by Michael Lane
He can’t remember what happened to the ice cream.
Satellite feeds go down and newsmen fade away even as they speak of upper-atmosphere disturbances, of third-wave EMP. That night, a shock throws everyone in Spokane from their beds, screaming, and a brilliant light flares to the north - brighter than any lightning stroke. By the next afternoon, survivors fleeing south have brought news of a strike near the Canadian border. They say nothing is left.
The sky darkens with smoke and dust and clouds over the next few days, and Grey won’t see the sun again for two years. Ash and rain fall in a muddy mix that robs the world of color. Over the next week thunder rumbles ceaselessly as the atmosphere fights to destroy the invaders. During that time, something happens to almost every machine except the simplest. Transformers on every power line die in lurid showers of sparks. Watches quit working, cars won’t start, computers are dark, phones are silent.
That was in August. By September the big strikes have largely stopped, but the damage is done. With no communications things fall apart. Disease follows disaster as it always does, and death follows behind. People try to stop the rot, but there simply aren’t enough parts to repair the world and many that had lain in storage are also found to be ruined. Linesmen in the early days manage to get a few power stations running, and restring cable to hospitals, and then another cluster of impacts in the atmosphere burns everything out. Within a few weeks everyone understands.
Grey’s father loads the family into the old Willy’s panel van that had been his grandfather’s jeep. None of the other cars will start. They manage to get out of the city and into the country, and five days later they would reach the little cabin above Cook’s Lake. It was usually an eight hour drive, but not anymore. They siphon gas into jerry cans. There is gas everywhere, in dead cars.
Most of the images are sharp but fragmentary, even in his dreams. His mind doesn’t want to see things clearly, and he’s glad of that, but there are moments like snapshots as the old Willy’s growls its way around abandoned vehicles and across the miles.
He remembers watching his father standing in the highway, arguing with a man with a bloody face. The man has a gun, and is yelling that they can’t come through without paying his toll. The road here ducks under another, lying in a deep concrete throat. Stalled and burnt vehicles clutter all but a narrow path. The man wants food. Father has already explained to them all that the food they have may not be enough. There are only a few months until the snow comes, and they will need luck to kill enough game for the winter.
Grey is in the back seat, and the .22 rifle is in his lap. The man can’t see it. His father walks back, circling to the rear of the Willy’s. The food, mostly canned goods from the larder at home, is stacked in the space behind the rear seats.
The man circles the jeep, the gun in his hands pointed at Grey’s father, though his eyes dart around constantly.
“You all stay in there and nice and quiet if you don’t want your daddy killed,” the man says as he passes. If he leaned forward he would see the rifle, but he doesn’t. He’s made them all put their hands up on the seat back – mom’s are on the dash – and he’s watching those.
Grey feels dizzy and cold and his face is numb. He’s watching his father, and when the man turns away to address the family in the jeep, Grey sees his father nod once over his shoulder, and his lips move with exaggerated care as he says two words.
Grey nods.
The man has his father pick up one of the cardboard boxes of cans – perhaps a quarter of their food – and gestures for him to carry it to the side of the road. His father is behind the man. Looking out the passenger window, Grey sees the man turn to speak to his dad. His father has no expression on his face as he bends down to set the box on the ground.
Grey’s hands leave the seat back and lift the rifle. He’s shot lots of ground squirrels on camping trips. He’s gone grouse hunting every year for the past three, and he’s a good shot.
He shoots the man in the back of the head. No one in the Willy’s makes a sound. He’s fourteen years old.
His father reloads the box of cans. Grey slips the rifle’s safety back on. His father stops at his window before climbing back in the driver’s seat.
“You did the right thing,” he says, but his eyes are haunted.
He looks out the window, past his father. One of the man’s legs is still jiggling. As he watches, it stops.
They drive on.
He remembers the town of Newport. It’s the only place they see that still has electricity. There’s a dam above the town. Grey supposes that’s why. Later he realizes it was just that they’d had the parts to repair the first waves of burnouts. When he rides through, come winter, the lights will be dead.
There are no locals on the streets, and shops are closed. They see one man in a policeman’s uniform on a horse. He has a shotgun lying across the pommel of his saddle and he wordlessly waves them on. Not here, his face says. Keep moving. They do.
It’s dark, and they’ve stopped near a Chevy pickup with the dealer’s papers still in its window. It has rolled to a halt on the shoulder. Grey is siphoning gas into the four jerry cans the Willy’s carries while his dad watches, cradling his deer rifle. The gas tastes like poison but he gets it flowing after a try or two. As the cans fill he stands and looks up into the night sky. There are no stars, but meteorites flash and thrum above the clouds of ash and smoke, flaring in milky streaks and blurs. A big one rolls a glowing, thundering spotlight across the sky from east to west, passing behind the mountains. Grey waits for the flash of its impact but it never comes.
The air smells of electricity and smoke. His younger sister Pamela is crying soundlessly. Far away, someone yells wordlessly; a feral, mad sound.
They keep moving.
Grey sat up and swung his feet from the cot to the cold floor, blinking at the dark. After a moment, he shook his head and lay back down, straightening the blanket.
In the distance a coyote called in the moonlight. He closed his eyes and slept until daybreak.
Breakfast was bacon, a plump venison sausage and hash browns. Doc got the potatoes from Tillingford’s nearby farm. Grey brought him the venison.
“Where’d you get bacon?” Grey asked.
“A farmer up by the Forks is raising pigs. I traded Maggie Gordon for this. She had a tooth that needed seeing to, and she traded him for some chickens.” Doc grinned. His own teeth were even and white.
“I gotta swing up that way again, then,” Grey said. “Maybe I can work out some trade. I miss bacon.”
The two men ate in silence. The husky stuck its head in the cabin door and whoofled at the smell, wagging its curled tail. Doc gave it a bacon rind and sent it back outside.
“So,” Doc said.
“So,” Grey echoed. “Well. The map tends to make me a believer.”
Doc watched Grey and said nothing.
“These weren’t soldiers, but they weren’t just homicidal hillbillies. Someone’s got an organized gang going.” Grey grinned without humor and scratched his chin. “Just like the old days, before the ammunition got scarce. It surprises me though. As things have settled down, the assholes with guns were usually the first to get shot.”
“You shot a few over the years, as I recall,” Doc offered.
Grey’s smile vanished.
“I don’t go looking for trouble.”
“Fine, no need to get your shorts in a knot,” Doc said, clearing the table. “So what do you think we should do?”
Grey rose and stretched.
“I’ll see if I can backtrack them. Figure out where they came from, and where they got that map. Ask people in the valley what they’ve seen.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Doc said. “Do you need anything? Food? Medicine?”
Grey shook his head and bent to tighten his bootlaces.
“I’ll go pack up my camp and then start working their trail. Probably won’t be able to follow them far anyway.”
When Grey left half an hour later, Doc pressed a small paper-wrapped parcel into his hands at the door. Winston whined and snuffled at it.
“Bacon?”
“Bacon.”
Chapter 2: Visitors
Doc’s cabin crouched on a wooded plateau surrounded by scrubby dry upland. From the forested edges of the wide top, a watcher could see for miles and remain unseen. Grey started the morning by circumnavigating that edge.
The land fell away steeply on all sides, cut by a few dry gullies and the single slow trickle of a year-round spring. In the early light the bunchgrass spreading out below was gold, the clumps of juniper black and sharp-edged. In the distance, at the foot of the valley’s far mountains, lay the blue expanse of Lake Okanagan. Grey saw two small herds of deer grazing and a lone bear rolling along, headed west toward the feral remains of the orchards that still bore fruit near the lake. The morning wind was cold. It was the end of September and it would be hot by noon, but the nights were near freezing now. The first light frost might come in a week, here in the lowlands.
A few thin lines of smoke rose here and there as homesteads started the day - faint and blue in the low sunlight. Across the width of the valley floor a few miles to the north sprawled the green and black blotch that was the ruins of Kelowna. Smoke rose there, too. Grey finished his circle and descended the gully rather than the broad path leading down the north slope. An hour later he reached the point where his path had crossed that of the three. He marked it with a stick and continued on.
His pack was heavier now. He’d kept various small items that he’d looted from the bodies for trade: Hunting knives, a bottle of iodine, some tin cups and a frying pan, a bag of coarse salt, a dozen thick silver coins. He’d grinned at the one struck in Vancouver. It bore the port’s name and a hand giving a middle-finger salute. There were also a handful of shotgun shells and three coils of good hemp rope. It was heavier still after detouring the two miles to his camp, where he’d rolled his tarp, loaded his own cookware and bedroll and dug up the steel box that held his extra ammunition and matches. He lowered his food bag from its perch in a pine. He filled three one-liter plastic bottles at the creek downslope from his camp, watching the red flash of kokanee as they fought over spawning beds in the tumbling flow.
It got hot. By noon he’d emptied the first of the bottles and taken off his jacket, tucking it under the left strap of his pack. He had progressed a few miles up the trio’s back trail, noting the way they’d stayed in cover where it was offered. That was their only nod to concealment, though. The trail itself was plain. They either didn’t know or didn’t care to walk where vegetation would have hidden their passage, and their boot marks were crisp in the clay dust.
They’d come from the south, and their trail carried on that way for the rest of the afternoon. Grey saw no one during those hours, though he did hear the distant crack of a rifle at one point. The trail never came too near any of the homesteads but did manage to hit spots that overlooked each. It detoured in an arc through the trees when it came close to Tillingford’s; a cluster of a half-dozen houses and fields of corn, turnips and swedes surrounded by pole fences. Past the fence lay cut fields of timothy hay.
Grey glanced at the westering sun in the hard blue sky and turned aside from the trail, again marking it. The soil was rocky, and he built a small cairn of stones atop a stump.
Tillingford’s consisted of log houses for the most part, the logs cut and hauled from the surrounding pines and cedars, though the oldest building was a two-story rancher that had survived the years and the fires following the Fall. It hadn’t aged well; the two-by-four and chipboard construction was sagging and falling apart and the house was now relegated to storage. The buildings sat in a rough square, guarding three barns made of poles and sheet metal. At the north and south extremities of the village rose tall three-legged watchtowers, overlooking the fields beyond. The settlers had cut back the woods more than half a mile in each direction over the decades, pulling stumps to open the fields for cultivation.
Grey slung his rifle and walked out of the trees and into the stubble of the hayfields. By his tenth step he heard the distant clang of one of the tower bells, followed by three more. Three must mean east, he thought. He looked up, waved in the direction of the village, and carried on, not hurrying.
Once he reached the fences flanking the fields he turned left, following them until he reached a stile and could climb over. He had to set his pack and rifle over first. Two young men were walking to meet him. Both were tall, dark-haired and shared the same sharp brown eyes. Their faces were identical but for the scarred lip of the one on the left.
“Grey, what brings you in out of the woods?” asked the unscarred twin. He smiled and offered a hand. Grey shook it.
“Hi, Todd. Oh the usual. Stuff to trade, questions to ask, dinner to eat. You keeping all right, Matthew?” His brother nodded and squinted back over Grey’s shoulder, eyeing the trees.
“You usually come in from the north. Why the change?”
“That’s why I like Matthew,” Grey said. “He’s more paranoid than I am. I’ll tell you all about it, but first I want to sit down and find out if you two will spare an old man a cup of milk?”
“I think that can be arranged,” Todd said. “Mrs. Genovaise has been making some cheese, and if you’re lucky she might share.”
“If that’s the case I may just have to settle down here and retire. I can’t recall the last time I had cheese.” Grey paused, his eyes turning to the trees as well. “I’ll want your dad, if he’s around.”
“Trouble?” Matthew asked.
“Maybe. Don’t know yet.”
“Daylight’s burning,” Todd said. “Let’s go.”
Art Tillingford was a bigger, balder version of his sons, with a wind-reddened face and a limp he’d earned in a horse wreck in his youth. He invited his guest into his house and sat across from him at the kitchen table. He and Grey made small talk for a minute while Art’s wife Ada sectioned vegetables for canning and pretended to ignore them. The two men exchanged local gossip and news - not that there was much. Tina Hanson had given birth to a daughter, and Jerry was busily adding onto the cabin for the new arrival. Tommy Sunderford had seen a big blonde grizzly on his patch. Everyone was still talking about the meteor that had killed Nathan’s old horse. The talk was a polite nothing. It let Grey enjoy his milk and cheese and a slab of heavy bread before moving on to the real news.
Grey filled Tillingford in. It didn’t take long.
“So I mostly wanted to know if you’d seen or heard about anyone new in the area lately, or this Defense Force thing,” Grey finished, “and to ask you to keep your ears open.”
“I haven’t heard shit,” Tillingford said. “I have to tell you I don’t much like the whole idea of someone thinking they’re in charge. That never works out.”
“It could just be bullshit.”
“Naw, I think Doc was right,” Tillingford said, rubbing his nose on his sleeve. “You look at that map, someone’s got something together. But what it is and what they want; there’s a question for you.”
Grey shrugged, then gave a grudging nod.
“Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe someone’s trying to rebuild?”
“Fuck that,” Tillingford said, flushing a deeper red. “We’ve already rebuilt and without any help. You remember what it was like as well as I do.” Ada rolled her eyes but stayed silent.
“Yeah.”
The two sat quiet for a minute. Grey listened to the high squeals of the younger children playing outside. There was always a pack of kids at every homestead. People had moved to big families fast in the aftermath, he reflected.
“What’s got you so pissed off, Art?”
Tillingford opened his mouth. Then shut it again and thought before answering.
“I’m worried. I’m worried you’re gonna follow this up and find out something neither of us want to know,” he said at last.
“I can only find what�
�s there,” Grey observed.
“Yeah, but you don’t poke a bear in the ass out of curiosity,” Tillingford said and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll see if I can just take a look at the bear, then. See which way it’s headed, maybe. I think we have to know. There’s what, maybe three or four thousand people through the valley now? Not many of them have a layout like this. They would be easy pickings.”
“Easy pickings for who?”
Grey smiled a hard little grin that didn’t touch his eyes.
“That’s the question I want to answer.”
Grey circulated that evening, thanked Mrs. Genovaise for the cheese, and made discreet inquiries with the two dozen adults in the village. He traded with Tillingford as well, swapping his shotgun shells for ten .270 rounds for his rifle and twenty empty brass of the same caliber. The knives went to three households, and brought in a jar of dried garlic, a wool blanket and a needle and spool of tough olive-green thread. One of the coils of rope bought him a bag of dried corn and another of beans. It was enough to travel on, he thought. Besides, he had a little silver.
He spent a dreamless night sleeping in the old rancher, listening to the packrats scuttle in the walls. He left in the pre-dawn dark after refilling his water bottles.
The weather stayed dry for the next three days, and Grey followed the fading trail that long before losing it for good somewhere just past the south end of the lake. He’d asked those it was safe to talk to, and as he went south he began to hear a few whispers. Nothing about any “defense force”, except as persistent rumors from the east, but a few people had noticed strangers.
In the summer there were always a few people moving north or south down the valley. Traders made the rounds, hunters followed the game, and once in a while settlers looking for a place to live came, carrying their lives in carts. The strangers didn’t seem to be any of those things. The few times they’d been seen they were moving in small groups, avoiding contact. There had been a few disappearances among the migrants during the same period. A hunter or two had not returned when they were expected; a pony cart had been found, empty, on the old highway. No one knew who it belonged to. Grey tracked it down at a small orchard not far north of where the border once was, but an examination told him nothing.
