The Wasteland Saga

by Nick Cole

Then let them stay buried, my friend. Let them stay buried forever.

  Yes.

  They travel south heading toward Vegas. The buckled road keeps straight, passing beneath toothy hills that guard a wide valley. An airfield rests in the center of it and buildings straddle the highway. Beyond and to the south lies a sea of rusting vehicles that stretch away to the indeterminate horizon.

  Our Great Wreck seems small in comparison.

  Yes.

  “What happened here?” asks the Old Man leaning into Kyle’s ear as he shouts above the noise of the tank.

  “Before my time,” yells Kyle above the wind and roar of the tank. “But they say that when the bomb went off, everyone in Vegas fled in two directions. Up here if you happened to be on the north side of town. If you were on the south side, then you might have gone out into Apache lands. My dad and mom were at the Dam on a ‘field trip’ when it happened. But most thought the Dam would be hit next so they just kept on moving. We never knew what really happened up here until we started coming to salvage parts years later.” He stopped, and then added, “It was like this when we got here. There hasn’t been anyone here for a long time.”

  They drove down into the valley, passing the airfield where planes lay fallen and scattered. There were visible bullet holes in the walls of the buildings.

  Later, in the large fields between the small mountains that bracketed the valley, they passed RVs formed into squares that had burned down to their axles and frames. Cars torn to pieces. Not in accidents, but methodically. All the tires on every vehicle were missing. They saw shreds of tent still hanging from poles, still flapping in the breeze of their passing. Ancient blue tarps lay dustily strung between the wrecks. Every imaginable possession seemed strewn about in the dirt and dust, some forever entrenched in the ancient mud of past rains.

  I know the story of this place.

  If I were going to salvage here, I could tell you their story.

  But it would be a bad story.

  And so, what is their story, my friend?

  Somewhere, there will be a pit. Somewhere within all that wreckage, all those vehicles turned to shelters, there will be a pit. A pit of bones forty years gone.

  Yes.

  This bomb goes off in Las Vegas. Right in downtown. I must have heard the news of it then, but I have forgotten since. But it happened in those first early days. The bomb goes off and those who are not killed outright run.

  As we ran.

  As I ran.

  Yes.

  There is nothing but a desert to run into. The nearest cities are hundreds of miles away. And what good is it to go to those places, those cities? They too are targets. So the survivors stop here and begin to wait for help.

  But there won’t be any.

  They wait for food and medical attention.

  But there won’t be any of that either.

  The skies were dark within weeks.

  Then there was winter.

  For two years.

  That is why there are no tires.

  And the bullet holes?

  When there is only a little left and there are many, then there are bullet holes.

  And the pit?

  If you wandered this maze of rusting and frozen vehicles and walked through the burned-down ruins of makeshift fortresses hustled together by a frightened few against a terrified many, on this hot desert day that will soon turn to dry afternoon, you will feel alone and a sadness you can’t name as you listen to the accidental wind chimes of wreckage and bone. You will ask yourself, where did they all go?

  And soon after that, you will find the pit.

  Because there was sickness.

  The flu, some virus, a horrible infection racing and unchecked consuming the weak, the tired, the burnt, the hungry, the desperate. The survivors.

  Because there was a sickness, there will be a pit.

  The Old Man stopped the tank. Ahead of them, tractor trailer trucks and ancient military vehicles long stripped of their tires and things that might burn for the simple luxury of heat have blocked the road.

  This was their checkpoint.

  Their attempt to control what was inevitable.

  The Old Man looked for a way around the wreck.

  Easing the tank down off the highway, they skirted the ancient wall of vehicles, riding rough over the hard-packed dirt.

  Ahead, the Old Man spied a deflated soccer ball half sunk in the calcified mud.

  The Old Man avoided it jerkily.

  Why, my friend?

  I don’t know. But it seemed wrong to run over it.

  They were back on the road and headed south.

  The wind and the sun feel good and the opposite of that place, that cemetery.

  Why? Why did you avoid the soccer ball? You must answer, my friend. You always have. Now, don’t be afraid.

  Because…

  He drove on.

  Why?

  Because it is the opposite of all those secrets buried in the desert. All those weapons. All those burned tires and open pits. It is the opposite of those things.

  How so?

  It just is.

  Chapter 27

  At dusk, a wan sky diffused with eastern dust storms roiled across the horizon, covering the melting ruins of Vegas.

  They unpacked and unfolded the Radiation Shielding Kit, which was little more than a fitted blanket of coarse nylon that smelled of charcoal. They began to drape and then secure it across the tank as Kyle, Grayson, and Trash cleaned their weapons and adjusted their gear.

  “We’ll go ahead of you on foot and carry torches to guide you through the tight spots,” said Kyle. “The two outside torches will show you how wide the path we’ve found is. Keep the person carrying two torches, one in each hand, in the center.”

  “What if you need to tell us something important?” asked the Old Man.

  “I don’t know… we could shout through the hatch maybe?”

  “There’s a telephone on the back of the tank inside this little cupboard,” said his granddaughter. “You could use it to talk to each other.”

  How did she find that?

  “Have you gone this way before?” asked the Old Man.

  “No. No one has. But we’ve all been to parts of it even though we weren’t s’posed to. Besides the lions that sometimes pass through, and the radiation from the wrecked airplane in the center of the Strip, the old casinos aren’t too safe and seem more likely to fall down on you as much as stand up. So we were never allowed in there. But you know how it is when yer a kid.”

  I want to say to him that he is, they are, still kids. That it should be me out there in the dark tonight carrying the torches and them, these children, safe behind however much this blanket will protect those inside the tank. But I can’t. They know the way, and I don’t.

  The Old Man drank some of the warm water that remained.

  “If we…” Kyle started to say, then stopped.

  He’s under too much pressure. He doesn’t know it, but there’s a twitch just beneath his eye.

  Either that or he just needs some water, my friend.

  “Drink this. Drink the rest. We’ll have enough water for the night. In the morning, when we reach your Dam, is there water?”

  Kyle took the water and drank.

  The Old Man watched the tremble in the hand of the too-young man. His Adam’s apple bobbed jerkily.

  “Yes,” gasped Kyle. “Lots.”

  He’s afraid.

  Wouldn’t you be?

  Yes.

  “If we don’t make it,” said Kyle, wiping his mouth with the back of a calloused hand, “just stay on the Strip until you get to the end. Head east when you get there and pick up the big highway that’s still in good shape except for the overpasses. We made little roads around the debris. Take that highway on out to the Dam. Tell them…”

  Kyle paused.

  He doesn’t know what to say. The thing he’s afraid of, he cannot name. As if this moment he’s lived in fe
ar of for so long, cut off out here in the desert, is finally going to happen.

  The Old Man rested his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. He could feel the uneasiness there. The anxiety.

  “Everything will be okay,” said the Old Man.

  Do you believe that, my friend?

  But the Old Man had no response.

  “Who will hold the two torches we must follow?”

  “I will,” said Kyle quickly.

  “And the others, they will guide us through the tight places?”

  “Yes. Grayson and Trash know what to do. Our armor should protect us from the radiation if we don’t stick around for too long.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad. Then it’s just a little walk in the night.”

  And slowly the twitching muscles in Kyle’s shoulder beneath the Old Man’s gnarled hand stopped.

  The boy soldier, the Harmonica Man, Kyle, began to breathe again.

  “Maybe the dust storm will cover us?” he said and smiled.

  The Old Man nodded.

  “Why do you call her Trash? She’s very beautiful. I know I’m old but ‘Trash’ doesn’t mean…”

  Kyle picked up his chest armor and began to examine it.

  “No,” he said almost to himself. “It means the same for us too.”

  “Then why such an awful name?”

  Kyle put down the armor, bent to take up another piece, and seemed to let go of the idea halfway through. He straightened and stared at the Old Man.

  “She won’t respond to anything else.”

  The Old Man said nothing, his blue eyes searching for meaning.

  “She and a trader we did business with for years came out of the North. We knew the trader long before she came with him. She didn’t say anything ever. We thought she was just shy. The trader just referred to her as his girl. Maybe a daughter we thought. One night the trader got a little drunk, which was his way, and he told us how he’d rescued her from a bunch of hillbillies up in the mountains. They, the hillbillies, they’d called her Trash. They’d also removed her tongue. Treated her pretty badly, I guess.”

  Kyle looked toward Trash. She worked intently with dirty blackened rags cleaning her gun.

  “We kept trying to give her new names. Normal ones like from Before. Jenny. Susie. The trader said he’d even made ones up that he thought she might like from words that used to be beautiful before the bombs. But she wouldn’t have any of it. She wouldn’t respond. Not unless he called her Trash. He explained to her it wasn’t such a good name for good people. But she wouldn’t have it. He said one day they were high up on a pass and the snow was coming down. He started building their shelter, said it was like to turn to a blizzard more than not. He decides he’s gonna call her this name he thinks is real pretty whether she likes it or not. Aria. Weird name if I ever heard one. Aria. So he starts using it and she just won’t help. It’s getting cold and their mules are freezing but she just stands there in the snow. The trader’s still callin’ her by that weird name and it’s gettin’ dark and the snow is fallin’ sideways. But she stands there in the snow. Won’t do nuthin’. Night falls. She won’t even come in to his little tent. Finally he said he just laughed to himself and gave up for good. Trash it was. I remember I thought that was the end of his story. People got up and left the cantina. Saul, the guy who runs the place, he turned the lanterns down. He always did that when it was time for all of us to go home.”

  Kyle fell silent for just a moment, and in that moment there were memories and thoughts of good things from home. Lanterns. Cantina. Home.

  “That trader stands up. He was a big man. Big like a bear almost. We’d been drinkin’, and he says to me, ‘You know what the name Trash means to me?’ I didn’t say nothin’, just listened. He says, ‘It means valuable. Like somethin’ so valuable, there’s no piece of salvage or skin or meat you’d trade for it. ’Cause if you did the world just wouldn’t seem right anymore. When I say that word I see her. And that’s a good thing to me. It’s one good thing that’s still left in this burned-up old world. Maybe the last piece of good we all got left.’ About a year later she came back alone. We don’t know what happened to the trader, but it wasn’t good. So we took her in.”

  The Old Man watched her. She was cleaning her gun. Cleaning it as though it was the most important work left to her in a burned-up old world.

  Trash.

  Chapter 28

  The tank followed the three dark figures through the dust storm. Ahead, the ruins of Las Vegas hovered in and out of the skirling grit that sent sheets of brown and gray across the dark sky and swept the crumbling highway.

  There should be a good moon out tonight but the dust is too thick to find it.

  Ahead, the superhighway that once cut through the desert and the city had long ago collapsed into rubble. The Old Man could see oil drums filled with fire and belching black smoke from atop piles of fortified concrete. Stakes and spears and tattered banners jutted and flapped madly in the storm.

  Who are these people? This Army of Crazy. King Charlie’s advance force Kyle called them.

  They’re different from the Horde. More organized. More dangerous. They’ve made traps and they have flags and lines of defense. They’ve come to rule, not like those I faced at Picacho Peak. They were little more than locusts. These are like wolves.

  Yes.

  Ahead of the tank, the three figures lit their four torches. Grayson on the right. Trash on the left. Kyle holding two in the center.

  The Old Man checked the case again, making sure it still rested on the floor of the tank.

  The Boy sat in the loader’s seat, watching the Old Man.

  His granddaughter was in the driver’s seat, forward and buttoned up.

  “Are you all right up there?” he said to her over the intercom.

  “Yes, Poppa. Can I drive now?”

  “No. Not yet. Maybe on the other side.”

  The bobbing torches descended off the freeway, following an off-ramp down into the ruins of the ancient gambling palaces.

  Crumbling casinos like canyon walls rose up dirty and dusty on both sides. Debris skittered wildly down the side streets. Ahead, the Old Man could see the broad thoroughfare they must traverse.

  Kyle’s father and mother and all the old ones of the Dam had told of the day when the airliner, taking off from the airport south of the city, had been crashed directly onto the Strip.

  Terrorists.

  It wasn’t until hours later that the authorities, and then everyone else, realized the plane had also been carrying a dirty bomb. A low-yield nuclear dirty bomb. That was when the panic started. When everyone fled.

  Like you did in Los Angeles.

  Yes, like we all did.

  Kyle said the plane and its dirty bomb were why they’d been told to avoid the main road through the casinos. Because of the dirty bomb. Only the bravest kids claimed to have seen the actual wreckage of the plane, lying halfway up the Strip in the middle of the street.

  That must have been a bad day.

  There were a lot of bad days back then, my friend.

  The Old Man turned to wondering if the Radiation Shielding Kit would indeed protect them.

  He looked at the radio.

  Concentrate on the path through the rubble. If you get stuck in this city, you’ve made things worse for everyone, and for no reason at all.

  Yes.

  He followed the jumping torches onto the main street.

  Fractured monuments fell away into the dusky gloom behind them. Alongside the road, a million darkened and shattered windows looked down upon them. Crumbling walkways crossing the street resembled strands of moss draped over swampy water. The torches guttered in the blasting wind, their oily fuel barely illuminating the ground beneath the feet of their guides as the flames fought desperately against the storm.

  Those torches won’t last long.

  Frozen buses lay on their sides, thrown across the road, while petrified cars littered the streets in haphazar
d directions. A clear reason why they’d stopped on that last, long-ago day seemed just out of reach, and in the end, unknowable.

  Their procession of torches and armored tank began to weave through the wrecks, occasionally crushing a smaller vehicle, its rusty destruction blossoming for an instant like a sickly rose, suddenly carried off by the storm.

  Ahead, a cluster of dust-caked and ashy gray emergency vehicles, fire engines and ambulances from that long-ago lost day of an air disaster turned terrorist attack, walled off the street ahead.

  On that day, those firefighters must have thought the downed aircraft was the biggest tragedy they’d ever seen, were likely to ever see.

  And then someone told them about the radiation.

  The Old Man looked at the dosimeter.

  It’s very high here.

  Kyle knows I am worried about the right tread. I hope he doesn’t ask me to drive over those fire engines. Besides, we must be getting near Ground Zero, and it should be time to go around the actual bomb site.

  Ground Zero.

  I have not used those words… since I cannot remember when.

  The Old Man marveled at the thought.

  Those words were once a common part of my vocabulary. Of all our vocabularies. I remember entire conversations, courses of action, fears that were based on those two simple little words. Ground Zero.

  As if listening in on the Old Man’s thoughts, the four torches veered to the left, heading into the gray and dusty ruins of a darkened casino. It loomed high above the tiny tank and the three figures like some scavenger bird of the wasteland. The wings of the two towers almost enveloped the street and all within it like a hunched and greedy eater of carrion.

  We’ve passed the unmanned defenses of this Army of Crazy. If they’re anywhere, they’ll be hunkered down from this storm, inside one of these old places. Waiting for us.

  And…

  I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want anyone, any of these children, to have to go into that dilapidated and evil pile of ruin.

  But we must, my friend. There is no other way through this city. No other way to stay on the road and keep the tank from throwing a tread, which we could never fix. If we take our chances on the side streets we could end up caught in one of their traps. Trust these children, my friend.