The Valley of Dry Bones

by Jerry B. Jenkins

“I am now. Especially for you. Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  Zeke found Doc in the infirmary, leafing through a notebook. A small plate of food that looked largely untouched lay before Cristelle, and she looked exhausted.

  “How’s our girl this morning?” Zeke said.

  Doc just gave him a look. Cristelle appeared to try to smile but merely shook her head.

  “Doc, if we go somewhere to talk, does someone need to sit with her?”

  “Yes, and Danley was here most of the night, so he’s sleeping.”

  “Sasha is up. Can she do it?”

  Doc shrugged. “Just need someone who has the maturity to know when to push the call button, right there on the wall, if—and only if—there’s a crisis. It triggers a buzzer on my belt, and I drop everything and come running.”

  “You’ll clarify that for her?”

  “Like I do with everyone else.”

  Zeke jogged back to his quarters, told Sasha, and left a note for Alexis as Sasha changed.

  Zeke checked his duty log and decided to give Benita Gutierrez a break from periscope duty in the southeast corner so he and Doc could talk there. At dawn the periscopes were lowered and one guard could patrol outside.

  “Bueno,” she said. “I can get Raoul breakfast before he leaves for Arizona. Is Danley still goin’ with him?”

  “That was on my list to ask you, Doc. Any reason why we can’t stick with the normal schedule?”

  “Cristelle’s not critical, if that’s what you’re asking,” Doc said. “He’s not the only person who can fill in for me when I need a break, as you just proved.”

  “Good.”

  “When I gotta be back?” Benita said.

  “Give us half an hour.”

  “Gracias.”

  “So what’s up, Zeke?” Doc said. “I do something wrong? I know you like pretending to supervise me.”

  “It’s nothing like that, but there is a chain of command, and things work better when we all acknowledge that.”

  “Oh, believe me, I know. Sir.”

  “C’mon, Doc, I’ve never asked you to refer to me that way.”

  “Get on with your agenda.”

  “I just wanted to go over today’s itinerary.”

  “I have no itinerary. I know I was scheduled to go with you all to see the Nuwuwus, and the council of elders wanted me to see some of the kids, but I’d rather not leave my patient that long.”

  Benita’s timer beeped. Zeke peered into the periscope and began the broad sweep of the horizon. “How is she?” he said.

  “It’s an acute injury,” Doc said. “The cleanup was the worst of it. And then I had to operate. I used more anesthetic on her than I’ve used total since we’ve been here. She had sand, rock, chrome, clothing fibers, and galvanized rubber embedded into her flesh and bone. I had to scrape all that away before I could even attempt to salvage healthy muscle, fat, ligaments, and tendons. It’ll be weeks before I have any idea whether she’ll regain use of that leg. Under normal circumstances I’d have had help, she probably would have been medevacked to an ER, and her leg might have been amputated below the knee.”

  Zeke folded the handles and turned back, resetting the timer. “Did you say chrome?”

  “I figure her leg was crushed into the bike’s spokes.”

  “You have enough pain meds to see her through?”

  “Till tomorrow. I’m sending a script for more with Raoul and Danley today.”

  Zeke peeked at his paper. “Just two more things, then whatever you have.”

  “This is your show.”

  “I’d like an elder meeting at one today to talk about who’s replacing Pastor Bob. It’ll be an important choice, because the new pastor will come from among the three of us.”

  For the first time since Zeke had known him, Doc lost eye contact and became inarticulate. “Yeah, uh, listen, who all’s going with you this morning to see the tribe?”

  “Let’s see: Katashi, Pastor Bob, Mrs. Meeks, Mahir, and your wife.”

  Doc’s eyes darted. “Uh-huh. Um, okay.”

  Zeke studied him, waiting.

  Doc said, “Why is Pastor going, everything considered?”

  “To say good-bye, of course. These people have come to mean a lot to him, and him to them, I’m sure.”

  Doc nodded. “And you say there’s one other thing on your list?”

  “Yes, but the elder meeting?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. One o’clock’s good. Just need someone to sit with Cristelle.”

  “I’ll check the duty log. The kids will be in class.”

  “Mine are too young anyway.”

  “I’ll find someone. My last item was about your car. You still adamant about—”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not.”

  “No?”

  Doc had suddenly regained his composure and stared into Zeke’s eyes, brows raised. “Do I need to repeat myself?”

  “Uh, no, great. Very helpful, thanks! If it’s all right with you, I’ll ask Raoul to find something adequate for your famil—”

  “I don’t need details, Zeke. I talked it over with Gabrielle, and we’re fine with whatever you decide.”

  “Well, thanks again, Doc. I really apprec—”

  “I’ll tell you what I’d appreciate: Quit making such a big deal out of it. You act like I don’t know how to be a team player.”

  “Sorry,” Zeke said as the timer beeped. “You want a turn at the scope?”

  “I’m not that much of a team player, Zeke. You really want your staff doctor—”

  “You’re right,” Zeke said.

  “Come on, man,” Doc said. “Can’t you tell when a man is playing you? Get out of the way.”

  He lowered the handles and hunched over, looking through the lenses. “It has been a long time.” Doc slowly pivoted, and about halfway through his arc he slowed, then stopped, then reversed a few degrees and stopped again. “I shouldn’t see anything on the horizon, should I? Just shimmering heat waves, right?”

  “You see something else?”

  “Hold on a second.” Doc slowly rotated the scope about an inch each way.

  “Depending on how far you’re looking,” Zeke said, “every inch represents several hundred yards.”

  “Um-hm,” Doc said. “You’d better take a look.”

  They traded places. A massive dust cloud loomed far enough away that Zeke could not make out the source. “Not an immediate threat to us,” he said. “But maybe to the tribe. We can stand them up again and explain later, though I hate to do that. The council has been warm to us.”

  “Not the leader’s daughter-in-law,” Doc said. “I don’t trust her.”

  “She’ll come around.”

  “Don’t be naïve.”

  “You’ll see, Doc.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll see otherwise.”

  Zeke took one more look. “We’re not going to want whoever it is getting any closer to us.”

  “Or interfering with our guys headed east,” Doc said.

  “That either.”

  “But Cristelle’s prescription can’t wait, Zeke.”

  “I hear you.”

  Zeke reset the timer to every three minutes. “When Benita gets back I’ll let the other monitors know what we’ve seen here.”

  Doc nodded. “There’s also something I need to confide in you.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s about Jennie Gill.”

  “When you say confide—”

  “I’ve told no one else.”

  “Not even Bob?”

  “No one.”

  “Why?”

  “Call me a coward, but I had already dumped enough on them all at once. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t expect them to up and leave a few days later. I thought I had time to work up to it, and now things have gotten out of hand.”

  “Do I want to know this?”

  “You need to know it.”

  Zeke sighed. “Pastor already told every
body she’s terminal. What could be worse than that?”

  “How quickly she’s terminal. Zeke, I couldn’t guarantee a week, and I can’t in good conscience advise Bob to expose her to the drive he has in mind the night after tomorrow. He’s talking hundreds of miles.”

  “Really, Doc? She doesn’t seem in that much pain.”

  “I’ve made sure of that. But they didn’t come to me until very late. This is as advanced a case of stage four as I’ve ever seen. In fact it’s so far beyond, ‘stage four’ doesn’t begin to define it.”

  “What if someone traveled with her?”

  Doc shook his head. “It’d be malpractice for me to even suggest it. The end is not going to be pretty, even here in a controlled environment. The best I can do is try to make her comfortable. I’m trying to plan for it, figure out where, scheduling Cristelle’s care at the same time, all that.”

  “Doc, this is awful. Bob’s talking about packing after the elder meeting today.”

  “That’s when we have to tell him then.”

  Zeke nodded. “Then we can decide what we’re going to do about the elder board, telling the whole group, a funeral, all that.”

  Zeke and Doc checked the periscope several more times before Benita returned.

  She was chipper as usual. “You guys look like you los’ your best friend, no?”

  “Well,” Zeke said, “Doc did see something on the horizon.”

  “What?” she said, grabbing the periscope. “Oh no! Qué en el mundo?”

  “That’s ‘What in the world?’” Doc said.

  “I reset your timer, Benita,” Zeke said. “Just keep an eye on it and keep me posted.”

  “Got it,” she said. “But don’t be sending mi esposo that way until we know what we’re dealin’ with, okay?”

  “You know I won’t.”

  12

  THE REMNANT

  EVERYTHING IN ZEKE told him to cancel the trip to the Nuwuwu Tribe—or what was left of it. Only about thirty remained in California of the indigenous Great Basin group, the rest of whom (totaling fewer than a thousand) had relocated to the Chemehuevi lands of the Paiute, mostly in Arizona. The remnant, according to tribal leader (“Don’t call me Chief”) Kaga, an eighty-year-old widower, were “too old, infirm, or stubborn to move.”

  They weren’t all too old, that was certain. Kaga’s son and heir apparent, Yuma, and his wife, Kineks, were in their fifties and had a six-year-old granddaughter whose parents had apparently left her as a newborn when they moved east with the others. Little Zaltana was a dark-eyed, black-haired beauty with a gleaming smile with whom everyone from Zeke’s team—and the Nuwuwu—seemed enamored.

  Zaltana had leapt giggling into Zeke’s lap at a tribal council meeting the last time he’d visited and said, “We’re the Nuwuwu! I’m a Nuwu. And Granddad and Grandmom and Great-Granddad and Great-Great-Grandmaw, all of us”—and here she dramatically spread her arms wide and rolled her head to indicate the whole settlement—“we’re the Nuwuwu!”

  Zeke shot her an exaggerated double take. “Is that true?”

  She nodded grandly and pointed to herself. “Nuwu.”

  “Thank you, honey,” Grandmom Kineks, a severe-looking woman as husky as her husband, said, “but we have business now, so you run along.”

  Zaltana jumped down, but Zeke said, “Oh, let me ask you before you go. Who’s Great-Great-Grandmaw?”

  “You don’t know Gaho?”

  “We really must finish our business,” Kineks said, “please.”

  “She’s—”

  “Zaltana!” Yuma barked. “Obey your grandmom!”

  Zeke was eager to get back that Monday. He had come to love these people after slowly, slowly earning their trust, mostly by trading with them and showing them charity without condescension. He and Mahir—with whom they had not seemed to connect or particularly care for—had even helped them set up their own aquaponics system. The Nuwuwu were taken with Katashi, whose ethnicity made him more similar to them in skin and hair color, so Zeke took him under his wing and taught him the system so he could help them maximize it.

  The women, particularly Elaine and Jennie, had endeared themselves to the Nuwuwu and developed an arrangement in which the tribe was not just the recipient of free warm clothing for cool desert nights but traded their unique crafts.

  However, everything that day seemed to war against the idea of Zeke venturing the approximately twelve miles to the Nuwuwu settlement with five comrades. With Cristelle not out of the woods, Jennie near death, the crucial elders’ meeting looming, the mystery of the Arabic document indicating a potential terrorist among them, Raoul and Danley about to make a vital all-day supply run, and the threatening dust cloud on the horizon—it simply made no sense. What more did he need to abort the mission?

  He was with Doc, so he would tell him first, then Pastor Bob. Then he’d tell the others who had planned to join him for the tribal visit and have Sasha stay with Cristelle another hour so he could call the elder meeting for fifteen minutes later. They’d hold it in the aquaponics lab after he mapped a route for Raoul and Danley that should skirt the Hydro Mongers or whoever had been kicking up the dust on the horizon.

  Zeke was in his element, feeling as if he’d been born to this. He knew his people were in trouble on many fronts, but this kind of thing motivated him. It was the way his mind worked. He liked having lots of plates spinning at once. If people would listen and cooperate, he’d get a handle on this and they’d get things accomplished.

  “Doc,” he said, “here’s what we’re going to do . . .”

  “Don’t cancel.”

  Zeke stopped cold. That had been God.

  “What?” Doc said.

  “Sorry,” Zeke said. “Give me a second.”

  Doc looked frustrated. “Well, when a man says, ‘Here’s what we’re going—’”

  “Please, Doc! I asked for a second.”

  Doc shook his head. “This is like yesterday. Amateur Night in—”

  “Will you stop with the ‘Amateur Night in Dixie,’ whatever that means. If you can’t give me a minute, just go back to Cristelle.”

  “You said a second.”

  “Go!”

  Doc stalked off and Zeke leaned against the wall, eyes closed. I’m listening.

  “You have a schedule. And I have a message for a leader.”

  Kaga leads thirty people in the middle of nowhere.

  Immediately he felt chastised, realizing that when Bob and Jennie were gone, he’d lead half that number, and where was he if not in the middle of nowhere?

  Forgive me, Lord. I’m on my way.

  Zeke would drive the yellow tanker truck, about half-full of water, with Pastor Bob and Katashi crowded in with him. Elaine Meeks and Gabrielle Xavier would follow in a white van, loaded with foodstuffs and clothing, Mahir driving.

  “Stay close,” Zeke told Mahir. “I sent Raoul and Danley way south before they’ll come back up to what used to be the 10 to get into Parker. If we get accosted by Mongers, let’s make sure we’re together.”

  Mahir nodded.

  “Everybody have enough ammo?”

  “You know I do,” Gabrielle said.

  “Not enthusiastically,” Mrs. Meeks said. “But yes.”

  “You’d better shoot enthusiastically, if necessary,” Mahir said.

  She looked surprised. “You know I’d do what I have to, Mahir.”

  “Do I?”

  “Would you rather I ride with the others?”

  “Where would they put you, on top? Just be ready.”

  “Always, of course.”

  Zeke stepped in. “We all have each others’ backs, right? . . . That demands a response, people.”

  “Right,” everyone said.

  Virtually nothing that could be mistaken for a street, road, or highway remained between the holdouts’ compound and the Nuwuwu settlement, so the going was slow. Zeke didn’t feel confident with the tanker at more than thirty miles per hour, given t
he state of the struts and shock absorbers, and though Mahir seemed occasionally to tailgate him, the van was older and in even rougher shape, so there was no sense taxing it either.

  “How was Mrs. Gill this morning?” Katashi said.

  “Thanks for asking,” Pastor Bob said, one hand braced on the dashboard as they bounced along. “To be honest, I’m concerned. Very weak, very pale. No appetite. I made her eat, but she couldn’t keep anything down. I was alarmed.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Katashi said. “If you hadn’t said anything yesterday, I wouldn’t have known she was even sick, let alone seriously ill. She looked great. She always does.”

  The pastor nodded. “Everyone was saying that. But you wouldn’t say that today. She had trouble sleeping last night and could barely sit up this morning. She hardly had the energy to talk.”

  “No kidding?”

  “She had to force me to leave her. Said I might not get another chance to tell these people good-bye for her. She loves them so much. I told her I wouldn’t unless Doc assured me she would be all right.”

  “What’d he say?” Zeke said.

  “That he would put someone with her and it was okay to let her sleep if she wanted to, and he would put her on a drip so she wouldn’t get dehydrated. I guess this type of cancer really takes a toll on your immune system and you can forget your water intake. You get a lot of your hydration from food, and if you have no appetite, you have to compensate.”

  “Who’s with her?” Zeke said.

  “Alexis and Sasha both. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “I didn’t even see Lexi this morning. Been on the go.”

  Zeke heard a honk and checked his side mirror to find Mahir flashing his lights. He let the tanker drift to a stop. Mahir hopped out and came to his window. “Big dust cloud behind us closing fast. Might as well just wait for ’em and not look like we’re trying to get away.”

  “Yup, or lead ’em to the Nuwuwu.” Zeke turned to Bob and Katashi. “You guys stay here unless Mahir and I are outnumbered.” He climbed out and stood next to Mahir, leaning back against the tanker, arms folded. “If they pass, they pass. Anybody stops, I’ll do the talking.”

  Mahir laughed. “Like you need to tell me that.”

  It soon became obvious that only one vehicle was causing the dust cloud, a big Monger rig. It shambled to a stop across from them, WatDoc at the wheel. He leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window. “Whatcha all doin’?”