Aspen Vale: A Tale of the Gone

by Lopeman, Kenneth

  The Kenoshan paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. “The three of us that came from there grabbed Simon. When the Gone took off after the refugees, they had really thinned out our part of the wall. We asked to make a sortie, just the three of us. A few fort folk volunteered to help. We went out, and started clearing a path for my kinfolk. Simon posted some riflemen on the walls to back us up.”

  “That was very brave,” said Roger. “Or very stupid.”

  “Probably both,” said Beaupre. “We didn’t save everyone. We didn’t save even half. But we got people up the pass and into the fort. There were more…so many more… but the action on the south wall drew the attention of the goners from the other parts. Eventually they moved in to close the gap, and we had to shut the gate. Most of us got in, but a friend of mine was stuck outside, with a group of people. He led some of the refugees around, through the woods, to the north part of the wall. There’s no gate there, but some of the fort folk nailed some wood planks to the end of the bridges we removed from the southern and eastern gate, hung it over the wall in the places the Gone were thinnest. My friend held off the goners in the moat single handedly while they tried to crawl up the ramp. A lot of them made it. But not everyone.”

  “How many of your people survived?” asked Carpenter.

  “Fifty three. Of two hundred and eight four souls,” said Beaupre. “Some of them that didn’t make it hid in the hills; they came down later after it was all over. We didn’t find out about them till later, of course. We thought they were all gone. On top of that, three of the six of us that made the initial sortie died, including my friend who had led the refugees around. One top of that, one of the riflemen died when his gun exploded in his face.”

  That last made the Longshooter captain sigh and nod. Ammunition stayed good a long time, if you kept it dry. But the most trustworthy ammo was the stuff cast before the Awakening, and much of that was nearly a century old. While there was no shortage of scrap metal for gunsmiths to work with, the powder they used could vary from shot to shot. The gunsmith at the Ranch was very good at his job… none of his rounds had maimed anyone in a decade or more. But there also hadn’t been any real need to shoot for a sustained period of time, the way the Kenoshans had.

  “That third day was a little easier. Most of the goners that attacked Jefferson stayed in the valley, and went after the cattle. They stampeded, which took a good number of goners out, but spread the herds out all over the valley. We were still trying to get them back together when I left. And despite the thinning numbers, we soon figured out that we had another problem. The goners we were killing on the walls were falling to the bottom of the trenches. As they piled up, they gave the ones that were still up and moving something to climb on the north and east walls. They started pressing up against them, and we were hearing timbers crack. All the fighting men went to those parts of the wall, trying to thin them out. We were doing well, too. But more timbers were breaking, and there were too many men on the catwalk. That’s when part of the outer northern wall gave. The entire outer wall collapsed inward, spilling men down into the space between the walls.”

  “The Gone made quick work of the men that fell in, and started to fill in the breach. One of the support timbers had been pushed back hard enough when the outer wall came down that the inner wall opposite had been compromised. It didn’t take them long to get through. That’s when we used the last of the ammunition. Riflemen rained fire on them, trying to plug the breach with corpses. It didn’t work, but it gave us some time to get off of the catwalks and down to fight them. If so many of them hadn’t gone off after our cows, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. As it was, we fought them all day, well into the night. We finally got an oxcart into the breach, and stacked wood and debris from the wall around it, plugging the gap. But the only reason we managed that was because we had run out of goners to kill by then; when we got back up, we saw that we had them down to a about hundred that hadn’t joined the attack for whatever reason. Not counting what was in the valley, of course. We might have ended it there, but we were so tired. And we had lost a lot of good people. Simon decided that we needed at least a day to rest our fighters, which didn’t feel like nearly enough to me. We were careful…we spent the better part of week slowly fighting our way out of the fort… sortie after sortie. Hit em quick, get back inside.”

  Beaupre trailed off, a faraway look in his eyes. For a long while, there was silence in the assembly room. Finally, Carpenter cleared his throat. “If you were so short of fighting men, why did they send you to us? And in the winter?”

  “Well, they didn’t send me here, per se,” Beaupre admitted. “They wanted me to head south to Beyuna Vista, get their help. I had some kinfolk there, and I’d been there in the past. This was about a month after the attack. Some of the cattlemen and stragglers from Jefferson were coming out of the woods, and telling us that they had seen goners walking away from the valley. We were getting the same news from everyone that came down. It isn’t a terribly long ski to Beyuna Vista, not for a Ranger, so I volunteered to do it. But Simon pulled me aside before I left. ‘Every time we heard that roar, there were more goners,’ he said. ‘Remember the second night, when it sounded far off?’”

  “He thought that the Vista got attacked, too,” Marolt said. It didn’t sound like a question.

  Beaupre nodded anyway. “Yeah. Truth to tell I had forgotten about that. I argued that it was a cloudy night that night, and there were a lot of goners. It could be that the sound had just been drowned out. He nodded, and said ‘Could be. If I’m wrong, you’re the best man to send to tell them what happened; we need the men, but most of the Vistans moved down there to get away from us fort folk. Someone from the valley has a better chance to convince them than I do. They won’t want to believe, but you have to convince them. And if I’m right… don’t come back. The road forks down that way; get to the fork and head west. Try to get to the Four Townships. Find out if they heard the noise, or if they’ve seen any more goners than usual. If they’re still OK, you find Jake Larkin. Show him the symbol, tell him what happened. Hopefully they can prepare, maybe send some men to help us.”

  “And there it is. The inevitable plea for help,” scoffed Townsend.

  “What symbol? Do you have it?” asked Roger, as if the Mayor hadn’t spoken.

  Beaupre nodded and pulled the scrap of paper out of his coat. He handed it to the elder Councilman. On it, a triangle had been drawn, dissected into three by two lines. “It’s rather a… nonthreatening symbol, isn’t it?” he noted.

  “Have you ever seen this symbol before, Jake?” asked Marolt.

  Jake nodded. “On barrels, in a pond upslope of Three Ponds,” he said. “I think someone put those barrels up there to taint the water supply.”

  “Are you saying that the sickness was on purpose?” Townsend asked incredulously. “Are you saying someone has ALLIED with the Gone!?”

  “More like they’ve found a way to turn the Gone into a weapon,” Beaupre said. “This symbol was branded onto the skin of every goner we found after the attack. Some of them that hold to the Three thought it might be the mark of Jezias himself, and that was why the goners didn’t freeze. Since you all hold to the Three here, I was hoping you might verify that.”

  Roger shook his head. “I’ve never seen it before. If it IS a mark of Lord Jezias, it’s something new.”

  “What about the Jezzites themselves?” Townsend asked, glaring at Beaupre. “I hear they all desire everlasting life. Maybe they’ve discovered some ritual to make themselves into more powerful goners!”

  “Jefferson was full of Christians,” said Beaupre, emphasizing the word, “and we took the brunt of the casualties. Why would we do that to ourselves?”

  “Because whatever you were doing backfired!” Townsend shot back. “It backfired and it turned on you, and you put the entire area in danger. And that’s IF your story is true.”

  “I agree that there are some... shall we say fantastic? …elem
ents to his story,” Jay Carpenter said. “Especially how this man seems to be one of the heroes that rescued his town, and yet they just sent him off to us when they lost so many of their fighters. But the fact remains, this man braved Independence Pass in February to tell us this story. He also has the confidence of our Scout Captain.” At Jake’s nod, Carpenter continued. “So, for now, we need to treat this story as being absolutely true. We need to build our defenses up, call in the Scouts, and train more fighting men.”

  “That will take a lot of men out of the fields,” said Marolt. “A lot of our 'fighting men' are actually farmers, and have been for years. And if Kenosha is in as bad a shape as he says, we probably cannot rely on getting any rice this year. We have a lot of mouths to feed.”

  “We’ll need no food at all if we’re dead,” said Jake. “For me, that symbol proves Mr. Beaupre’s story. We have some sort of enemy here. Whether it’s some crazy Jezzite cult or the Lord of Death himself, revealing himself after all these years… We’re going to have a fight on our hands, and maybe sooner rather than later.”

  “If Lord Jezias is our enemy, what chance do we stand?” Marolt argued.

  “We stand no chance if we’re not ready. We need those men,” said Jake.

  “You’re right, but so is Zeke,” Carpenter said softly, nodding to Marolt. “Men can’t fight if they’re not fed, Jake”

  Jake started to shoot back, but what Jay was saying got through to him and he bit off the retort. “You’re right. I let my mouth get ahead of my brain there. But we can’t just go about business as usual when we know there is a threat.”

  “Whoever it is, we managed to fight them off,” said Beaupre. “If there was no hope, I would be dead. You, at least, have time to prepare here. It’s time I wished we could have had.”

  “I noticed you didn’t actually say what had happened to Beyuna Vista,” the mayor noted. Beaupre grimaced and looked at his feet. The mayor nodded. “Right. This enemy, whoever it is, is responsible for the destruction of the Vista, Three Ponds, Mr. Beaupre’s town, and damn near Fort Kenosha. We don’t have a fort in Aspen Vale. What can we realistically do to prepare?”

  “The Angle held out for weeks during the Awakening,” Roger reminded them all. “It’s a damned strong building.”

  “It WAS a damned strong building,” said Townsend. “It hasn’t been kept up as well as the Ell; not enough people want to live there. Who knows if the walls would stand up to a herd now?”

  There was silence after that. A long moment passed. “Can I take it, then, that we believe Mr. Beaupre’s story, then?” asked Jake.

  Townsend started to say something, but then paused and turned to Ranch’s ambassador. “Mr. Lefton? You’ve been quiet. What do you think?”

  Lefton didn’t answer right away. Instead, he fixed the Kenoshan with an emotionless stare. When Beaupre didn’t flinch, he nodded. “I am not sure I believe him, Mr. Mayor. But I’m not sure I don’t, either. Kenosha is a damn long way away, especially by the old Piggie road. A nomad might lie about that some battle, and we wouldn’t know if it was true or not for months if we sent people to investigate. But if Beyuna Vista is actually gone… it’s harder to lie about an entire town disappearing, especially one close enough for us to verify after the melt comes and the mud dries. That would be an idiot thing to lie about, and whatever else Mr. Beaupre is, he doesn’t strike me as an idiot. I think Mr. Carpenter has the right of it. For now, we need to treat this story as if it was true. And I’ll be saying the same thing when I get back to the Ranch.”

  Townsend looked like he had just taken a bite of a bitter fruit, but nodded. “The Council has spoken,” he said resignedly. “Alright then. What steps can we take now to prepare?”

  “We can’t plant until the ground thaws, and that’s still six weeks away at best,” Roger reminded them. “So let’s put that labor to use. First and foremost, we need to see what we can do to reinforce the School Complex. The Ell is in good shape, and I think the people who live in the Angle and the Curve have kept them in better repair than we’re giving them credit for. If we’re lucky, it will mainly be a matter of reinforcing the walls.”

  “Shouldn’t we work on repairing the Angle then, before reinforcing the Ell?” said Townsend. “The Angle held off the Awakening itself.”

  Jake shook his head. “We don’t know how long we will have before an attack, and it sounds like we won’t have much warning if the Gone are going to fall out of the sky. The Ell is in the best shape, so will take the least work to fortify. After that, the Angle should be the priority.”

  “Agreed,” said Jay. “It’s a good idea with or without a threat; we’ve gotten lax about defense here. I also think we should organize an excursion into the Ruins, Jake. Collect some scrap metal to take to the Ranch.” Jake nodded. The Ranch had the only gunsmith in the Townships, but he needed metal. In the Ruins, the remains of the old metal carriages the Pigs had used for transportation still sat; metal monstrosities that hulked around every corner, as if every man, woman and child had needed their very own. The rubber wheels that they had sat on was long since used or decomposed, and the outer shells of the carriages were generally rusted out beyond being use able. But the undercarriages, as well as the parts of the machine hidden under the metal flap in the front, were generally still salvageable.

  “While we’re there, I’d like to go down into the Gardens of Denver,” said Jake.

  This caused a murmur in the chamber. “I really don’t think you should do that, Jake,” Jay Carpenter said soberly. “That place is cursed, and we really can’t afford to lose you.”

  The Gardens of Denver were located on the northern end of the Ruins, right up against the Roaring Fork River. A large building sat to one side, and a path had once cut in and among the trees. Along these paths, huge standing stones had been placed, etched with the words of a man called Denver. According to the stories, this man was so important that the Piggies had named their capital city for him. One of the stones spoke of death not being an ending, and that all spirits would become a part of each other; classic Jezzite teachings. It had clearly been a holy place for the followers of Lord Jezias before the Awakening. It was said that the influence of Lord Jezias was so strong in the Gardens that his taint had spread to the Ruins, and that anyone who entered the Garden brought upon himself the attention of the Lord of Death. “I don’t think I should, either,” said Jake. “But if this IS some sort of Jezzite symbol, then we may find it on the standing stones there. And it’s not the sort of thing I can ask any of my men to do.”

  Carpenter pressed his lips into a thin line, but nodded. “I still don’t like it. If you find it, great, we know who and what we’re dealing with. But even if you find nothing, it could still be a Jezzite symbol that simply wasn’t used before the Awakening. Seems a lot of risk for little gain.”

  “Jay is right,” said Roger. “We know we can’t stop you, but think this over a little bit more before you decide to take action.”

  Jake nodded to the elder. “I will. In the meantime, there is a meeting of the Scouts this afternoon at my home.” He turned to face Jay. “Do you think you could get your Longshooters there?”

  “You called a meeting about this matter before you heard the Council’s decision?” asked Townsend, an edge to his voice.

  Yes, I did, you insecure piece of kak. “No, mayor,” he lied. “My son has decided to join the Scouts, and the meeting was called to vote him in. Now, though, we can use it to plan our foray into the Ruins.”

  Townsend did not look convinced, but Marolt nodded. “Alright then. I need to get back home and rework the plans for planting this year. Figure out how we are going to plant more food with fewer hands.”

  “For right now, I only intend to approach Hernando Martinez, Planter Marolt,” said Jake, “and let the other inactive Scouts decide for themselves how they want to help. If things get bad, that will change, but I agree with Roger. If we get enough done now, it may not cut into the planting later.�
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  “I’ve already planned an announcement tomorrow regarding Three Ponds, if the weather holds,” said Townsend. “That is going to cause anxiety enough. We'll have to tell them that there was some sort of attack at Fort Kenosha; otherwise Mr. Beaupre's presence makes no sense. But I’d rather hold back the part about their being an enemy, at least until we learn more. And I don’t want anyone to breath a word about the people of Three Ponds maybe being poisoned. We don’t know that they were, and if the people think the water supply is in danger we WILL have a panic. Agreed?”

  Jake's sense of honesty rebelled at that notion, but he had to nod. “The rumor will leak out, because I will have to tell some people what to look out for. But I agree with the Mayor. And if there IS a panic, it will make people question the decisions we make. We don’t need to make people paranoid. It will be up to my Scouts to guard the water supply.”

  Townsend looked surprised at the support, but accepted it. “The rumor will spread, like Jake says. But there are always rumors. Hopefully, we’ll have enough time to figure out a course of action before things get out of hand.”

  “I hate leaving things to hope,” Jay said. But he said it mostly to himself; it was more of a complaint than a criticism.

  “Then pray to the Mother that her grace sees us through this,” said Roger, struggling to his feet, “and hope she answers our prayers. I know that I, for one, will be praying like crazy.”

  That seemed to signal the end of the meeting. Lefton strode out the door without a word, putting on his riding gloves as he went. Jay Carpenter watched him go. “I think he’s taking your story more seriously than he let on, Mr. Beaupre,” he said to the Kenoshan. “For all his talk about going home, I’ve never seen him in that big of a hurry.” The Longshooter then turned to Jake. “I’ll get as many Longshooters together as possible for your meeting tonight.”