The Wasteland Saga

by Nick Cole

  Its story of salvage.

  They moved on, leaving the slag and molten-made shapes to write their questions in the desert sands.

  The Boy continued to sleep and once, when the Old Man looked down from his place in the open hatch, he could see the Boy, eyes open, watching him. The Old Man leaned down and handed him his canteen, keeping his other hand out of sight, ready with the crowbar.

  Is he like that other savage boy?

  The other boy who chased me across the desert.

  The boy who chased my flare out into the night and must still lie at the bottom of the pass.

  You would tell me, Santiago, that it was nothing personal. You would tell me that so I am not bothered by the memory of it.

  It was nothing personal, my friend.

  The Boy drank, swallowed thickly, and laid his head back down on the sleeping bag, exhausted. A moment later, his eyes were closed and the Old Man wondered if the Boy was sleeping and what he dreamed of.

  Twisting hills and rocky ravines wound through ancient islands of mining equipment rusting long before the bombs. Stone outlines blackened by fire showed where once a village might have done business by the side of the thin ribbon of road.

  Such times are long gone now. Now there is only the wind and burnt stone lying amid the red dirt and whispering brush of dry brown stick.

  “We’ll stop here for the night,” said the Old Man over the intercom. A moment later his granddaughter pivoted the tank sharply to the left and pulled into a vacant lot banked by the fire-blackened stones of what had once been two separate buildings.

  The Old Man shut down the tank, climbed out and down onto the hard red dirt that glimmered with broken glass and quartzite, his granddaughter meeting him near the massive treads.

  “How’d I do today, Grandpa… I mean, Poppa? How’d I do?”

  “The best. Better than I could’ve ever done. Better than anybody ever.”

  “What’ll we do with that boy, Poppa?” she whispered, concentrating hard on remembering the Old Man’s new name.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Silence.

  “We can’t just leave him, right?”

  “No, we can’t” said the Old Man after a short pause.

  There was still a little daylight left and the Old Man turned to setting up their camp for the night. He built a circle of stones for a fire pit, gathered dry sticks with his granddaughter, and considered finding some snake for fresh meat. But in the end they simply heated more of their rations.

  In the dark, as they watched the orange glow of the coals and a thin trickle of red flame that leapt upward, the Boy exited the tank, a dark shadow against the blue twilight of the coming night. He limped to the fire and took a seat on the hard ground.

  The Old Man watched the Boy and then saw his granddaughter watching him also.

  The Old Man took the plate of food he’d made for the Boy and handed it across the fire.

  The Boy looked at it for a long moment, dipped his hand into it, and brought the food up to his cracked lips. He chewed slowly, painfully.

  The Old Man watched the unused fork he’d given the Boy with the tin pie plate.

  The Old Man sighed. He felt overwhelmed by all the questions he had for the Boy.

  None seemed right.

  None seemed appropriate.

  That there was a great weight, a sadness even, that hung over the Boy who stared listlessly into the depths of the fire, that much was evident.

  “Thank you,” said the Boy. His voice hollow. Deep.

  The Old Man smiled.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Where’d you come from?” erupted from his granddaughter. The Old Man winced.

  The Boy turned to her. He smiled sadly.

  Did he shake his head?

  “Everywhere,” mumbled the Boy.

  “Oh wow,” she squealed. “We’re just from…” She barely caught the look the Old Man briefly gave her. “We live in a village alongside the Old Highway. Have you been to the cities?”

  Have you been to the cities? She must wonder what was in them. Imagine things about them as though they were a fantasy place. A palace of dreams, maybe.

  Why wouldn’t she?

  The Boy nodded.

  He continued to chew slowly, painfully.

  “Which ones?” she asked.

  She is like Big Pedro when he gambled. She cannot restrain herself.

  The Boy turned his gaze back to the fire.

  “Washington, D.C., Little Rock, Reno, Detroit, and…”

  But he didn’t finish.

  He watched the fire.

  But he is not watching the fire, my friend. He is there, wherever that city is that he cannot name.

  “Here, drink a little; it will help you recover,” said the Old Man when the pause had become both long and uncomfortable.

  The Boy put his food down. He took the canteen with his good hand. The withered hand was heaved into position as he grasped the cap with the good hand and twisted. Then the canteen was transferred back to the good hand and the Boy took a long pull, his Adam’s apple bobbing thickly in the firelight.

  A night owl hooted, its call lonely and inviting.

  When the Boy finished, he handed the canteen back to the Old Man. “Thank you.”

  Silence.

  “When I was young,” began the Old Man, “I lived in a city. At least I thought it was a city. It was really just a town on the outskirts of a big city. But that town was my whole world.”

  The Old Man placed a few more sticks on the fire.

  “Sometimes I think back about those times. There used to be nights when the town was quiet, when I was young, and my friends and I would roam the streets in cars. We would eat fast food and play video games. We saw movies.”

  The Old Man looked at his granddaughter.

  She loves these stories and I don’t know why. I have explained fast food and video games and movies. But they are just words.

  She will never know those places. Those things.

  She will have to make do with mere words.

  Still, she loves these stories, my friend.

  “Do you know those things?” asked the Old Man of the Boy.

  The Boy nodded.

  Someone has told him of the things that once were.

  “So,” the Old Man continued, “these things were my world, and if you would’ve asked me at the time what the world was like, what its shape was, I guess I might have described it that way.”

  He nodded at both of them.

  “Even when I was older, just a few years beyond both of you, I knew the world had many places in it and I had even traveled to some of those places expecting them to be different. But life in one place is much the same as another. Life is life, despite your street address.”

  The Old Man smiled at their blank faces.

  You never told her about street addresses.

  Didn’t I?

  No, maybe not, my friend.

  “Well,” said the Old Man, lost for a moment. “Life is life. All my nights and days would be with friends or in places that had water and rooms and pizza and video games. I thought I would always see movies. Probably until the day I died. Then the bombs fell.”

  The Old Man watched the fire.

  “Since that time I have had many nights out in the desert. Out under the stars. Nights I never would’ve imagined when I was young like you and spent every night in the same room I had grown up in.”

  There were cars on the walls.

  Yes.

  And comic books.

  Yes, also.

  “Poppa?”

  Pause.

  I am not in that room anymore. Not for a long time and I wonder what became of it.

  What do you think happened to it, my friend?

  “Poppa!”

  “Well, it is good to be here,” said the Old Man, returning. “Under the stars tonight, with you.” He looked at his granddaughter. “What I’m trying to say is that
I never thought my life would lead here, and that I would be happy. Do you understand?”

  She thought for a long moment.

  Then…

  “I just want to go everywhere, Poppa.”

  After a moment the Old Man nodded, concealing his fear that one day she might actually do that. Concealing his fear of those days and places and the people that must live there now in the “everywhere” of all the places she would go.

  The Old Man turned to the Boy who watched the both of them.

  He almost becomes invisible.

  It’s like he’s barely there.

  Like he’s fading away.

  “What are all those cities like? What is it like out there in the world?” asked the Old Man, waving his hand across the night sky as if to cover every known place.

  As if to wipe away his sudden fear.

  Pause.

  “All gone,” said the Boy. “There is nothing left. And the world…”

  Pause.

  The Boy looked into the eyes of the Old Man.

  The Old Man saw none of the malice he’d seen in that other boy, that savage boy who’d chased him across the desert with a parking meter for a club.

  Instead he saw an emptiness within the Boy’s green eyes where a fire that once burned had gone out. Like an old campfire gone cold long ago. Or a wreck from Before, still lying on the highway waiting for someone to come and cry out with horror.

  And grief.

  Like this campfire will be after we leave tomorrow and for the years to come. Just tired ashes fading in the sun and disappearing with the wind.

  “…the world,” said the Boy. “Is gone.”

  Chapter 18

  “General Watt? Natalie, are you there?” In the night, the Old Man sits in the tank, feeling the cold metal against his sunburned skin.

  The nightmare that awoke him, the one of falling and hearing his granddaughter say No, Grandpa. I need you, has come again. And even though he reminds himself that she calls him Poppa now and that the terror has no power over him, should have no power, that he has changed the rules of the game and changed his name so the devil cannot find him, still he lies awake.

  He slips away from the camp to urinate on ancient blackened stones that were once someone’s home, someone’s business, who can know anymore? Then he drinks cold water made pleasant by the night’s cool air.

  I will think of tomorrow and the fuel we need to find at China Lake.

  And when he cannot think of or envision what they might find there, he leaves his bedroll, knowing he will not return for the night and starts the APU on the tank.

  He checks the radio frequency though he knows he has not touched it and can think of no reason why he should have.

  “General Watt? Natalie? Come in.”

  The Old Man wonders if the white noise he hears as he waits for a response from the General, from Natalie, is always there, waiting even when no one is listening.

  How many years are there between these few brief signals since the bombs?

  “Yes. I’m here,” says General Watt.

  Natalie.

  The Old Man finds an unexpected comfort in the woman’s voice. Older, softer, yes. Tired even. But a comfort he did not expect to find.

  And yet you must have known it was there, my friend, or why else would you be calling her in the middle of the night?

  He watches the barely red coals and the sleeping forms of his unmoving granddaughter on one side of the fire near his empty bedroll, and the Boy, his good arm thrown over his face, his body twisted as if tormented even in sleep.

  “We’re not too far from China Lake, General… I mean, Natalie.”

  “Good. I have more information for you on where to locate a possible fuel source. I planned on waiting until morning to contact you. I was estimating that you might still be asleep.”

  “I can’t sleep tonight.”

  “Why, are there problems? Is everything all right?”

  “No. I mean… Yes. I mean… we picked up a passenger today. But now we’re proceeding on to China Lake. I’d expected this trip to be much more difficult than it has been so far.”

  “Then why can’t you sleep?”

  “I guess… because I’m old.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I was twenty-seven when the bombs fell. How long ago was that?”

  “Forty years, six months, eight days, seventeen hours, and seven minutes since the nuclear detonation that occurred on Manhattan Island in New York City.”

  The Old Man moved numbers around in his head.

  We had lost track of time back in the village.

  There had been more important things to do in those days after the bombs than to keep track of meaningless days.

  I am old now.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I am one year older than you,” replied Natalie.

  Pause.

  “Do you remember…?” asked the Old Man.

  “Yes. I remember everything.”

  Pause.

  “Does it… bother you… to remember what’s gone?”

  “No,” said Natalie. General Watt.

  “Why?”

  Pause.

  “Because I still have hope that things can get better.”

  The Old Man listened.

  “I have hope that you will come and set us free from this place. I have hope that one day every good thing that was lost will return again. I have hope, and there is no room inside my hope for the past.”

  “Oh,” said the Old Man and realized that his days, his story, this journey, were not just about him and his granddaughter who was his most precious and best friend. Or even the Boy they’d found alongside the road who seemed hollow and fading from a worn and thin world. This journey was about someone else. Someone who needed help. Someone who has only hope in the poverty of what remains.

  “Every day is the chance that tomorrow might be better,” said General Watt.

  Natalie.

  Chapter 19

  Piles of volcanic rock rise to the height of small mountains as the tank crests the barren desert plateau. Below them, the entire world seems to slope downward to some unseen terminus that must surely await them.

  Now we must fall to the bottom of the earth. This thin highway will pass through the military base once called China Lake and then we must follow that until we come to a small road the map has marked the 190.

  And then… Death Valley.

  The Boy liked to ride atop the tank, holding on to the main gun, watching the far horizon.

  The wind catches his hair, pulling it, tossing it.

  The gray-and-white feather with the broken spine flutters in the breeze.

  The Old Man watched the Boy from the hatch as they bumped along the descent into the lowest parts of the desert.

  That morning, as they’d loaded the tank, the Old Man had stopped the Boy, who seemed familiar with what must be done when breaking camp. Moving on.

  He has probably done this every morning of his life.

  “We’re going far to the east.”

  He waited for the Boy to ask him why. When he didn’t, the Old Man continued.

  “I can’t leave you here, there is too little to survive on and to salvage. But later today we should come to an old military base.”

  The Boy waited.

  Whether this pleased or displeased the Boy, the Old Man could not tell.

  “We can leave you there, if you like?”

  The Boy nodded and returned to helping load their things back onto the tank.

  The Boy tapped the spare fuel drums and all of them heard an empty gong that came from within each.

  “Where will we get fuel today, Poppa?” his granddaughter asked.

  “Ahead of us there’s supposed to be an underground storage tank near a long runway. When we get there, I’m told we’ll be able to load the tank up with rocket ship fuel.”

  Will we, my friend?

  General Watt, Natal
ie, said so. Shuttle fuel. Left over from the last shuttle flights. Stored in case there might ever be a need for it again. Stored with fuel stabilizers in an underground, airtight storage tank where they had hidden the fuel once those shuttles had landed after circling the earth.

  “Though shuttle fuel is not listed as a reliable fuel source for the M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank,” General Watt, Natalie, had told him last night, “reviewing its specifications and requirements, I fail to see why this fuel source will not suffice.”

  “If it is all we have, then it will have to do,” said the Old Man during their deep-of-the-night conversation, when he could not sleep.

  “Yes,” agreed Natalie. “It may increase the engine temperature though, and that should be a concern worth noting.”

  “Runs a little hot, eh?” said the Old Man, laughing for no reason he could think of at the time.

  Maybe I was relieved there would at least be something to use for fuel. If not, it would be a very long walk back home or even just to the bunker.

  “Yes,” Natalie had said.

  Now, turning along a wide curve underneath dusty gray granite rock, the high desert town of China Lake lies buried beneath wild growth turned brown and yellow. Hints of collapsed buildings occasionally peek out from beneath the rampant tangle of wild desert shrub and thorn.

  The base is on the far side of the town.

  “Continue down this freeway,” he told his granddaughter. “We should be able to see the control tower from the road. If we reach the remains of an overpass, we’ve gone too far.”

  “Okay, Poppa!”

  The people came stumbling out of the tangle of undergrowth, some lumbering, some crawling, others dragging themselves free of the riot of briers, thorns, and wild cactus.

  The Boy saw them first and pointed. The Old Man followed the gaze and finger.

  They were misshapen.

  Withered limbs.

  Missing limbs.

  They wore rags.

  They held up their bony and scratched arms. If they had them.

  Their mouths were open.

  Some held up tiny, milky-eyed blind children, as if offering, as if pleading, as if begging.

  The shape of their ribs was revealed through sagging skin above potbellies distended by starvation.