by Ben Bova
"But don't depend on them too much," Will warned. "They're not going to risk their own necks to help strangers. Stay alert. Especially at night."
Sure, Alec thought, stay alert. We'll be lucky if we can stay conscious.
"Well . . ." Russo clambered to his feet. Towering over the prostrate Alec he said, "Good luck. I hope you get through this okay and we can meet again under happier circumstances."
When we do, we'll be pointing guns at each other, Alec realized.
The first night wasn't so bad. Before the Moon rose one of the men thought he saw someone prowling along the street and fired a burst of automatic rifle fire at him. Everyone roused, the sick and the well, but the alarm was over just that quickly. Once the Moon came up and it was fairly bright, the town became absolutely still.
At least, as far as Alec and his men could tell.
The next day it clouded over and by mid-morning began to rain. Alec lay in absolute misery on the floor of the Post Office next to the two trucks that had been trundled inside there. The rain dripped through the broken roof, adding rivulets of soaking water and a chilling, soggy air to the agonies that they all felt.
Ron Jameson was the strong one among them.
He was on his feet, moving from building to building, truck to truck, man to man, carrying medicine and discipline and—most important of all—morale.
He kept a constant eye on Ferret, as well, but the pinch-faced youth never tried to run out on them, never strayed far from the trucks and the other men. He watched them, eyes darting everywhere, in their miseries.
Hunched over Alec's makeshift pallet as the rain drummed on the sagging roof and dripped through its shattered sections, Jameson said matter-of-factly:
"I wouldn't depend on any farmers to warn us of raider bands. From what Russo's people told me, most of them won't bother to help us as long as the raiders leave them alone."
Alec nodded weakly. "I guess that's so."
"And the way it's raining, the raiders could march in here with a brass band and we wouldn't see or hear a thing until they were right on top of us."
"How many ..." Alec had to take a breath, "... how many men are on their feet?"
"They're starting to recover. We've got seven or eight who're as good as new, almost."
"Out of fifteen."
"The worst is over. I think you got the biggest dose of all."
Alec smiled wanly. "Good. I wouldn't want anybody else ... to go through this ..." He had been vomiting aspirin and antibiotics all day. The cramps and diarrhea were not so bad now, but he was cold and utterly weak. Nothing stayed inside him.
"We'll make it," Jameson said, with a grim smile. "Once the Sun comes out again we'll be okay."
Alec translated, If we get through tonight we might have a chance.
Alec drifted to sleep. When he awoke, it was dark. Rain pelted the roof of the cab he lay in, but it seemed lighter now, diminishing. Cramps again.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position and the nausea washed over him in waves. Dizzy, he grabbed for the truck door handle and half-fell, half-slid to the floor of the Post Office room.
It was wet. The drizzling rain coming through the roof felt almost good on his head and shoulders.
Clutching at his midsection, Alec staggered out toward the back door. If any of the men noticed him, they gave no indication of it. He saw no one stir.
He was fumbling with the belt of his pants when the first explosion came.
It lifted him off his feet and slammed him into the muddy ground ten meters from where he'd been standing. The back wall of the Post Office was a sheet of flame and it collapsed in surrealistic slow motion, crumbling in on itself.
Sparks and flaming debris soared upward.
Alec rolled over on his back in the ice-cold mud.
Gunfire. Men yelling. The high-pitched whine of an electric generator revving up to top speed.
He rolled over onto his stomach, fumbling for his pistol, but couldn't find it. Four men were running toward him. In the dancing light of the flames he saw that they were armed. Then a truck smashed its front end through a store window across the street. The running men turned to flame as the invisible laser beam hit them. Their clothing burst into fire and they jerked, screaming, hair and flesh ablaze. They fell and the ground bubbled where the invisible laser beam struck.
The pencil line of boiling earth marched across the street to where Alec lay, close enough for him to hear the hellish hiss of it as he watched, paralyzed with fear.
Then the beam swung away. More explosions.
Another truck started to pull free of a building that was collapsing, but the truck itself blew up, hurling pieces of men and machinery so high into the air that they were lost in shadow.
Alec couldn't move. He lay there soaked in mud and his own excrement as bullets zinged by, kicking up puffs of mud close enough to splatter his face. One truck seemed to be the only one fighting, and running, cursing men backed away from it, firing as they fell back.
Then another truck trundled slowly around the Post Office building. A dozen raggedly-dressed men charged at it, trying to capture it intact. The laser caught them in the open and they instantly became gibbering torches. More men appeared on the rooftop of the building where the first truck stood, but they must have been Alec's men, for they sprayed the street with automatic weapons' fire.
Bullets spanged everywhere and Alec knew he was going to be killed. Then he felt a tug at his ankles. Turning his head, he saw Ferret, lips pulled back over his yellowed teeth, bent over double to drag him through the muddy street over to the side of a building and a modicum of safety.
Ferret knelt beside Alec, wincing with every bullet that whizzed near, obviously terrified.
Before Alec could find the strength to say anything, he saw a third truck coming up from the other end of the street. Its laser was silent and a gang of armed men crouched on the mounting platform, behind the armored cab. More men walked stealthily behind it. They've captured that one, Alec realized, but they don't know how to work the laser.
Jameson must have realized the same thing.
Alec saw him standing erect alongside the first truck, pointing a straight unflinching arm toward the captured one. The laser generator shrilled and the captured truck was caught in its merciless beam. Men screamed and burned, tires burst and the truck slumped to a halt. Then the beam found the oxygen and hydrogen lines of the fuel cell and the truck fireballed, searing Alec and Ferret with its glaring heat.
Suddenly it all stopped. The truck burned sullenly, the Post Office was a twisted mass of smoking ruins. The shooting ceased. No more shouting. No more movement. The street was littered with bodies.
Christ! They wiped us out and I lay there like a turd.
Alec forced himself up to his hands and knees.
"Okay?" Ferret asked, his voice high with fear.
"You okay? Okay?"
"Yes," he said, still nearly breathless. "I'm all right."
Two men jumped out from behind the corner of the building, guns levelled at them. Ferret threw his arms over his head and dived for the ground.
"Hey, it's Alec!" Gianelli's voice shouted.
"And that Ferret character."
"He's one of them," Gianelli said. "Shoot the bastard!"
Alec heard the snick of a gun being cocked.
"No," he commanded, as loudly as he could manage. "He saved my life. Leave him alone. He wasn't with them. He pulled me out of the line of fire."
"You got hit?" Gianelli asked, striding to Alec.
His face was grimy, streaked with soot. His partner kept his rifle levelled at Ferret.
"No," Alec said. "I'm ... I wasn't hit."
After an hour of cleaning and changing clothes, Alec felt strong enough to look for some food. The other men were dragging off the bodies of the dead, tending to each other's wounds. The word had quickly spread that Alec's deepest injury was soiled pants. The men shied away from him.
He found Jameson by a smal
l cook fire, near one of the remaining trucks.
"You're okay," Jameson said.
Alec nodded. "And you?"
"Broke a fingernail on the safety of my rifle," he said with utter seriousness.
"How many . . . did we lose?"
"Three killed, five wounded. Two pretty seriously. The other three are just scratched. Could have been a lot worse."
We're down to a dozen men, Alec thought. "Did they get one of the trucks?"
Nodding, Jameson said, "It cost them twenty-two dead."
"And wounded?"
"They dragged most of their wounded away,"
Jameson said flatly. "The others died."
A single pistol shot cracked through the smoldering darkness.
"That's the last one now," Jameson said.
"I got caught between you and them," Alec mumbled. "Went out to . . . never got my pants down."
Jameson shrugged. "I hear Ferret dragged you to safety. Guess I'll have to start trusting him a little."
"Yeah. Maybe he can help us locate some food."
Jameson excused himself and left Alec alone by the tiny fire. While Alec tried to get some hot broth down, he heard one of the men grumbling:
"I don't care if he does hear me! He was crapping in his pants while Ollie and the rest of 'em were getting killed. Some leader!"
And then Jameson's voice, quiet, calm. "Maybe you don't care if he hears you but if I hear you make another crack like that I'll break your jaw. Understand? He was sick . . . still is."
The reply was mumbled too low for Alec to hear.
He leaned back against the metal of the truck and held the warm cup of broth in both trembling hands. A dozen men. Twelve against Thebes.
Twelve of us and two trucks to cross the country and find Douglas and the fissionables. And most of the men think I'm either a coward or a madman.
Or both.
He almost laughed. The only real friend he had among them was the half-witted Ferret.
Alec looked up. The first hint of dawn was lightening the sky to the east. It would feel good to have sunlight warming him again.
"All right" he whispered to himself. "Two trucks and twelve men. We 5tart north. Now!"
BOOK THREE
Chapter 19
It was pleasantly cool among the trees. The Sun still felt hot, falling in mottled patches through the swaying branches and lighting up the grassy glades of clearings among the trees. The breeze had a tang to it as it gusted in from the northwest.
The leaves were already falling, their colors fantastic.
Alec had never seen such a profusion of reds and golds before.
But he was not paying attention to the autumn foliage now. He lay on his belly atop a carpeting of soft leaves at the rim of a hill, under the cover of the maples and birches. Out in the cleared valley below stood a walled village. A cluster of little huts with thin plumes of smoke curling from a few chimneys.
Ron Jameson lay beside Alec. "They picked a good location. Couple of klicks out in the open. Nobody can get to them without them seeing him first and closing their gates."
Nodding, Alec raised his binoculars to inspect the village's wall. Old cinderblock, mostly. Some newly made brick. Wooden gates, probably scavenged from one of the abandoned cities nearby.
He noticed a few men working in the cornfield ' between the woods and the village. No women were in sight, although they might have been in among the rows of two-meter-high stalks.
"They're greedy" Alec said quietly. 'They've planted cornfields all the way from the edge of their wall to the edge of the trees. And they're trying to get a second crop in before the frosts come."
Jameson grinned. Perfect coyer.
On Alec's other side, Ferret jabbed an excited finger. "Road," he said. "Carts. Wagons."
"They must be carrying on trade with other villages,"
Alec said. "That's too much corn for them to eat all by themselves."
"Maybe they supply Douglas's people?"
Jameson suggested. "If he's got a sizable army and an organized base near here, he'd need supplies from villages like this."
Alec scanned the area again. A cloud of dust caught his attention, far down the road toward the horizon. "Truck," he murmured. "No, it's a wagon, pulled by horses."
"Wagon," Ferret agreed, nodding happily.
He handed the binoculars to Jameson. "Empty, heading in toward the village. Driver and two gunners."
"Wasn't there another one yesterday?" Jameson asked, adjusting the focus as he peered through the glasses.
"That's right. Gianelli spotted it."
"Just about this time, too."
Alec smiled. "We can make a Trojan Horse out of the next one."
"A what?"
"You'll see," Alec said.
All through the summer Alec had driven his tiny band northward, toward the area of Douglas's headquarters. Not that he knew where it was. Only that it was north, toward the lakes.
When he had first reported on meeting Douglas to his mother, she mused, "He was born up in the lake country. It would be just like him to make his home territory into the center of his empire."
She assigned the satellite observers to scan the area carefully and, sure enough, they reported extensive networks of roads, villages, farms in the area. It all appeared quite settled and serene, with no sign of marauding raider packs molesting the farmers or villagers.
Alec headed for the lake country.
The laser trucks ran out of fuel after the first few days. Alec burned them, rather than let them fall into barbarian hands. But with the loss of the trucks they also lost their only link with home, the truck radios which were capable of reaching the satellite station and, through relay, the Moon. Alec had one of the radio transceivers taken from a truck and carried along.
"Whenever we find a power source for it, we can make contact again," he told the men.
Gianelli grumbled at the extra few pounds.
Jameson ordered the men to take turns carrying it. Alec talked with Kobol or Lisa or one of the other Council members whenever they could surprise a village or an armed outpost that had a suitable electric power supply. Lisa had supplies dropped for them, with zero success. The supply vehicles were unmanned and virtually unguided, catapulted from the Moon to the satellite station and then nudged into a re-entry trajectory by the satellite crew. They flamed to Earth like great meteors, either missing Alec's position by enormous margins or being reached first by barbarians who plundered the food, ammunition and supplies inside them long before Alec's men could reach them.
So they lived off the land. Ferret became invaluable, bringing in food where the lunar invaders could find nothing, slowly teaching them how to hunt, trap, see the landscape and the living creatures who dwelled in it. Ecology became a lifesaving study for Alec and his men. And they stopped thinking of Ferret as a halfwitted spy in their midst.
They also raided villages and took what they needed. Alec tried to do it peacefully whenever he could, but it was seldom possible to take the food people had grown for themselves, their ammunition, boots, or medicine, and do it peacefully.
Especially when Alec had nothing to exchange for the goods he took except his thanks.
They lost three men on such raids. In one of them the seemingly indestructable Jameson took an arrow in his thigh that left a wound that infected badly. He still favored that leg.
Twice they tangled with other raider bands and fled for their lives. The raiders were bigger and knew the territory better. Like primitive tribes, each band had staked out a territory for itself and drove off trespassers.
Feudalism, Alec realized. They protect the villages and in return the villagers supply them with food. He shrugged to himself. Well, it's a step up from barbarism.
Alec himself was wounded slightly in the arm, and they lost a fourth man the one and only time they went into a city.
Their sporadic contacts with the satellite had at least provided them with information abou
t the radioactivity levels of the cities. Many of the urban areas had not been bombed, and fallout levels had diminished over the quarter-century since the sky burned, although the eastern seaboard from Boston to Norfolk was still a glowing tangle of devastation for fifty kilometers inland.
They had reached the Ohio River, travelling mostly on foot since the trucks had failed. The summer heat was like a weight pressing on them, although they had adapted to the sunshine by tanning darkly. They commandeered trucks or cars wherever they could find them, abandoning them when they ran out of fuel. Once in a while they would find a few horses, but such animals were usually guarded more passionately than food or women by the farmers in the villages. And Alec found it very strange and difficult to ride a vehicle that had a mind of its own. It wasn't merely a ' 201 matter of steering it; he had to fight a battle of wills to make the beast do anything at all.
Cincinnati was to their west and still dangerously radioactive, the satellite sensors showed, from the bombing of the big U.S. Air Force base in nearby Dayton. The cities along the Ohio River were mostly abandoned, emptied because the surviving people could not feed themselves inside their cities. And the diseases that had scourged the survivors had been at their worst in the cities.
But empty or not, the cities were treasure houses of canned food, ammunition, clothing, maps, compasses, vehicles, and even fast fuel dumps that still held usable gasoline. But even after twenty-five years, most of the earthlings shunned all the cities with superstitious dread.
Most of them. The satellite sensors could not warn Alec about the few crazed, ghoulish lunatics who haunted the dead, empty buildings. Nor of the rats and diseases that lingered there with them.
Alec's band numbered twenty-three when they reached Pittsburgh. The newcomers were youngsters, several still in their teens, with only the faintest fuzz on their chins. They had joined Alec's band from the villages, for adventure, for safety, for loot or women or to get away from parents or for any of the ancient reasons that turn a boy into a would-be warrior.
When they staggered away from Pittsburgh only nine of them were left. The city was teeming with rats and ferocious, feral dogs—and with wild-eyed, half-starved ragged screaming things that could barely be recognized as human. They fought as madmen fight, swarming into Alec's men by the hundreds, oblivious to the murderous fire that mowed them down, piling up their dead on the broken filthy streets and still coming, clawing over the corpses to get at the living.
