by Nick Cole
We will have to watch them.
Over the hum of the engines, he considered the place as he readied for the long push back to the village.
What had been the difference between this place and the village?
He set off down the road making slow but steady progress. A harvest moon came out and it stayed dry. It smelled dusty when he arrived at the burnt town where the two highways intersected. The bodies were still spaced across the blacktop. He maneuvered around them and set the high beams on the road heading west.
If I remember right, the village will be beyond the next valley. But it has been some time.
He crossed a small plain where once crops had grown. An overpass had collapsed across the road and he went around it. Shaking with hunger, he stopped and turned off the tank. He opened the can of chili and ate it as he walked around the silent tank. It was cold and he began to shiver.
Back in the tank, he started it, momentarily knowing it wouldn’t. But it did and soon he eased forward into the night as the road climbed a small desert plateau, crossing a pass and descending into a valley of jagged peaks.
I remember this part. I remember driving it many times.
Thoughts that had seemed so important then, as he passed over the same ground now, seemed foreign.
I was different then, he said in the wind and the night.
When he reached the end of the valley he felt tired enough to stop. He thought about buttoning up the tank and sleeping on the floor.
I need rest. I know I am very sick.
If you die… or if in the morning you cannot get up… no one will know. Eventually the Horde will find the Fort. The machine gun won’t keep them away for long. Once it runs out of bullets, what then?
He drank some water and pressed on. He passed a conical mountain, and then came to the Gas Station that had burned down at the edge of the town that was the farthest limit the villagers would salvage.
Just a ways more.
The Old Man in the book is not his name. His name is Santiago. In the book he wanted the boy with him as he fought the fish. Just as I wanted my granddaughter with me.
He passed the blackened ruins and a little later the moon fell low in the sky.
He topped the rise and saw the village. He turned off the tank feeling the heat dissipate quickly. He was just a mile off from the village but he could see it below. It was a collection of sheds and huts built around an old processing plant. It was his home. He could see the field of broken glass glittering like the stars above.
He left the tank, feeling hot and sore.
I WILL WALK home and go to my house and in the morning they will see the tank.
There has never been such a fish.
He knew he made little sense. But it seemed right not to wake anyone.
Let them sleep in the village one night longer. To have the village one more night. Then they can have the world.
My journey was like the one in the book.
That is the thing about books. You take their journeys with you.
You came home with something more than just the remains of a fish.
The book was never about the fish.
He neared the sleeping village and passed through unseen.
Even the dogs are asleep.
I want to tell my granddaughter the lesson of the book. The lesson that they can beat you, but they cannot defeat you. I must tell her that.
At the door to his shed, he wondered if someone might live here now. His thoughts were scrambled and came in waves. But he knew it was the sickness and the fatigue.
He pushed open the door and heard its sound, knowing it as his own. He loved the sound of it. All was as he’d left it. Still holding his rucksack, he lit a candle and carried it to the desk where he kept the book. He looked at the cover for a long moment and then set down his pack.
Your must tell her that.
What?
They can beat you but they cannot defeat you.
He put the book on his bed and lit a fire in the stove.
My friend in the book is safe.
Maybe just some tea. Then sleep.
But when he sat on the bed to take off his new boots, he couldn’t get back up.
Be sure to tell her.
I will.
For just a moment he mumbled, then lay down.
He dreamed of lions playing on distant beaches at sunset. His granddaughter was right next to him, watching, both of them silent. Her little hand in his old hand.
SHE WAS GOING out again. In the dark, she gathered all the tools she would need, and when she found the claw hammer her grandfather had let her carry, she placed it in her belt. It was like having him with her. She needed that.
On the way to the cantina for the tea that the old women made while they fried the sweet dough, she felt the cold earth on her toes. This was the best time of day, she thought. This was the time when they would meet and she would go out with him to salvage.
She looked at his shed as she had every morning, its silent, gray, unlived in look a memorial to her grandfather.
It’s a good thing. That way you will remember everything he taught you. You will need it out there.
But as she looked this morning, she saw the wispy smoke in the chimney of his shed and she was angry.
Someone has moved in! It’s too soon…
She charged toward the shed door, intending to wake the village with her rebuke at whoever had taken her grandpa’s shed as his own. But then she was running and hoping. Hoping he had come back.
Like she knew he would.
She found him sweaty and hot atop his cot, mumbling in his sleep. She kissed him but he did not recognize her in his fever. His body felt thin and gaunt.
She hurried back to her parents’ door, telling all in one burst that he had returned. Then to the kitchen to tell the women.
Back at the shed, her father knelt by the side of the cot, crying and talking softly to the Old Man. She would nurse him back to health. She would make him drink soup. They needed to kill one of the chickens. Then when he was well, they would go out again to salvage, and then she too was crying.
Her little brother came running to her as he always did.
“There is something on the road. Something wonderful.” He pulled her through the lanes of the village to the edge of the highway.
Alone and in pairs, the villagers approached the tank atop the hill as the morning sun rose behind it. She didn’t care. Even though it was the greatest salvage ever, it was nothing compared to what she cared about.
Epilogue
The Chief Excavator stood atop the scaffolding, the wind blowing at his jacket. He stepped back from the hole he had just made with the cutting tool.
“It’s your turn.”
The Doctor of Antiquities stepped forward. He had campaigned long and hard for this day. Now that it was upon him, he didn’t want to go through with it. From theory to paper, to committees and hearings, it had been one thing. The game of academics. But now those questions would be answered. He would have to find something new to uncover because the riddle of the tank would be solved.
His heart beat rapidly as he moved his light toward the opening, his head close behind. Inside, a wrapped body was the first thing he saw. He knew it was a body. The first residents of the reoccupation of Old Tucson, the foundation of their culture, had prepared their bodies in the same manner. But those bodies had all been found in the graveyards of Starr Pass.
“It’s true,” he mumbled.
“You were right?” asked the Chief Excavator.
The Doctor stuck his head and light back in the hole.
“It’s a body. Probably an early warlord. Maybe the first to conquer the area. There is something on top of the body. A book perhaps.”
A strong wind, a danger at this altitude, gusted past the Doctor’s head and turned the ancient book to fragments, floating and swirling about the inside of the tank.
“Looked like a book, I should say.”
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“Any clue how they got the tank to the top of the tower?” asked the Chief Excavator. The Doctor stepped back and pulled a plastic sheet over the opening to prevent further wind damage.
“We’ll never know how they did that.” He took in the panorama of the world’s oldest still-populated city. Towers and buildings raced toward the heights above, the Space Elevator beyond that, its thin diamond line tracing away into the sky above.
“That was never the point of this project. We wanted to know who was in here. It’s our city’s oldest monument and no one knows a thing about it.”
“So who was he?”
“Can we ever know? Probably not. We will make some guesses from what we know about the survivors of that period. But we can never know for sure.”
“So we can just guess a little better, is that it?”
The Doctor put his hand on the tank, feeling its ancientness.
“I can say one thing.”
“What?” asked the reporter who’d come out to the historic district to cover the story.
“Whoever put him here, in a war machine of the period, which was impossible as we know it by their standards after the catastrophe, to hoist a multiton vehicle to the top of this tower, whoever it was, loved him very much. He was very important to them. I can say that.”
Intermezzo
For those who loved
The Old Man and the Wasteland,
You will find this novel a bit different.
This time the Apocalypse is personal.
I thank you in advance for this brief indulgence.
God willing, we may yet hear more of the Old Man.
PART II
The Savage Boy
Chapter 1
You take everything with you.
That is the last lesson. The last of all the lessons. The last words of Staff Sergeant Presley.
You take everything with you, Boy.
The Boy tramped through the last of the crunchy brown stalks of wild corn, his weak left leg dragging as it did, his arms full. He carried weathered wooden slats taken from the old building at the edge of the nameless town. He listened to the single clang of some long unused lanyard, connecting against a flagpole in the fading warmth of the quiet autumn morning.
He knew.
Staff Sergeant Presley was gone now.
The last night had been the longest. The old man that Staff Sergeant Presley had become, bent and shriveled, faded as he gasped for air around the ragged remains of his throat, was gone. His once dark, chocolate brown skin turned gray. The muscles shriveled, the eyes milky. There had been brief moments of fire in those eyes over the final cold days. But at the last of Staff Sergeant Presley there had been no final moment. All of him had gone so quickly. As if stolen. As if taken.
You take everything with you.
The cold wind thundered against the sides of Gas Station all night long as it raced down from mountain passes far to the west. It careened across the dry whispering plain of husk and brush through a ravaged land of wild, dry corn. The wind raced past them in the night, moving east.
A week ago, Gas Station was as far as Staff Sergeant Presley could go, stopping as if they might start again, as they had so many times before. Gas Station was as far as the dying man could go. Would go.
I gotcha to the Eighty, Boy. Now all you got to do is follow it straight on into California. Follow it all the way to the Army in Oakland.
Now, in the morning’s heatless golden light, the Boy came back from hunting, having taken only a rabbit. Staff Sergeant Presley’s sunken chest did not rise. The Boy waited for a moment among the debris and broken glass turned to sandy grit of Gas Station, their final camp. He waited for Sergeant Presley to look at him and nod.
I’m okay.
I’ll be fine.
Get the wood.
But he did not. Staff Sergeant Presley lay unmoving in his blankets.
The Boy went out, crossing the open space where once a building stood. Now, wild corn had grown up through the cracked concrete pad that remained. He crossed the disappearing town to the old wooden shamble at its edge, maybe once a barn. Working with his tomahawk he had the slats off with a sharp crack in the cool, dry air of the high desert. Returning to Gas Station, he knew.
Staff Sergeant Presley was gone now.
The Boy crossed the open lot. Horse looked at him, then turned away. And there was something in that dismissal of Horse that told the Boy everything he needed to know and did not want to.
Staff Sergeant Presley was gone.
He laid the wood down near the crumbling curb and crossed into the tiny office that once watched the county road.
Staff Sergeant Presley’s hand was cold. His chest did not rise. His eyes were closed.
The Boy sat next to the body throughout that long afternoon until the wind came up.
You take everything with you.
And…
The Army is west. Keep going west, Boy. When you find them, show them the map. Tell them who I was. They’ll know what to do. Tell them Staff Sergeant Lyman Julius Presley, Third Battalion, 47th Infantry, Scouts. Tell them I made it all the way—all the way to D.C., never quit. Tell them there’s nothing left. No one.
And…
That’s the North Star.
And…
Don’t let that tomahawk fly unless you’re sure. Might not get it back.
And…
These were all towns. People once lived here. Not like your people. This was a neighborhood. You could have lived here if the world hadn’t ended. Gone to school, played sports. Not like your tents and horses.
And…
There are some who still know what it means to be human—to be a society. There are others… You got to avoid those others. That’s some craziness.
And…
“Boy” is what they called you. It’s the only thing you responded to. So “Boy” it is. This is how we…
Make camp.
Hunt.
Fight.
Ride Horse.
Track.
Spell.
Read.
Bury the dead.
Salute.
For a day the Boy watched the body. Later, he wrapped Staff Sergeant Presley in a blanket; blankets they had traded the Possum Hunters for, back two years ago, when their old blankets were worn thin from winter and the road, when Staff Sergeant Presley had still been young and always would be.
At the edge of the town that once was, in the golden light of morning, the Boy dug the grave. He selected a spot under a sign he could not spell because the words had faded. He dug in the warm, brown earth, pushing aside the yellowed, papery corn husks. The broken and cratered road nearby made a straight line into the west.
When the body was in the grave, covered, the Boy waited. Horse snorted. The wind came rolling across the wasteland of wild corn husks.
What now?
You take everything with you.
Horse.
Tomahawk.
Blankets.
Knife.
Map.
Find the Army, Boy. All the way west, near a big city called San Francisco. Tell them there’s nothing left and show them the map.
When he could still speak, that was what Staff Sergeant Presley had said.
And…
You take everything with you.
Which seemed something more than just a lesson.
Chapter 2
The road and the map gave the number 80. For a time he knew where he was by the map’s lines and tracings. He alone would have to know where he was going from now on.
I followed him from the day he took me. Now I will need to lead, even if it is just myself and Horse.
Horse grazed by the side of the broken and cracked highway.
The short days were cold and it was best to let Horse eat when they could find dry grass. The Boy considered the snowcapped mountains rising in the distant west.
Sergeant Presley would’ve had a plan for those mounta
ins.
You should be thinking about the snow, not about me, Boy.
The voice of Sergeant Presley in his head was strong, not as it had been in the last months of his life when it was little more than a rasp and in the end, nothing at all.
You’re just remembering me as I was, Boy.
I am.
You can’t think of me as someone who can get you outta trouble. I’m dead. I’m gone. You’ll have to take care of yourself now, Boy. I did all I could, taught you everything I knew about survival. Now you got to complete the mission. You got to survive. I told you there’d be mountains. Not like the ones you knew back east. These are real mountains. They’re gonna test you. Let me go now and keep moving, Boy.
The sun fell behind the mountains, creating a small flash as it disappeared beyond the snowcapped peaks. Horse moved forward in his impatient way. The Boy massaged his bad leg. This was the time when it began to hurt, at the end of the day as the heat faded and the cold night began.
Sometimes it’s better to ride through the night, Boy. Horse’ll keep you warm. Better than shiverin’ and not sleepin’. But stick to the roads if you do go on.
The Boy rode through the night, listening to Horse clop lazily along, the only sound for many hours. He watched his breath turn to vapor in the dark.
I should make a fire.
The Boy continued on, listening to Sergeant Presley’s voice and the stories he would tell of his life before the Boy.
Ah got caught up in things I shouldn’t have. You do that and time gets away from you. It shoulda taken me two years to get across the States. Instead it’s taken me almost twenty-five or twenty-eight years. I’ve lost count at times. How old are you, Boy? You was eight when you come with me. But that was after I’d finished my business in Montana. That took me more than twenty to do. Maybe even thirty. Nah, couldn’t have been that much.
We fought over San Francisco maybe ten years. After the Chinese kicked us out of the city and dug in, that’s when the general sent us east to see if there was anyone left in D.C. My squad didn’t make it two weeks. Then it was just me. Until I met you, and that was up in Wyoming.
