His mouth quirked. "Always told myself I was a practical type. But this has got weird stuff in it… would you believe a voice I heard in dreams sent me here?"
Juniper Mackenzie laughed, a clear peal. "Oh, Ingolf, you've come to the one place in all the world for that to be believed-though in truth, I might have thought you wandering in your wits if I hadn't had independent confirmation of some of it."
"And I haven't had the dream since I arrived. And by God, I'm thankful for that!"
Juniper nodded. "The Powers are at work here, but it isn't the first time they've touched my life, so… or Rudi's."
He gave a shy duck of the head. "Well, it's like this… the start's ordinary enough. After the war with the Sioux, I didn't want to end up a hired soldier, but there didn't seem to be much else I could do except get work as a farmhand. Not that I'm above any honest work; sheriffs from the Free Republic of Richland aren't so high and mighty that we never touch a pitchfork or a plow handle, not like some folk I could name but won't, like those arrogant bastards over to Marshall."
"Not welcome back home?" Rudi asked sympathetically. That would be a terrible thing.
"Not without more crawling than I could stomach," Ingolf said grimly. Then his tone became matter of-fact.
"So some friends and I who'd fought together in the war, we got into the salvage business. Not steel and glass and stuff like everyone gets from the nearest ruins; that's low-value, and it's pretty tightly tied up most places too; you can't just go in and start mining. Not anywhere close enough to market that the cost of hauling wouldn't kill you."
"Yes, we have agreements on who can claim what here, as well," Juniper said encouragingly. "And there's more than enough steel and brass and aluminum and so forth, and will be for many an age. So as you say, it's cheap in most places."
Ingolf went on, his voice growing a bit more animated as he relived his great idea:
"What we went after was really valuable things-gold and silver, jewels, artwork that was famous before the Change, watches, machine tools that can be rerigged to run off water power, telescopes and binoculars… the sort of thing that's been worked out of places near to areas that still have people. Well, out east where I come from, that means going farther east, if you want to get somewhere unclaimed. East and south, down into the dead lands, past Chicago. I hear there are villages and farms up in parts of the Appalachians, but in the low lands from the old Illinois line to the Atlantic it's… it's still real bad."
Rudi and his mother nodded. They'd heard the same from California, where a few explorers had gone lately, and similar things about Europe from Nigel and others. Nearly everywhere in thick settled lands the streams of refugees from the great cities had overlapped one an other; they'd eaten the land bare and then died. Except those who took to living off man's flesh, but that was a losing game in the long run, with the fate of the Kilkenny cats at the end of it. A few of the luckiest lived until the rabbits bred back.
Some of those little groups of grisly predators barely had speech or fire, since they'd started with feral children run wild during the chaos. They were primitive in a way no human savages had ever been before, without the great store of knowledge and skill real wilderness dwellers had. And they still ate men, when they could.
"So… we'd gotten a few good hauls, better as we went farther east, but the problem was that money… well, you can rent a room and buy your beer with cash, but if you want to make a life, you need to have a place where you're welcome to settle as something more than a laborer, and that's not so easy. Most places aren't too open to outsiders buying land, and without you're pro tected by law all you've got is what you can carry in your saddlebags while you fight off all comers, and a man has to sleep sometime."
True enough, Rudi thought.
The Mackenzies took in anyone honest, peaceable and willing to work, and they had little in the way of internal division of rank or wealth, but that was very much an exception.
"After a couple of years, all the people left in my bunch, they were those who didn't have a home they could go to and use what they'd got. Even young as we were, we were getting tired of knocking around, risk ing our lives and then blowing it all on a bender before some big shot could tax it off us. Then we got this offer from a bunch of sheriffs near Des Moines, and the new bossman too; he'd just succeeded his father and wanted to make a splash…"
An aside: "Iowa's the biggest place going out east; the land's good, and they carried a lot of people through the dying time; there are more than two million there now."
Rudi whistled slightly, and Juniper nodded as well; that was as much as the whole Pacific Northwest, according to the best estimates they'd been able to get, and on only one fifth the area. Ingolf continued:
"So you can go for days and days, and it's all tilled land and settlements, or at least pasture, and big towns now and then, cities even, hardly any real wilderness except right along the Mississippi and in the northwestern border counties. The Iowa farmers-ranchers, they say farther west; I don't know what you call them here-and the sheriffs, they're rich as rich."
Both the Mackenzies followed the tale easily enough; being familiar with what went on east of the Cascades they mentally translated farmer/rancher and sheriff as landed knights and barons. Usually deputy or cowboy did duty for what most in the Willamette would call a man-at arms. The descendants of starving townsmen were generally on the bottom of the social heap, sometimes bound to the soil, outright slaves in a few of the worst places.
"We don't have lords here," Rudi said pridefully. "But I know what you mean."
"We were lucky, too, with it," his mother whispered in his ear, and then pinched it in mild reproof.
Rudi jumped a little. Vogeler plodded on, his big wasted hands knotted together, his voice and mind in a different time and place. But trapped there, knowing what was to happen and unable to warn his earlier self, watching it unfold again:
"So they made a deal with us. I had a reputation for getting the goods, and they offered to let us settle, give us land and rank, if we'd go where nobody had gone before-all the way east to the sea, and the museums and art galleries and such. They still care for such stuff in Iowa, you see, more than most places. And the new bossman of Des Moines… they call him the governor when they're being formal.. . sent along this little rat of a guy to check it all. And that would be the price of our new homes. We could all be deputies at least. I don't much like the way they treat ordinary people there, but beggars can't be choosers."
Vogeler smiled grimly. "There was even talk of a sheriff's daughter for me, and plenty of talk about how I was a sheriff by blood
… not that they really think any cheesehead's anything but a bear from the backwoods, that bunch. I thought they'd keep the deal, though, or at least most of it, so we signed up."
The hesitation left Ingolf's voice as he went on. "Well, it was a good deal, and like I said, we were all young. For a prize like that, we'd go to hellmouth and back, we thought. What I didn't know was who the little ratty guy, Joseph Kuttner his name was, was really working for. Neither did the bossman who paid his wages. So we crossed the Mississippi south of Clinton, all my bunch-we called ourselves Vogeler's Villains, same as my troop back in the Sioux War-"
Chapter Five
Cape Cod,
Near Innsmouth, Massachusetts
August 14, CY21/2019 A.D.
Ingolf cursed as sweat ran down into his eyes from the lining of his helmet-it was made from old kitchen sponges-and soaked the padding under his mail shirt. It was fiercely hot, with only a slight high haze, and wet as a soaked blanket with it, and the air buzzed with mosquitoes even a little past noon. If you went into the shade they ate you alive. At least he wore what they called a kettle helmet, with a wide sloping brim like a droopy canvas hat. He'd always preferred that to a close helm; the extra visibility and better hearing more than made up for any lesser protection, and it kept the sun off your face and neck. Plus in weather like this it let you br
eathe.
All he could smell right now was his own sweat and Boy's, and forest green from the scrubby sandy woods of oak and pine around, but his nose still tingled with trouble coming. Birds sang and insects buzzed; a swath of monarch butterflies swirled up from a patch of milk-weed growing in cracks in the pavement. They passed another dead car, a heap of rust and shattered glass, amid a scorch mark that showed where it had burned.
There were bones in the ditches, under rampant weed and brush. Every time he rode Boy off into the endless woods they crumbled beneath the shod hooves; leached by twenty years of rains and frost, by acid soil and scav engers, but still so many to start with they were everywhere, the skulls popping like eggshells.
The woods were also full of wet stagnant pits where basements had been; the houses had all been wooden frame, and they'd all burnt at one time or another. There must have been tens of thousands of them once all through this wasteland, and the thought made his skin crawl a little even now. All those little houses, in this place where no crops grew and you couldn't even find any decent water without digging and pumping, nothing but short twisty pines…
He found he hated this part of the lost lands even more than the dead cities. At least they were honestly alien; this never-a city reverting to forest was neither one thing nor another. A sudden intense longing filled him, to see a herd of black and-white cows grazing in green meadow, or smell bread baking, or to ride by a farmhouse in the snow and hear the rising-falling hum of a spinning wheel and a girl singing by it as she worked and smoke drifted low from the chimney. Anything that meant real life.
I thought I'd grown up free of the Change, not hagridden by it the way the old folks are, the way Dad was, so he'd drink too much and cry whenever he couldn't keep himself from thinking about it. I can't even remember it, not even the flash and the pain, nor the years right after when things were worst. I was too young. But here there's nothing but death and ghosts, and it's as if you can hear them all screaming and sobbing, hear it drifting on the wind. It'll be a thousand years before they stop.
He flung up his clenched right fist in its steer-hide glove and barked: "Halt!"
The whole train stopped in a slow clatter of hooves and squeal of brake levers, five big rubber tired steel-frame wagons drawn by six horses each, and the two-score of guards and ostlers and salvage experts who made up Vogeler's Villains-not that every single one couldn't fight at need, including the four women. They all looked around; there was a wide meadow right ahead, and more of the scrub forest to their right and left, with sand showing through the sparse grass beneath. The meadow had the broken asphalt of the roadway looping around it in an oval and two roads leading south, so it had probably been a roundabout once. Nothing much grew there but some low green brush, and a couple of dead trees poking up through them.
Kaur stood in the stirrups and sniffed. "I think that's salt water," she said. "The maps say the ocean should be close, here, unless everything's silted up. Innsmouth's that way."
She pointed right south, the steel bangle on her wrist twisting. Her brother Singh nodded. Dark-skinned and hawk faced in a way different from Injuns, they were both from a little village founded in the farming country west of Marshall by refugees from Minneapolis right after the Change, and both were three or four years younger than Ingolf's twenty-seven. They wore mail shirts like his; she had a plain bowl helmet and he covered his blue-black hair under a dark turban with a steel cap underneath, and the ends of his beard tucked up into the cloth on either side. They were Sikhs-he still wasn't sure exactly what that entailed even after six years together, since they didn't talk about it much. Apparently they were the only ones of their kind left in the world, as far as they knew.
The Lakota had burned out their people's settlement, and they'd found everyone dead when they came back from a hunting trip. He'd taken them into his troop during the Sioux war, and they'd been together ever since. Dur ing the war they'd fought with a cold ferocity that made even the wild raiders from the high plains afraid. What they'd done to prisoners to make them talk made him wince a little to recall… and he wasn't a squeamish man.
"Do a flit forward," he told them. "Mounted-quick and dirty. Don't take any chances, and get back before dark."
He did know they were both first-class scouts, the best in the Villains apart from him and Jose, and they could move quietly while wearing a mail shirt, which most folk couldn't. The band was shorthanded since Boston. Boston had been very bad…
They nodded. Singh grinned in the thickness of his black beard; he was a big burly man, nearly as big as In golf, and the muscles bunched in his brown forearms as he picked the reins off his saddlebow. Sometimes when he'd had a drink or two he'd straighten horseshoes with his hands for a joke.
"We shall be like lions, Captain Ingolf," he said, and his sister nodded, a rare smile on her face.
"Like a lioness," she added.
They always say that, and they never say why it's funny, Ingolf thought, as they heeled their horses into a walk; Kaur dropped a little behind, covering her brother with an arrow on the string of her saddlebow.
I know what lions are. He had seen pictures in old books, and once a trader had brought a skin through, just before he left home. They've got 'em down in Texas.
One of his best men came from there, having wandered up the way people did every now and then and joined the bossman's army when Ingolf did; he'd told stories about them, how they'd bred up in the bush country until they were a major nuisance along the Rio Grande, the way tigers were farther north.
Sort of tiger sized but colored like a cougar, and the males have a big black ruff around the neck, and they hunt together in packs like wolves. OK, a lion's big and fierce and sneaky, and so's Singh… well, his sister is medium-sized and fierce and sneaky. But why's it funny?
"All right, we'll camp here," he called loudly. Then he squinted at the sun; they still had eight hours to dark, this time of year. "Jump to it!"
Everyone knew what to do; some cleared the brush; others drove the wagons into a circle and linked them with chains and knockdown barriers of timber, shoved and fastened coils of razor wire under the vehicles, saw to the rest of the defenses, built fires, scavenged firewood, got the cooking gear ready. They had plenty of food, besides hoarded dried fruits and such to keep them from scurvy; this area swarmed with deer and duck, rabbit and bear, and some of the rivers were thick with fish, where the old time poisons weren't still leaking from rusting storage tanks or lingering in the mud.
The natives were too thin on the ground nowadays to keep the game down, and they weren't really very good hunters, most of them…
Not of animals, at least, he thought grimly as he swung down and handed over Boy's reins.
The stock were watered from buckets, and the wood teams also collected any green fodder around and piled it up for them to stretch the remnants of the parched corn. The Villains were cheerful enough, more so than he'd expected; there was even some laughing and horse play, and after the main work was done someone got out a guitar.
I'm going to see every one of you gets a home out of this, if I can; so help me God and His mother.
He smiled to himself; homes for the ones who didn't just want to blow every penny on booze, whores and fancy duds, at least.
And me, I'm going to be rich, if I can, with a fort and land to the horizon. None of my kids are going to have to earn a living like this when I have 'em. And God knows I've earned it… And as for you, my dear brother Edward, you can shit sideways, fold yourself in half and go blind back there in the old homestead. Maybe I'll come visit my nieces and nephews, with gifts fit for a bossman's heirs.
Kuttner came over, and Ingolf hid a grimace. Al though the little man had turned out to be a lot tougher and less of a complainer than he'd expected back in Des Moines, and a hell of a lot better in a fight, that hadn't made him any more agreeable, just less disgusting. He was about thirty, a bit below average height-five six or so-thin and wiry, with close-cropped bro
wn hair and an unremarkable face that looked distorted, somehow, without being in any way abnormal if you considered it feature by feature.
"We should push on to Innsmouth, see if we can find a usable boat," Kuttner said; his voice always sounded as if he was in a hurry
… which he generally was.
"Mr. Kuttner, you know I'm the best in this business, don't you?" he said, swatting at a mosquito.
It went squit and left a smear of blood on his cheek. He had bites under his armor, too.
"Yes, Mr. Vogeler, but-"
"Kuttner," he said, getting a little less polite, "did you ever wonder why the best man in this business is only twenty-seven years old?"
Kuttner stopped-which was a wonder, because he liked to talk better than listen-and looked at him out of his ordinary brown eyes. "No, Mr. Vogeler, I can't say that I have. Why?"
"Well, two reasons. First, it's a pretty new business, the way my Villains do it, because there hasn't been enough call for it till now. Second, those who take it up don't usu ally live very long, if they come anywhere near this far east. I am alive and I aim to get back to Iowa still alive, and collect what was promised. Are you sure we have to do this? The Bossman didn't mention Nantucket when we talked-we've got the stuff he wanted from Boston and that was the last on our list."
And I lost four good men doing it, he thought but didn't say.
That was a cost of doing business, and everyone in the Villains knew they took the most dangerous jobs. That didn't make watching an old friend die by inches of a punctured gut much better, or make it easier to make yourself give them an end to pain as the last gift.
"I have written instructions and the Bossman's au thority," Kuttner said, running a hand over his close-cropped hair.
"Yeah-" Ingolf began.
The sound of drumming hoofbeats interrupted them. They could see a fair way down the roads to the south, littered with the rusting vine-grown heaps that had been cars and trucks. Kaur and Singh were coming along at a gallop, riding on the sandy median strip. The hard drum beat of the hooves echoed through the woods, setting birds to avalanche loud flight; it wasn't a sound anyone around here had heard for a long time.
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