge the significance of that, then goes on. “In our travels… I’ve been noticing a lot of people are struggling with some kind of cognitive obstruction. We’re calling it ‘mind fog’ or ‘brain fog.'” He pauses. “Captain… when was the last time you saw a book? Or a map?”
Majewski blinks, goes ashen, and sags against the truck. “I have a library at home. and I don’t remember the last time I read anything in it. I’m a lawyer – I was a lawyer before the war, anyway – in land use. I live with maps.” He slides to a sitting position, staring blankly.
From the OT-64, Alexei watches as all of the militia troops within earshot have similar reactions. They’re going pale with shock, some dropping to their knees and dry-heaving. He’s heard about the brain fog, but he joined the team after the last time they had to break someone out of it urgently. This is his first time witnessing these reactions. He dismounts, grabs one of the jerrycans of water, and starts hauling it over.
The team gives the Rawa militiamen space to recover. Majewski forces himself to his feet, takes the water can from Alexei, and tends to his troops. Freed of that burden, Alexei trots back to the OT-64 and pulls out a selection of his trade materials: a Star Frontiers boxed set and maintenance manuals for HMMWVs, 3-series BMWs, and T-72s. Watching this, Leks briefly ponders bringing along part of his slowly-growing stamp collection as another tool for demonstrating recorded knowledge.
After about fifteen minutes, he walks back to Red. “You said you’d seen this before.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Red starts ticking off fingers. “All of the raiders that we’ve dealt with. Von Bahr’s people at the dam. Even people at Opoczno can fall into it, though we’ve been working with the town council to break people out of it. It’s really bad in Tomaszow.”
Majewski frowns. “That was a long way to say ‘everywhere.'”
The physician nods. “Yeah. Almost everywhere. The Russians… those who are still in large units, operating under orders, are much less prone to it. It’s not a Russian weapon. They’re extremely concerned about it as well.”
“How long has it been like this?”
“I have no idea.” Red shrugs. “Six months, at least. I suspect it manifested after the plagues started to taper off.”
“Since the die-off started to slow down.” Majewski scratches his scalp, clearly working on an idea.
The team, Majewski, and the Poles’ platoon sergeant circle up around the map. Magda, having regained her bearings and her equilibrium, starts with, “We aren’t lost so much as diverted. Something benefited from leading us astray, and I don’t know what that was. But the area we’re consistently turning away from is here.” She points.
Majewski and his sergeant, Jablonski, exchange a look. “The village on that hill is depopulated,” the militia captain says with confidence. “It was hit with a chemical attack late in the war. Organophosphate nerve agent. There was persistent contamination. The place has a poor reputation now.” He traces a contour line. “It sits on a hill. A hundred, hundred and fifty meters relative elevation. The east will be the least-exposed approach.”
The combined group mounts up and moves out through heavy rain. About four kilometers away from where the map says the village should be, they start noticing the onset of fatigue and disorientation again. The leaders call a halt. Magda mounts up behind Jablonski on his motorcycle and the two move forward for reconnaissance.
Magda realizes they’re splashing through the mud and heading away from the village, swears, and checks her watch. She’s lost maybe five minutes. Jablonski finds this discrepancy to be profoundly infuriating. As they head back to the main body, he’s streaming profanity: “God damn broken-ass space time continuum. Stupid tesseract bullshit. I fuck your wrinkle in time!”
Aboard the OT-64, Arkadi notices the engine is running rough. He asks Alexei to shut it down, then climbs out and pops the engine compartment open. He can’t find anything wrong. He looks around and realizes all the vehicles are running rough, as if their engine timing is off. He’s not a scientist, but he is a mechanic, and he’s been listening to the conversation. He kicks a few ideas around with Alexei, who points out that the APC’s dashboard clock is also running irregularly. The second hand will sweep 270º or so, then halt… or skip forward… or skip backward.
Arkadi latches the engine compartment shut. “Nothing’s mechanically wrong. The engines aren’t losing time. The world here is losing time.”
“Huh. Arkadi, come here.” Red checks the KGB defector’s pulse against his own wristwatch. “Regular heartbeat, regular respiration. You’re normal, as far as I can tell.”
“You and I can keep count. The machinery can’t.” Arkadi ponders that for a moment. “And the mind fog moves in when we’re trying to move on the objective,” he nods toward the distant hill, “in vehicles.”
“Maybe whatever we’re headed for doesn’t want us to see it or find it,” Alexei puts in.
Red glares toward the west. “Ross has been training Kowalski and a couple of our other militia on that 82mm mortar we took off the Russians at Radom. We have a handful of white phosphorus shells and ten or twelve cases of HE for it. I am strongly tempted to go back home, get that, blow the fuck out of that village from two miles away, and set the rubble on fire.”
“But,” Arkadi picks up on the implied caveat.
“But they might leave before we can do that.” Red checks his watch, swears, then swears again at the futility of trying to check the angle of the sun through a downpour. “On the other hand, I think trying to get them tonight is stupid.”
Arkadi snorts. “Glad to hear you say that.”
“We’re only about twelve kilometers away from Rawa Mazowiecka,” Majewski states. “We have space for you. Let’s pull back there, do some planning, and come at this with more daylight.”
Rawa Mazowiecka, like most towns in the area, is badly depopulated. Before the war, it was home to about 14,000. Now, just under 2,000 people live there, giving it a population base slightly smaller than its marauder-infested neighbor, Tomaszów Mazowiecki. The current residents have concentrated in the center of the community, deeming that the best option for defensibility and mutual assistance.
Majewski guides the team to a row of untenanted houses. “They’re not well-furnished, but they have some basics,” he explains apologetically. “We’ve been hoping for population growth, so we spent some time cleaning them out and making sure they’re habitable.”
As the team unloads their gear and Magda starts organizing a late dinner, Majewski pulls Red aside. “It’s about my wife,” he explains apologetically. “This,” he gestures at his head, “mind-fog. What is the safest way for me to wake her up?” At Red’s raised eyebrow, he elaborates. “She’s the head of the town council. And she’s an educated woman. She’s – she was – a chemist, working in fertilizer development. How we met, actually.”
Red unpacks the process he’s been using, gives Majewski a dose of the antiseizure medication he’s been keeping in his travel kit, and briefs the former attorney on its use. Majewski nods. “Thank you, doctor. I’ll see you in the morning. Hopefully not before then.”
The team traces thin lines of salt across the borrowed house’s doors and windows with the last of Minka’s jar. About an hour later, there’s a knock at the door. Arkadi, on watch, eases his hand to his Skorpion. “Who is it?”
A voice speaking Polish with a heavy British accent comes back. “I’m looking for an American doctor I heard was in town.”
“Huh. Let me see if we have one of those.” Arkadi finds Red. “Are you taking visitors?”
“I guess. Let’s see who it is.”
Red opens the door to reveal a man and a woman, both thirtyish, in local civilian attire under RAF flight jackets. The man is prematurely balding, compensating for it with an immaculate mustache, and has a complexion that suggests he’s spent the summer repeatedly burning instead of tanning. The woman is stocky, narrow-featured, with long auburn hair pinned up in a bun that’s getting a steady soaking. Red steps back and invites them in, not without checking over his shoulder to ensure the team is ready for subterfuge.
The visitors introduce themselves as Flight Lieutenant Oscar Jackson and Flying Officer Rhianon Morgan. Respectively, they were the pilot and navigator of a Tornado GR.1A tasked with photoreconnaissance over Lódz and Lublin in advance of NATO’s spring offensive. They lost a debate with a Soviet SAM battery and ejected near Rawa Mazowiecka, where NATO-friendly locals picked them up and hid them. They’ve been in the town since March, and Red is the first westerner they’ve seen.
Red interviews them. They’re under a mild level of brain fog, though not nearly as bad as that of the Polish locals, and he starts the process of easing them out of it. When he casually drops the mention of other NATO survivors back at his own base of operations, both of them perk up. They’re exceptionally interested in linking up, and eventually finding a way back to their respective homes. (Jackson is still wearing his wedding band. Arkadi notes this in passing and whispers, “optimist,” to himself.) Red probes for qualifications beyond flying. Morgan studied electrical engineering and astronomy before enlisting. Jackson admits to having a useless aeronautical engineering degree, but he grew up on the “family farm” and knows a bit about horses and sheep – though the way he phrases it sounds an awful lot like it was more of an estate that his family owned and ran than a small family establishment. Neither has put down roots in Rawa Mazowiecka, but each has some connections and commitments they’ll need to resolve. Once that’s done, though, they’re interested in eventually relocating to Ponikla.
By morning, the downpour has tapered off into a steady, annoying drizzle. About an hour after dawn, Natan Majewski returns to the house. With him is a solidly-built woman around his own late fifties, sheltering under an umbrella he holds. Leks opens the door for them and Natan introduces his wife, Liwia. She understands the urgency of the impending operation – three militiamen are still missing, after all – but she’s very thankful for being out from under the brain fog. She intends to bring the rest of the community’s leadership back to full wakefulness over the next day or two, and she’d like to explore the possibility of adding Rawa Mazowiecka to the regional alliance.
With that pinned for future diplomatic efforts, the team checks their weapons and vehicles and mounts up. The allied militia force links up with them and the combined unit heads back northwest toward the ill-favored village.