Free The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

chemicals used in modern war, had saturated the tissues of these people as they had the ground. Once she had delivered three malformed babies in succession among a party of refugees who thought they had found safety at last. But along the way they had sustained themselves on leaves and roots.
    She stumbled back eventually, not to the room where she had been eating but to the bedroom, and fell into a stuporous slumber.
    Thinking, in the dead middle of the night, that the noise she was hearing belonged to nightmare—her dreams were regularly haunted by the fear that fighting might break out anew—she forced herself awake. Found she was awake. The noise was real. Gunfire.
    Horrified, she sat up and strained her ears. The room was absolutely dark, the windows curtained. Her instant of panic passed. There were indeed shots to be heard, but there was a random, almost a cheerful quality to the rattling racket, like strings of firecrackers. Also, at the very edge of hearing, she could discern drumming—possibly even singing.
    She made to inch her way toward the window, and was immediately distracted by the discovery that her thighs were wet. Christ. Her period had begun. Funnily, since coming to Noshri, she had stopped suffering the advance warning pains she had been accustomed to at home, as though her mind were so taken up with matters of life and death she had no attention to spare for the complaints of her own body.
    She found tissues to wipe herself and called for Maua. Waiting for the maid to enter, she went to the window overlooking the town and peered past the curtains. Oh, yes. Bonfires. Wasteful, but excusable. Liquor had been concealed somewhere, no doubt—she’d seen that drunken woman dancing—or possibly made from garbage. And with Christmas so close ...
    Bonfires?
    The patterns of light suddenly acquired perspective. The yellow flames were not small and near, but far and huge. In the direction of the airstrip.
    A plane burning!
    “Maua!” she cried, and ran in search of the flashlight she kept by her bed. Finding it, she hurried to the lean-to room where the girl slept. The pallet there was empty.
    “Oh, Christ!” Lucy whispered.
    She dashed back to the bedroom, intending to seize clothes, Tampax, the little .22 pistol her father had given her which she’d never used. But a moment later there was a slam from the living-room as the outer door was flung open, and she settled for just the gun. She still had on the toweling robe she had slumped asleep in.
    Mouth dry, hands shaking, she switched off the flashlight and crept on silent bare feet to the living room.
    “Hands up!” she shouted, switching on the torch again, and was instantly appalled by the way her finger was tightening on the trigger. Across the threshold lay a form which mingled khaki, dark-brown, bright-red. The red was blood. It was Major Obou, sprawled on his belly, his right hand limp beside his automatic, his left shoulder slashed to the bone.
    “Major?” she tried to say, and found her voice wasn’t there. She saw his good hand, like a colossal spider, scrabbling for the lost gun.
    “Major Obou!”
    He heard her and rolled his head on the reed matting of the floor. “Vaut rien,” he said thickly, and corrected himself. “No good. No more bullet.”
    “But what’s happening?” She put down her own gun and stooped with her flashlight playing on his wound, her mind spinning with thirty different things each as urgent as another: call out her neighbor the Swedish doctor, cleanse the cut, close the outside door, make sure he hadn’t been followed by his attacker ...
    He summoned a supreme effort and seized her by the wrist as she made to rise and shut the door.
    “Don’t go out, miss! Don’t go there! All mad, all crazy! Look, my arm! One of my men did that, my own men! See, I caught him take bowl food from widow with baby, and corporal say it third time tonight, so I order with my gun give back, go find more at airstrip for poor