by Rick Shelley
“We’d better not hit any snags before we finish,” I whispered to Aaron as we hurried to the next tent. “The natives are restless.”
“Another display?” Aaron suggested.
“Not if we can avoid it. The way those folks are carrying on, it might backfire.”
There were less than two hours of daylight left by the time we finished guiding through the last of the radiation victims. The crowd around the tents had gone from angry noise to stunned silence. There were occasional shouts, but not as concerted as before.
“That should ease the burden here, Lieutenant,” I told McAndrews before Aaron broke the last connection to Castle Basil. “You want to go through? I can always use good officers.”
“You?” he asked.
“Ah, yes. The place through the gate is a castle in the kingdom of Varay. I’m the king.”
I feel absolutely stupid saying things like that, but I guess McAndrews had seen too much to doubt me. He looked through the portal, then shook his head.
“I’ve still got family here, and my duty.”
I nodded. “Duty” was a word I could understand. Aaron took his hand away from the doorframe, and Castle Basil disappeared.
“We’d better get on our way,” I said. There was no way I would chance sticking around that camp after more than two hundred people had “vanished” because of Aaron’s magic. We wouldn’t have lasted the night. “We may need some help getting through the crowd.”
“I’ll see to it,” McAndrew said. He still sounded a little shaky, but he had stuck right with us through it all. Major Abrams had been conspicuously absent the whole time.
When we were mounted and Lieutenant McAndrews had his squad ready to escort us out of the camp, I asked Aaron, “Which way?”
He pointed. I looked around in the direction he pointed, then back to where we had entered the camp.
“That’s not the direction we were heading before,” I said, and the change was a lot more than the minor corrections we had made before. “You’re aiming a lot more to the north now.”
Aaron looked around the way I had, closed his eyes, and after a couple of seconds, he pointed again, in the same direction he had a moment before. He opened his eyes and shrugged.
“They’ve moved then, or I’m just getting a stronger signal now,” Aaron said.
“Lieutenant, is there a map of Illinois around?” I asked.
“There must be one at the CP. I’ll send someone for it.”
When the map arrived, Aaron pointed in his direction again. McAndrews produced a compass. The line Aaron said we had to take now would pass fifty miles east of St. Louis.
“Are there more camps like this one, Lieutenant?” I asked when I handed the map back to him.
“There must be dozens of them this side of St. Louis,” he replied.
I looked at Aaron and shook my head. There was no way we could keep stopping and shipping crowds through to Varay at every camp. Time would run out on us. Time itself would run out on us. And I had to try to find Joy’s family.
11
The Falling Wall
The last of the field corn had been caught in the field by the war and by the rains that followed. Drying cornstalks stood in ponds while the fodder for livestock rotted. There weren’t the people or machines around to harvest the grain. But then, there weren’t as many animals to eat it either. It did give our horses a change from their diet of grass, though. I didn’t have any hesitation about collecting enough corn each day for the animals. It would just have gone to waste.
The rains came almost daily, and they lasted for hours at a time, dirty, stinking rain that brought more filth than cleansing. One front would pass. For a few minutes or hours we would see clear sky—a reddened sun at day, the moons and stars by night … with the dimmer stars obscured by the dust in the atmosphere and the competition of four moons. Then the next bank of war-enhanced clouds would cover us like a shroud. At night, the temperatures started to approach the freezing mark, not so unusual for the latter part of October in Illinois, I guess. Three nights after we left the first refugee camp, the rain turned to snow. Little of it stuck, and the thin veneer of ice that formed on standing water thawed soon after the dawn brought a lighter shade of gray to the sky.
We had passed several other refugee camps since the first. Each time, Aaron had shielded us as soon as we saw people and we detoured around them. We passed by more hundreds, maybe thousands of people we could have helped. I felt guilty, but forced myself to ride on.
Quixotic, I thought. You help once, then pass by other sufferers, leaving them to their painful deaths. “I gave at the office.” Condemn all those hundreds on the chance of saving maybe six people who happened to be related to Joy.
No wonder I had nightmares every night. The word “Hero” was beginning to leave a dirty taste in my mind.
“We don’t have any choice,” Aaron told me. I hadn’t spelled out why I was in such a rotten mood—and getting worse all the time—but maybe it wasn’t that hard to see. “Even if we weren’t so rushed for time, we couldn’t save the whole world, couldn’t ship everybody to Varay. We’ve done as much as we could, maybe more than we should have. And if you don’t manage to get to the Great Earth Mother in time, none of it matters anyway.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t say much at all during those days.
My grumpiness did have one benefit. We made better time, nearly thirty miles a day, although that wasn’t straight-line distance toward the signal we were following because of the long detours we had to take to get around the refugee camps. When we made camp three nights after handing through the one batch of radiation casualties, we were east and maybe a little north of St. Louis, approaching 1-70, maybe twenty or twenty-five miles west of Vandalia, Illinois. We had stayed on the same bearing, as much as we could, since leaving that first camp. If Joy’s family had moved while we were rescuing sick people, they had stayed put since.
“The signal’s getting a lot stronger,” Aaron said while we were pitching our tents. “But then, I don’t know what the maximum will feel like. They might be fifty miles away yet or just down the other side of the next highway.”
“Even if it’s that close, we’ll have to wait for morning,” I said. “We can’t ride after dark, not this close to another interstate. I’d hate to stumble on another camp in the dark.”
I hardly slept at all that night. Whatever the primary cause—guilt, fear of nightmares, or anticipation—I was simply too keyed up to sleep. We had several showers during the night, which kept me in my tent more than I really wanted to be. I stood an extra-long turn on sentry, then stayed up a while longer after Lesh came out to relieve me. When the rain started again, I went into my tent, but I only stayed in until the rain let up again, shortly after Aaron got up to stand guard.
“If nerves mean anything, we’ll find them today,” I said.
“I think it’s likely,” Aaron said. “I feel them close. But remember, they’re probably in a camp by now. We’re going to have another scene like we did before.”
I shrugged. “We get Joy’s family through. Then we can get as many others as we can. If we can.” Maybe it had been necessary to ignore all the people we could have helped along the way, but once I accomplished my primary mission, I wasn’t going to just step through and ignore any people who were close enough to go with us.
“Do we go in like the Four Horsemen again?” Aaron asked.
“Unless you can come up with a better disguise, something to get us close without getting shot.”
“They may have heard about us from the other camp,” Aaron said. “The Army must have radio communications. And we know they have helicopters. The news has to be spreading. I’m surprised they haven’t been out looking for us.”
“You think anybody who wasn’t there to see us will believe it?” I gave him a sour laugh. “If Major Abrams tried to report exactly what happened, they’ll have him locked up, either for being crazy or for massacring all tho
se missing casualties.”
“Hey, I know what’s eating you, but don’t you think it’s about time to lighten up? You didn’t get so down when it looked like the whole world was falling right on our heads at that shrine. You think a Hero should do more. All those dead Heroes in the crypt thought the same thing. That’s how they got dead. And you got work to do yet.” He paused, but I didn’t say anything. “Besides, you’re spoiling my ninth birthday.”
“Your what?”
“I’m nine years old today. Didn’t you know?”
I looked at him in the flickering light of our campfire. Aaron was three inches taller than me and a few pounds heavier, and had a respectable beard on his face. None of us had shaved since leaving Varay.
“Nine years old?” And then I started laughing, almost hysterically—enough to wake both Lesh and Timon. Lesh came rolling out of his tent with a sword in one hand and his battle-axe in the other.
“Sire?” Lesh said. He got to his feet and looked around, ready for battle and looking for foes.
“Today is Aaron’s ninth birthday,” I said, squeezing the words out through continuing laughter. It was a painful catharsis. It didn’t release all of the agony I felt, but it did make it easier to get through the next hours … and I could hardly think farther ahead than that.
Dawn saw rain falling again, heavy rain, dripping off the bill of my Cubs cap, soaking my head behind it. We broke camp in the wet and got up in the saddle. The rain had been too heavy to get a fire going, so we had to start the day without coffee or a hot breakfast.
“There is one way we could maybe find out how close they are,” I told Aaron as we started riding north again. “We could ride either east or west for five or ten miles and see how much the direction changes. Triangulation.”
“What, and lose an hour or two of riding?” Aaron asked. He smiled. “Anyway, I didn’t get that far in math. We were just doing simple fractions in the third grade.”
So we rode straight north. We were an hour short of 1-70. Climbing the rise to cross the highway, we popped into sight of another refugee camp, sitting right at the north side of the road.
“We’re the four riders,” Aaron said quickly. I felt the tingling of active magic and nodded.
Sentries at the perimeter of the camp had spotted us, but we still angled off to the right, toward the nearer side of the camp. We had gone only about a hundred yards before Aaron pulled to a stop.
“They must be in this camp,” he said. “The pull changed, off that way.” He pointed. “That what you meant before?”
“That’s what I meant.”
We gathered a lot of intent attention from the camp as we approached, but nobody came out to intercept us. The sentries, and a crowd of civilian onlookers, moved apart to let us ride in without challenge. I saw people crossing themselves or waving the horns toward us to ward off evil. I glanced around, looking for familiar faces.
“Ditch the disguise, Aaron,” I said as soon as we were inside the perimeter of the camp. “I don’t want to spook my in-laws any more than they already are.”
This camp was a lot larger than the first one we had seen. There had to be more than five thousand people here. Rows of wall tents paralleled the highway. A United States flag flew over a tent in the center. That had to be the command post. There was an open space at the west end of the camp that had to be set aside as a heliport, but there were no choppers on the ground at the moment.
The officer who came out to meet us was a captain, and he didn’t approach until we were halfway from the perimeter to the center of the camp.
“You’re the ones we heard about?” he asked when we reined in our horses.
“Since I don’t know what you’ve heard, I can’t say if we’re the ones you heard about,” I replied, softly, trying to sound very friendly and nonthreatening. “I’m looking for my in-laws, Captain. I have strong reason to believe that they’re in this camp.”
“You’re the one who took off all the cases of radiation sickness?”
“Yes.”
“We have about four hundred and fifty of them here.”
“And you want us to help them?”
“We certainly can’t do much for them here. By the way, my name is William Travis Thompson.”
“Gil Tyner. This is Aaron Carpenter. Lesh. Timon.”
“The Four Horsemen,” Captain Thompson said.
“Some have called us that,” I admitted. “As I said, I’m looking for my in-laws, my wife’s family, and I think that at least some of them are here in your camp.”
“We have a roster at the command post,” the captain said. “Can you help our injured?”
“You seem awfully anxious to trust someone you know nothing about, Captain. Are you that desperate?”
“Yes,” he said, very softly, but without the slightest hesitation. “We just can’t handle so many. We don’t have the facilities, the medical personnel, the drugs. All we can do is watch as people get worse and die, some that could be saved—according to the book—if we had the means to treat them.”
“We’ll do what we can, Captain, as soon as we find the people we’re looking for.” There was no way I would even think of turning him down. “Are you in command here?”
“Ah, technically, no. But the colonel has four camps to look after, so I’m the ranking officer here at the moment.”
When we reached the command post, Captain Thompson asked me for the names of the people we were looking for, and I told him: Joy’s parents, Dan and Rosemary Bennett; her brother, Danny, his wife, Julia, and their children, Dawn and David.
The roster was alphabetical. Thompson had my answers almost immediately.
“Danny and Julia Bennett and two children, tent D-4. That’s toward the northwest from here. Rosemary Bennett, dispensary. Just down the line here. Dan Bennett died the day they arrived. Radiation.”
Now Joy’s lost her father too, I thought. It was getting to be an epidemic.
“Can you tell me how bad Rosemary’s condition is?” I asked.
“I don’t have the daily status reports here,” Thompson said. “The doctors keep those.”
I nodded. “We’ll go to the hospital tents first.”
Rosemary Bennett was in critical condition, bed-bound. She hardly seemed aware of who I was. But Danny was with her when we arrived. After I said hello to his mother, Danny took me off toward the door, away from her.
“What the hell did you do to Mom and Dad?” he demanded. I had only met Danny a couple of times while I was going with Joy. Danny had his own family, and Joy and I were in Chicago most of the time before Joy moved to Varay.
“Joy and I tried to give them, and you and your family, a chance to escape all of this,” I said. “Joy was worried when we saw this coming. Your parents didn’t want any part of it.”
“Part of what? All this fairy-tale hocus-pocus?”
“It’s real, Danny, whether you want to believe it or not.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Looking for all of you. Joy’s going crazy with worry. I’m here to take the whole bunch of you through to Varay.”
“You think I’m crazy? I’m not a gullible fool.”
“Neither is Joy. Neither are the two-hundred-odd people we helped through from a camp by Marion, Illinois. Ask Captain Thompson here about that. We can help your mother. Going through to Varay will reverse most if not all of the damage from radiation. Varay is the only hope she has. And it’s probably the only chance your kids have for a decent future too.”
“Oh? Do you have Mother Goose there to tell her own stories?”
“Get your wife and kids and bring them back here. We can’t waste all day. We make people nervous.”
“Yeah, I heard that story about four skeletons riding across the country. All the hellfire preachers are making a big noise about it. Judgment Day is almost here.”
“They may be right,” I said. “Now, get your family. If it’s a fraud, you’ll have your la
ugh soon enough. But it isn’t, and you’ll see that quick enough too. Look at it this way. You’ve got nothing to lose but a few minutes, and you’ve got everything to gain.”
For a moment, I thought that Danny was going to just tell me to go to hell and refuse. But he didn’t. I sent Lesh along to help him bring his family back to the hospital tent—and to make sure he didn’t change his mind and take off in the other direction.
“Timon, as soon as Aaron gets the first doorway open, take the horses through and then find Baron Kardeen again. We’ll all be coming through this time. If Joy’s there at Basil, find her and tell her that we’re bringing through her family. Got it?”
“Yes, sire.”
That brought looks from the people around us. Aaron and I started giving the same kind of pep talks we had given to the casualties at Marion. There were five tents filled with radiation cases here, though, larger tents than at the other camp, and more of these people were in really bad condition. Closer to St. Louis, and several days farther along, I guess that was inevitable. We finished talking to the people in the one tent, then went outside to wait for Lesh to get back with the other Bennetts.
“Look, if you don’t mind,” Aaron said, “after you get your wife’s people and all the casualties through, I’ll hang on at the door to let as many of the others through as want to come. Can we handle that?”
“It might strain things for a few days, but go ahead.” I might have suggested that if Aaron hadn’t. “Just one caution. Stand on the Varayan side of the door. If things get out of control then, all you have to do is pull your hand away.”
“That’ll mean no second chance. I’m not sure I could open the way back to one of these tent doors.”
“I know, but it’s the only way, Aaron. I can’t take any chance of you getting trapped on this side. Crowd gets out of hand, you might get trampled before you could whip anything up.”
“You may be right,” Aaron said. “Parthet didn’t give any guarantees about old-age pensions in this job.”
