The Last Pilgrims

by Michael Bunker

  Ruth would hang meat from hooks in the ceiling rafters of the springhouse where it would stay cool until Wally could come, usually in the early morning, and cook it for breakfast, or process it for longer-term storage.

  After she had cooled herself down a bit, Ruth hung the skinned and gutted coon carcass from a hook. She then walked down the stone pathway past the woodshop to the tannery where she gave the coonskin to Ana, who dropped it into a bucket of cool water she had recently pumped up from the springhouse cistern. From her bag, she took out the brains of the hog that she had wrapped in grass after gutting the beast, knowing that Ana would find them useful in her tanning process. Tanning was still somewhat of a mystery to Ruth.

  Ana was a widow, about 45 years old, dark-haired and beautiful. She was the official tanner of the Wall ranch. Tanning was a full time job on the ranch and Ana was known throughout the Vallensian territories as one of the best tanners around. Ana’s skins, at least all those that were not used right there on the ranch, were bundled and taken to Bethany where they would be traded for salt and any other necessities that could not be produced on the ranch. Ana, like all of the other workers on the ranch, was well taken care of. Ruth’s father treated them all as if they were part of the family.

  Ana had come to live and work on the Wall’s ranch many years before Ruth was born, and she told fantastic and often frightening tales of life before the crash. Ruth sometimes got into trouble with her father for repeating Ana’s tales. Father said that Ana would have been a great fiction writer, and sometimes even he would sit and listen, fascinated by the stories Ana could tell. But, on those rare occasions when he would fall under Ana’s spell, like clockwork, after about 20 minutes of listening, he would shake his head and gruffly order everyone back to work. “Distractions!” he would say.

  Ruth didn’t have time for tales today. She thanked Ana and headed back to the house to clean up. Father would be home soon, and she wanted to talk to him about her day. She could not wait to tell him about her pig, and the perfect kill-shot that had even impressed Timothy the ghostman. She also wanted to sit at her father’s feet and hear him talk about whatever news he had from Bethany.

  In the olden days, Father told her, people would sit around a glowing box and be entertained by strangers who hated them and wanted to brainwash them and do them harm. That didn’t make any sense to Ruth. What nonsense! People must have been silly back then, or really stupid. How could watching devil’s plays in a magic box be anywhere near as entertaining as hearing Ana’s tales, or father’s news, or playing tag in the yard with the other children, or hiding from work in the springhouse?

  Ruth’s father arrived home from Bethany just as everyone was sitting down to the table. Gareth, Phillip, and Timothy all sat at Father’s table. It was the first time that Gareth had been to the great room to eat. Everyone was a little excited to see him, as it meant that he was getting better. He smiled a lot, joking that it was the beer that had healed him.

  To Ruth, Philip and Gareth seemed to be like close friends, comfortable enough to argue incessantly and tease each other something awful.

  Ruth bowed her head as her father made a speech and a prayer about the Walls being blessed to have such honored guests. He reminded them all that, in such trying times, it was good to have friends, even if they did not share the same views on everything. Then he told everyone, like he usually did, that Ruth had gotten the pig for the evening’s supper. Ruth always liked that part, as everyone smiled at her, thanking her for the delicious meal. Then Tim told everyone the story about how she shot the pig. She protested that he had made it seem more dramatic and heroic than it really was, but she still blushed and was happy about the whole thing.

  Then, suddenly, everything went horribly wrong.

  It started when three of the militia men interrupted the supper to speak to Phillip privately. Ruth watched as Phillip put his hand to his mouth and silently shook his head. He spoke in hushed tones to the ghostmen, before returning to the table. He didn’t sit down.

  Phillip was ashen faced and his eyes had closed to mere slits when he began to speak. Ruth felt her stomach sink, and it seemed like all of the air in the room had been sucked out of the back window. She closed her eyes. Whatever it was, it was bad news.

  Phillip said, “I apologize for interrupting your meal. I’ve just been alerted that two of my men are dead. My wife and two daughters are missing. They’ve been taken.”

  Chapter 4 - English

  Whether he liked it or not, Sir Nigel Kerr was called ‘English’ or even ‘Sir English’ by everyone who knew him. He no longer disliked it. It had become who he now was. He reasoned that it could be worse—he could have been called Sir Kerr. After all of these years in America, and three years now in El Paso, he now preferred just this nickname. It was like being a dog named dog. His being an Englishman called “English” was, in fact, the only authentic thing about his place of work.

  The ducal castle in El Paso, if one could even call it a castle, could have been considered eclectic if that word really meant ‘a dissonant mix of ugly and disconnected styles’. Still, one thing could not be disputed—the ducal headquarters were appropriately named. The castle was called La Chimenea—The Chimney, and as the name would aptly suggest, it was always hot—brutally and relentlessly hot.

  La Chimenea had not been designed or constructed to maximize or capitalize on any particular cooling principles. Though the main structure appeared to be covered in adobe, and slightly resembled what could only be called a Southwestern desert version of a medieval castle, for some reason the castle was bereft of any of the expected cooling benefits of either adobe or medieval castles.

  Through some flaw in design, construction, or both, the castle more closely approximated a large earthen oven—gathering the extreme heat throughout the day, and exuding it throughout the night.

  The obsession with castles, keeps, and siege walls, and basically all things medieval, was a natural result of necessity, combined with the mentality born of a return to monarchy. Post-modern survivor instincts, shaped by hardship in this new and often violent middle age, almost naturally resulted in monstrosities like the ducal castle in El Paso. But, La Chimenea reflected both the spirit of the city and the duchy it sheltered.

  The 400-year-old city of El Paso, ‘The Pass of the North’, along with the Mexican sister city of Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande river, had once claimed a population of over two million souls. Though the metropolitan area itself was one of very few densely populated areas not completely destroyed by riots, bombs and fire, the population had diminished steadily from the nearly two million at the time of the collapse, to around 50,000 people only twenty years later. This number did not take into account the ducal army that was usually quartered outside of the city, which numbered around 8,000 men.

  The urban area had been reduced in size to a few square miles, around which had been constructed a 30-foot high concrete and steel wall, mostly built out of abandoned materials and debris—remnants of what used to be a highly populated city. Unlike other areas, El Paso had not been reduced by bombs and fire, but rather by the inevitable deconstruction that usually accompanies the death of an empire.

  Once the Duke had accomplished the task of enforcing some stability and peace on the city (along with the state religion of New Rome), he had cordoned off several blocks of the downtown area, including the old Camino Real Hotel. From the hodgepodge of late 19th and early 20th century buildings, he had proceeded to fashion what he thought was an acceptable version of a medieval castle. A late 20th century addition to the hotel, a 17-story tower, was what had earned the castle the Chimenea moniker.

  Soon, workers had been summoned to remove most of the vestiges of the radically contrasting and contradictory architectural styles and facades. Battlements, bastions and parapets had been added, and in order to somehow homogenize the gruesome beast, most of the visible surfaces had been coated in some kind of adobe mixture. The outcome was rather dre
adful.

  A more practical result of the Duke’s projects was a city and castle that were legitimately defensible against a moderately sized army using mostly medieval style weaponry. Still, there was no denying that La Chimenea was an ugly stain on Texas, and on the Rio Grande valley. Moreover, English found it an almost impossible environment in which to work.

  Every so often, he would make a mental note to ask the Duke to have the chief architect and builder of the castle drawn and quartered, or hanged for incompetence. Executing the perpetrator of this heinous abortion of a structure was not likely to ever happen, since the Duke himself had been the designer and chief contractor of the castle; but the joke always made English feel better and always irritated the Duke.

  El Paso’s heat usually made him think about the cool air of the northern mountains of Aztlan, which inevitably channeled his thoughts into a rut wherein he re-examined again all of the circumstances that had so radically changed the trajectory and reality of his life.

  He had no time for that just now, as he had a stack of correspondence and intelligence to go over with the Duke. But, even as he willed himself to do his duty and give his report and get it over with, the warm air and the view from the castle window dragged his thoughts into that rut of reflection.

  El Paso was still foreign to him. This place could not be any more different from either of the two other places he had once called home.

  It seemed a hundred years ago that Nigel Kerr was a 25-year-old foreign visitor on holiday, skiing with friends in the high mountains of New Mexico. That was when the collapse happened and everything in his young life changed.

  He never imagined that his fun-filled adventure to America was going to be permanent. He could still vividly remember his parents’ home in the English countryside, even though he had not seen it in over 20 years. He could remember the day of his departure. He was saying goodbye to his parents, telling them that he would be home in a month or two. He made a promise that, when he returned rested and refreshed from his skiing trip, he would buckle down and take life more seriously.

  English had been raised on his parents’ farm where he had slopped pigs, shepherded sheep and milked cows. As a boy, all he had wanted was to get away, see the world and have adventures. Now he knew that the ignorant dreams of children often determined the way of old fools.

  At the age of 18, he had joined the military. As a soldier, in only a few years, he had indeed traveled the world and met exotic people. He had killed them because his government wanted him to, not because of any wrong they had done him. Various socio-political and economic reasons were routinely offered as an excuse for state-sponsored violence, but those reasons only salve the consciences of those who are already suffering from internal corruption and denial.

  He had returned home spiritually depressed, morally confused, and with an intense desire for peace and simplicity, hoping to—in some magical way—purify his conscience.

  At 25 years of age, he was back to being a student. Farm life was just not working out for his generation, what with the endless need for money and all the expensive rules, laws and hindrances. Farming, though now attractive to him, seemed an idyllic and unreasonable fantasy. Higher education promised a more realistic answer to his overwhelming angst.

  For his twenty-fifth birthday his parents gave him an all-expenses paid trip to America. He had determined to spend the bulk of the trip skiing in the Southern Rockies. He hadn’t determined to pass through what had always been referred to as ‘The End of The World as We Know It.’

  His passage to America had been uneventful, and without portent. The early stages of his trip were just as he had imagined. Then THE DAY arrived.

  On the morning of the collapse, he and two American friends rode horses through the drifting snow to a remote cabin owned by an artist they had met while exploring around in Santa Fe. Why they had chosen that day to ride into the mountains, he could not say.

  This particular artist lived on a mountainside just east of what was once known as Taos, New Mexico. Taos was then well known as a haven for artists, beatniks, leftists, environmentalists, and other assorted potheads and hippies.

  The artist, Goffrey Byrd, was about stereotypical for the area, which made the day trip interesting, as one of English’s American friends was a right-wing, special-forces, mercenary type genius that he had met while serving in the mountains of Afghanistan.

  After a spectacularly insightful argument between the artist, who happened to be a communist, and the mercenary, who happened to hate communism, the group had decided to work out their political differences with copious amounts of alcohol and a good old-fashioned snowball fight.

  The snowy battle was in full swing when Goffrey received a call on his cell phone. He barely had a signal, but he caught enough of the message to understand that things had gone very, very wrong in the world.

  Goffrey’s closest neighbor with a television was higher up the mountain, several miles up a twisty snow-covered road. The group rode silently and pensively, wondering what was going on, and how it would affect them. The mercenary was full of speculation and supposition, most of which turned out to be correct.

  Staring out at El Paso shimmering in the summer heat, he shook his head. The rest of the memory blurred, like the waves of heat rising above the city—the endless reports of the economic crash, and then staring at the television while society just unraveled in real time; the panicked actions of an impotent government as the dominos cascaded outward from the crash; riots in stores, in neighborhoods, and then in whole cities. Within days (rather than weeks or months, as some had predicted) the world had changed forever.

  Within a week of the crash, all communications and electrical power had been lost permanently.

  The next few weeks the group spent learning how to survive a winter in the mountains without power. He recalled long, endless hours of guard duty; eating wild cats and hares trapped from the forest; bottomless cups of pine needle tea; shooting at looters and bandits, while simultaneously trying not to waste ammunition.

  After a period of five weeks passed with no news at all from the outside world, the men had seen the mushroom cloud, or at least the uppermost part of it, rising into the clear blue sky to the south. They rightly guessed that the cloud had been a nuclear device going off in Albuquerque. To this day he still did not know who set off the nukes. In books, there were always answers. In the real world… not so much.

  His present way of life was entirely different to what it used to be. The world was now monumentally different. What he called ‘the world’ had grown to immense proportions after the crash. England might as well be on the moon, and he could just as well have gotten on a spaceship when he left home twenty years ago.

  He smiled as he watched the endless mule carts being pulled through the open portcullis at the main gate of the castle. He was on another planet now. He had gone back in time, even if he was in the future.

  The terror he had felt back in those first few days, weeks, and months on that mountainside in New Mexico seemed overwhelming to a young man accustomed to life’s luxuries. Still, English knew now that he would trade everything he had today, including his titles, his lands, and his prospects, to go back to those days. Things had been clearer back then… and cooler. Now, he was playing this deadly game, permanently soaking wet from the sweat. How could he escape this infernal heat?

  In the three years since the King had sent him to El Paso as Secretary to Duke Carlos Emmanuel, English had complained about the heat incessantly. Even in the winter. He had hoped that his endless vocal protestations of discomfort would cause the Duke to send him back to New Rome, and to his home and lands there. Alternatively, he could eventually have enough of my moaning and decide to kill me, English thought, which would be almost as good. He took out a handkerchief and wiped down his face. Even the bloody breezes were hot here!

  English had no love for the Aztlanis, no real love for his King, and even less love for his current master
the Duke Carlos Emmanuel. In his own private correspondence, he referred to the former drug dealer and current Duke of El Paso with the acronym CEPIC which stood for Cocaloco Everyman, Pretender-In-Chief. He laughed to himself, thinking that, if the spies ever opened his mail, they would be forever trying to figure out what CEPIC meant. He also referred to the Duchy of El Paso as ‘The Duchy of Wastelandia’, but usually only under his breath or into his cup.

  Being an Aztlani Knight on paper didn’t erase the reality that he was, for all intents and purposes, an unwilling slave to the King, sent to the court of Carlos Emmanuel as a spy pretending to be his ducal secretary. And that was only the first play in the game.

  English gathered the latest correspondence and intelligence from his own secretary, a young man named Pano, and exited his large office into the Great Hall that lead to the office of the Duke. In his mind, he called this walk the paseo de la vergüenza which meant ‘the walk of shame’. It was funnier in his head and with his English accent.

  The Duke was already waiting for him so he approached the desk in his usual formal manner, and greeted His Grace with a bow. “I have the latest communications and intelligence to share with Your Grace.”

  The Duke was a tiny joke of a man, a clown-royal, known before the collapse as an extremely violent middle-man who would do anything, betray any friend, violate any trust, and murder anyone necessary to maintain his position and to move up in the Juarez drug cartel.