by Nick Cole
At the gate, ashen-faced warriors were gathering to watch the crossbow’s work while a captain marshaled them for the final attack on the last of the courthouse’s defenders.
Dunn rode through the gate on his dark gray mare. He saw the Boy and waved his hat as he galloped the distance between them.
“Where’s MacRaven?”
The Boy pointed toward the top of the outpost. “Where’s my horse and gear?”
Dunn smiled. “What, dontcha trust us, Bear Killer?”
The anger behind the Boy’s stare checked Dunn.
“Nice rifle.” Dunn’s eyes were ice cold.
The Boy looked down at the rifle. He had completely forgotten about it.
“Give it here,” demanded Dunn.
“Where’s my horse?” said the Boy through clenched teeth.
For a moment Dunn’s hand fell to his machete. But then he heard a far-off volley of rifle fire and this meant something to him.
“Hell, keep it. Vaclav’s coming up with Raleigh’s horse and yours also, I suspect. Where’d you say the chief was?”
The Boy stared for a long moment, then pointed toward the field.
Dunn kicked his mount and tore off across the grass of the on-ramp. The crossbow sang again and now the ashen-faced warriors were marching in formation toward the courthouse.
Won’t be long now before things get sorted out. You better get while the gettin’s good, Boy.
He trotted through the broken timbers of the gate, smashed by the iron bar flung from the space crossbow.
The rising highway to the east was flooded with carts and wagon teams. Wild-eyed women and scrawny children who had followed the army of tribes watched the fort with hunger. On the other side of the highway, buildings from Before lay fallow and fallen amidst a pine forest that had overrun that section of town.
Vaclav led Horse and Raleigh’s mount down alongside the grass-covered highway. The other horses were wild with fear from the smoke and gunfire as Vaclav cursed and spit, trying to keep them under control.
When he saw the Boy he yelled, “Take your stupid animal already.”
The Boy limped forward and took hold of Horse. The bearskin was tied across Horse’s back and he found his tomahawk inside the saddle pack. A moment later he was up and whispering as he patted the long neck of his friend.
“What’s going on in there?” said Vaclav, looking at the rifle with the coal-black version of Dunn’s hungry blue eyes.
The Boy was just about to lie when they both heard shouting at the gate as Dunn came thundering through on his mare, knocking back two ashen-faced guards. He screamed something at Vaclav.
If the meaning isn’t clear it shortly will be, Boy.
“What’s he saying?” asked Vaclav.
Dunn waved his machete, still shouting as he drove his horse hard up the old highway.
Whatchu gonna do now, Boy?
Vaclav will be busy with the extra mount. Dunn, on the other hand…
The Boy raised the rifle and sighted down the barrel. The rifle was too long to steady with just his one good arm, which he needed the hand of to pull the trigger.
Horse has never heard a rifle before. Be ready, Boy. Horse might not like it.
He raised his withered left arm and set the rifle on the flat of his thin arm.
“What’re you doing?” Vaclav screamed.
Is it loaded, Boy?
Dunn’s eyes were wide with fear and hate as he raced to close the distance between them.
Horse danced to the right, turning away.
I’ve never fired a gun before, Sergeant.
Ain’t nothin’ but a thang.
Explosion.
The bullet rips into Dunn’s mount and Dunn goes down hard, face-first on the grassy slope.
The Boy urged Horse forward and they were off across the broken and grassy highway, down an overgrown embankment, and into the ruins and the forest beyond.
Chapter 32
The Boy had passed by the overgrown ruins of places almost familiar many times before. There had always been in him that desire to understand such places, to investigate them. But in this moment of shouting men behind him, and soon the inevitable dogs, he knew there was no time for the usual consideration of things past.
Green grass sprouted through the split asphalt of a wide avenue, the remains of an old road led up through the ruins that the Boy suspected was the other half of the Auburn that existed before the bombs. At the top of the rise, looking back toward the smoky pillars climbing over the outpost, the Boy saw the remnants of the Hard Men coming for him. Other men, ferocious lunatics, followed behind Raleigh’s riders with bellowing hounds at the ends of thick straps of leather.
Escape and evade, Boy, we done it a million times. If they’re bringing dogs, then distance is what you need. Out of sight, those dogs will start to slow down when they start searchin’ for your trail. Then you can confuse ’em.
The Boy patted Horse and knew that an outright race would put him beyond the dogs. But the Hard Men on their horses would spot his trail and the following would be easier.
He turned and started through the overgrown brush and tangle of a collapsed bridge that once crossed the road.
I’ll keep moving west, Sergeant.
He rode Horse hard for a time, working his way down a wooded ridge and following a twisting maze of dense brush and warped trees along falling ridges and a steep slope that will eventually lead into the river delta around Sacramento.
By noon he had lost the Hard Men, but his progress had been slow. Way off, back up on the ridge, he heard dogs baying, moaning as if in pain.
If they catch me, will those dogs stop their noise, satisfied at what will happen next?
Sometimes I wonder if there is any good left in this world.
He thought of the bodies and carnage of Auburn.
At sunset, he pulled out the map from its hidden place in the bearskin. Sacramento was far ahead to the west.
Behind him, he could smell woody smoke in the fading light and he wondered if it was from Auburn or the campfires of his pursuers.
It was good to be alone again.
Is that the way of my life, Sergeant? My way through this world? Alone?
But there was no answer.
Why should there be an answer, Sergeant? When you were alive we never talked about those things. We talked of food and survival, and sometimes I just listened to your stories about the way things were Before. And sometimes also, why they had to end.
You take everything with you, Boy.
Yes.
He looked at what forty years of wild, unchecked growth had made of the terrain. It was a wall through which nothing could pass undetected.
The Old Highway is maybe a mile off to my right. I’ll have a better chance evading them there.
They could be searching the road for you, Boy.
If I put as much distance tonight between myself and the hounds, by morning I’ll have a better chance.
He remembered Sergeant Presley’s hatred of “chance.”
If all you got is a chance, Boy, you ain’t got jack!
It’s all I have now, Sergeant.
He rode the highway at a trot. The night was cool and mist rose from the lowlands on both sides of the highway. Cars and trucks, forever frozen in rusty dereliction, littered the road and made him wonder, as they always did, of the stories behind and within them.
You’ll never know, Boy. I could make up a story for you like I used to. You could tell yourself a lie. But what good would it do, even if you could know how things ended for those people?
Sometimes the Boy heard himself asking, What has happened here? Sometimes the cars were jammed together, as though frozen in a single moment of waiting. Sometimes they were overturned. Sometimes they were parked by the side of the road, every door open, every window broken. What was within was gone, even down to the seats. All that was left was rusting metal and an untold story he would never hear.
He
looked at the cars scattered along the highway.
It is beyond me to ever know why such things have been left the way they are.
And yet I want to know.
He rode on, long after the sliver of a moon had completed its descent. It was dark and damp and cold. In the misty gloom he saw standing water in the surrounding fields and broken buildings.
The water looked like a rug.
Before long, he had ridden in close to the skeletal towers of the old state capitol in Sacramento. He heard frogs everywhere and even the highway was submerged. He came to a bridge that had long since fallen into the muck of the dark river below and he could go no farther.
It is too dark to find a way around, Sergeant.
He looked behind him and saw nothing in the misty night.
The frogs will warn me if anyone comes along.
Sorry—he pats Horse—we can’t have fire tonight.
He draped his blanket over his friend and rolled up in his bearskin at the side of the bridge, far out along it, almost to the edge of the broken span over the swamp below.
IN THE MILKY light of morning he surveyed the bridge. There was no way to the other side. The city, twisted, bent, and broken, lay all about him, submerged in the cold water of the wide river.
The course of the river must have changed in the years since the bombs.
Or because of the bombs.
He led Horse down an off-ramp and they waded through the watery streets of a long-gone city. Windows, regularly spaced, gaped and screamed in silent horror as they passed.
My whole life I’ve wanted to explore such places. But there is nothing here now.
Is this why Sergeant Presley said no? Because there is nothing left of the things that were once here?
At noon the murk had mostly burned off and they—Horse and the Boy—had crossed over to the far side of the river on an old rail bridge that still stood. The Eighty continued west on the other side of a field.
The Boy looked back at the dead city.
I could wander you for years and what could you give me back?
Could you show me who I might have been?
And why is that so important to me?
He tries for a moment to imagine what it must have looked like—looked like with people in it. People from Before.
That night, beyond the city, after a day filled with long silences punctuated by the last lonely birds of winter, he camped next to a wall whose purpose he didn’t understand. Why it lay next to the old highway or who built it and for what he did not know.
He ate three small rabbits that he took with the rifle in the afternoon and set wild corn in front of Horse.
The world is filled with wild corn and you want nothing more, Horse. Life must be pretty good for you.
He thought of the five rounds he’d fired to take the three rabbits.
Two had been wasted.
Yes. But if I am to use the rifle I must practice with it. I must be sure of it when I need it.
He reached into his bag and took out the charcoal. He shaved it with his knife and looked at the wall.
He drew a great bridge in long, sketchy strokes that ran the length of the wall. Then he drew the skyline of the hoary city sinking into the swampy river. Below, near the gritty pavement of the old highway, he filled in the moonlit water, reflecting the shadows of the city back up at itself.
The night was bitterly cold and even the fingers of his good hand ached like those on his bad side. Later he returned to the fire and warmed himself, looking at the mural.
Was that it?
It seemed as though there should be something more.
He thought of drawing Horse. Or himself. Or even MacRaven.
But nothing seemed right.
Lying on his side drifting toward sleep, facing the hot fire, the cold at his neck, he saw the city come to life.
And he lived there.
And there was a day…
The best day ever.
He awoke to the orange light of the coals in the deep of night and saw the shadowy city rendered on the wall. He could not remember what was so good about the dream of the day in that city before the bombs. Only that it was the best, and worth having, and that he had been cheated, as though a valuable piece of salvage had been stolen from beneath him while he slept.
‘It seems as though there should be something more to the picture on the wall,’ he thought again, remembering the dream.
And as he fell back to sleep he heard, I bet the people who lived in that city thought so too, Boy. I bet they did.
Chapter 33
In the days that followed, the Boy rode in quiet along the muddy river that reminded him so much of the big one back east, and the Possum Hunters and Sergeant Presley, when he had been young.
He felt old.
The days passed and towns on the map either didn’t exist or lay buried beneath wild grass and corn.
He passed a convoy of military vehicles forever parked in the median of the great windswept highway.
He smelled the salt of the ocean on a sudden shifting breeze.
It smelled of Texas.
But cleaner.
He passed rusting vehicles lying swaddled in the reeds that shot up out of the mucky fields and stood for a long time considering the wreck of an Apache helicopter, held longingly by a clutch of thorny rosebushes.
He climbed a high pass and saw long iron spikes cast to the ground, all in one direction, as if thrown by the hand of a giant. Large windmill blades lay buried in the dirt and grass.
In the town beyond, he saw the charred remains of buildings reaching up to the gray sky.
The wind and the clouds march east, lashing the buckled highway with spring rain. At the end of the day, the Boy felt as though much more had been required of him than just movement. He was exhausted.
On the day he reached the bay, the weather turned warm. At least, if he stood in the center of the road at full noon and turned his face toward the bright sun, the day felt warm. In the shade of bridges and crumbling buildings, the cold had always been and always would be, just like the rusty destruction he found there along the bay’s edge.
He saw the bay from a high hill and on the far side of its blue water, he saw the great pile of rubble that was San Francisco, in the State of California. Only a few tall buildings remained standing. The rest lay buried in the piles of concrete and twisted rebar he could see even from this distance.
Ain’t never been nuked, Boy. Chinese wouldn’t do it. Needed a deep water port on the West Coast. Seattle, San Diego, and of course L.A. were all long gone. We fought for that pile of rubble for ten years.
The Boy could hear the campfire stories of the great battles and “ops” of the San Francisco of Sergeant Presley.
On Market Street we lost all our armor, Boy.
And…
I was the last one off the roof of the Ferry Building. Close one that day, Boy.
And…
I saw the TransAmerica Building go down after a Jay Thirty-three went in about halfway up. Dust for days after that one, Boy.
And…
The Army will be down along the East Bay. Headquarters in an old college library. That’s where you’ll find I Corps, Boy.
Tell them I made it all the way.
Tell them there was no one left.
Tell them who I was, Boy.
And…
You take everything with you.
Chapter 34
I’m glad you died, Sergeant.
You thought they would still be here—waiting for you.
The wreckage of military equipment littered the highway that wound its way along the green-grass slopes of the East Bay. Broken concrete pads and burnt black fingers of framing erupted through tall wind-driven grass.
You crossed the whole country and lost all your friends, Sergeant. The general, even. Someone named Lola, who you never told me about. All of them.
The Boy passed a convoy of supply tucks, melted and black
ened forty years ago.
“Five tons,” said the Boy as the morning wind off the bay beat at his long hair, whipping his face and shoulders.
Farther along, the tail rotor of a helicopter lay across the buckling highway.
Apache, maybe.
The KIAs and the MIAs and all the people you imagined were still here, waiting for you to come back—they’re all gone.
Later, as Horse nosed the tall grass, the Boy walked around three helicopter transports long since landed in the southbound lanes. They were rusty and dark, stripped of everything.
“Black Hawks,” he mumbled, sitting in a pilot’s seat, wondering at how one flew them through the air like a bird, which was impossible for him to picture.
Climbing up through the concrete buttresses that remained of Fort Oakland, he came to the tanks.
Blackened. Burnt. Abandoned. High up on the hill he could see the ragged remains of canvas tents and the flower blossoms of spiked artillery pieces.
Sergeant, your dream of finding them here couldn’t have survived this.
He led Horse up the hill through the long grass and around the craters and foxholes long since covered in a waving sea of soft green and yellow.
When he reached the spiked artillery pieces now resting forever in permanent bloom, he could see the remains of the Army, of I Corps, below. All the way to the shores of the sparkling bay’s eastern edge he could see burnt tanks, melted Humvees, helicopters that would never fly, a fighter jet erupting from the rubble of the few houses that remained along the bay.
I followed you through the rain and the snow and along all those long moonlit nights while you told me about this place. The people. What we would find. Who you were.
And.
Who I might be.
He stood among the tent posts on top of the hill.
Of the Army he’d waited his whole life to meet, only ragged strips of canvas remained, fluttering in the breeze.
Off to the right, down along a ridgeline, he could see a field of white crosses. The graves were open and the crosses lay canted at angles.
