by Nick Cole
He threw more brush on the fire and white smoke issued up as the fire slowly caught. He ate the peyote. He felt tired as he sat there staring into the fire. Later when the laughter came upon him, he got up and the leg felt numb. The pain was gone. He began to circle the fire, laughing and muttering. The rain stopped and he stared at the stars twirling and moving faster.
The Dragon was dead and the People were the stars.
The Dragon was old and now he was just an old man, chased through the desert by Himbradda. Chased by a hero across the stars.
He shouldered his club and set off into the night. The Old Dragon was sticking to the hard roads. Himbradda didn’t need to track him through the desert. He would stay on the hard path and he would find him.
AT THE BOTTOM of Gates Pass, the Old Man turned back to look along the way he had come. He didn’t see the boy.
Ahead, a serpentine road wound its way up the rocky face of the pass. At the top he would be able to see Tucson. He would be in the suburbs of Tucson.
He shivered and felt chilled to the bone. He drank an entire packet of water and thought about eating a protein bar, but his throat felt as though it were on fire.
I am at the last of it and I am too sick to go on.
You must.
The boy is asleep no doubt. I can afford to borrow a little rest against the lead I have taken.
Your friend in the book would tell you, “First you borrow, then you beg.”
True.
The moon was out as ghostly white clouds skidded off into the deep blue of night. It was quiet.
I heard coyotes a while back and I am just thinking of it now. I think I am very sick.
If there is a Fort Tucson they can help you.
“If” is the question.
The savage boy loped into view on the road below. Using his club as a cane, he was pumping hard to catch the Old Man. The Old Man tightened his grip around the axe resting across his shoulder and knew he was too weak to swing it to any effect.
HIMBRADDA CHARGED FORWARD seeing the Old Dragon. The night air burned clean and fresh in his lungs. He screamed and thought of victory and dipping his hands in the blood of the Old Dragon, and covering the rock walls where he had chased the Old Dragon to, making the sign of the People. He screamed and felt better than he had ever felt in all his short life. He felt alive.
THE OLD MAN labored hard up the steep grade. The next stretch of the cracked and broken highway was extremely steep.
Another bend or two and I’ll be at the top.
He’ll be on you by then.
He is my shark. I must try until there is nothing left like my friend did with first the harpoon, then the paddle, and finally the club.
He spared a glance back at the boy and knew the boy was nothing human. Humanity hadn’t been something the child had ever possessed, been taught, experienced.
The flare gun might scare him off.
The Old Man reached into the ruck. He had four flares. He loaded one and took aim. Himbradda labored up the first grade below. He fired and Himbradda stopped, watching the flare streak over his head. When it passed, the Old Man could see the features of the wild boy. Teeth missing in a mouth agape. Thick hair. The withered arm. Animal amazement at the red streaking light. His pupils large and dark. When the flare had gone into the bushes to burn, Himbradda surged forward up the hill, closing in on the Old Man.
Start moving now.
But I am tired.
Just move forward. Get to the top. Then think of something else to do when you get there.
He began to move.
At the top of the pass he turned, breathing hard, and felt dizzy. The savage boy was running now, rounding the bend on the narrow road that would lead straight to the Old Man.
He let the axe fall to the ground while holding the handle, and he knew it was beyond himself to use it. He let it go and backed toward the edge of the cliff.
You’ve got time for one trick, Old Man.
The boy charged forward closing the distance rapidly. The Old Man could hear the savage boy wheezing as he gasped for breath to close the gap.
I’ve got nothing.
Try the flare.
Without thinking he loaded another round.
I’ll just shoot him in the chest and that will be done.
But he doubted it would stop the savage boy. Not twenty feet away, the animal child raised the club over his head to smash it down on the Old Man.
The Old Man stumbled backward, knowing the cliff’s edge was nearby. He felt himself falling and, for a brief moment, thought he was going over the edge, but the dusty ground greeted him with a dull reassurance as he fell onto it.
I came this far. If I had just a moment, I’d see Tucson at the other side of the pass.
That would have been enough. To know. To know it still exists, could exist for the village.
He raised the flare gun lamely as sweat poured cold and clammy across his forehead. He aimed it right into the face of the charging boy.
The wild snarling youth bore down upon him. Himbradda had crushed many. Many had raised their hands in defense, hoping to ward off the blow of the parking meter, to change the inevitable. Himbradda knew what to do in these moments. He wanted nothing between him and the skull of the Old Dragon. He kicked the Old Dragon’s arm away with his leathery foot.
The Old Man’s aim went wide. He urged his finger not to squeeze the trigger, to re-aim, and try once more. But the impulse to squeeze raced ahead of the caution not to, and he felt his finger, his hand squeeze off the flare. It shot skyward past Himbradda’s feral grin of rage and triumph.
This is death.
Himbradda jerked his head skyward, gigantic pupils following the falling star, the angel, the most beautiful thing he would ever see. The peyote revealed the world to him as he wanted it to be.
He watched the flare arching skyward, falling out and away from him, against a universe of broken glass. He twirled to follow its course and felt himself falling away from it.
The rocks at the bottom of the pass greeted him with a jagged reception. First his feet hit, then his wrist snapped, and finally his skull struck a rock. It felt as if those things could have been separate events, instead of the single instant they were.
THE OLD MAN knew he was about to be killed. He had closed his eyes, waiting. But the blow had not come. And when he replayed what should have happened, what must have happened, he knew it had not happened. He saw the rush of the boy, the flying kick at his hand. Saw the flare racing away and felt Himbradda stumble forward, out over the cliff. He heard the crunch below. But his mind had not accepted it.
He lay there breathing, his fever breaking for just a moment. He sat up to drink water and felt his stomach turn. He curled into a ball and fell asleep.
Chapter 26
Morning wind caressed his old head and when he awoke, wrapped in his emergency blanket and using the ruck as a pillow, he felt hollow. His eyes ached and he hoped the weakness of the day before might have been just a short fever.
He sat up and drank some water. His throat was still sore, but not on fire as it had been.
Maybe that was the worst of it and now I’ll just be sick. I can handle that.
At the bottom of the cliff near the bend in the road below, he saw the broken body and blood of the boy. The boy still clutched the club that was a parking meter.
What life did you live?
Is it your concern?
He never knew the things of the past. Never knew the first day of school. How the fog of California smells like damp wood in the morning. Never knew those things.
Let it go.
The Old Man sat for a long time in the golden rays of morning. It was still cold, but the sun at the top of the pass felt good and seemed to get down into his bones.
You’ve made it. You should go and see now.
The Old Man left his gear and walked to the far side of the pass. He crossed an old stone wall and then a parking lot scorched and fade
d by forty years of sun and rain.
The rising eastern sun burned bright. For a moment it blotted out everything and the Old Man had to look away. He remembered coming to Gates Pass with his mother one time. To talk. She bought some jewelry from an Indian woman who sold them on a blanket. He had been maybe twenty-five.
He looked again and saw the city. It was a low collection of buildings with a few tall ones at the center. The city was dark against the brightness of the sun.
It didn’t get hit.
Then he began to laugh. But it didn’t feel right.
You made it.
He went back to his gear and soon was on the road toward the city. Morning birds flitted in the brush, calling rapidly to one another. To tell what they had seen or done. Or that they had survived. Or that they were still there. Or maybe that they were simply happy. Later, he passed the overgrown remains of a golf course. He saw a bobcat on a rock.
Soon he entered the old part of Tucson. Buildings were still standing. In a store, he saw the items it had once sold within. The front window had been shattered. Within lay a collection of sewing machines and vacuum cleaners.
He passed a grocery store and stopped to look in through the dark holes where the glass had once been. The shelves all lay atop one another but the cans and products still remained, piled in the dark against the bottoms of the toppled shelves.
He passed apartment complexes and finally came to a bridge that spanned the dry riverbed girding the western edge of Tucson. At the freeway off-ramp, blowtorched into the abutment wall was the word SAFETY and then an arrow pointing to the left under the bridge.
He followed the arrow and found others leading along the streets. Soon he entered the City Center. Birds flew everywhere, their calls echoing off the silent buildings. He crossed an intersection and walked toward an arrow that pointed farther down the street. He rounded a corner near a hotel and saw the gray square structure of the Federal Building.
At its base he saw a wall of sheet metal reinforced with sandbags. Written in large letters near a break in the sheet metal wall were the words “Welcome to Fort Tucson.”
He came to the gate, which was just an opening, and saw a courtyard and the steps leading into the main building. A gate that could have closed the opening had been swung back and left open.
The Old Man walked up the steps and entered through the main doors of the Federal Building. A large marble entrance was bisected by a spray-painted orange line that ran across the length of the floor. Beyond the line, spray-painted in orange were the words “Raise your hands and walk forward or you will be killed.”
The Old Man raised his hands.
HE STOOD FOR a while and nothing happened. He walked forward into the dark at the far end of the hallway. Abruptly an automated noise hummed forth on a note, then reversed and sounded again. The process repeated itself. In the dark ahead he could see a small dog-shaped thing swiveling its head.
The auto sentry gun traversed back and forth across the lobby, and once the Old Man began to lower his hands, the motion stopped and the sentry gun ground to a halt, locking its barrel in his direction. He raised his hands quickly. Automatically the gun began to traverse its field.
This is salvage.
The Old Man passed the sentry gun and turned. A red light on the ground attached to a battery pack switched to green and the gun ceased to move. An elevator lit up and the Old Man waited as the doors opened with a soft hush and then a poignant ding. On the back wall was a hand-painted sign that read Enter.
When the doors opened again, the Old Man stepped into a stark white lobby with polished floors. It was government. The feeling of the fluorescent lights, the cheap linoleum, the polished floors, and the smell of paper. The Old Man remembered a place where he had gone to get a Social Security card when he was eighteen. It had been like this.
Or was that a passport?
I don’t remember.
Beyond the lobby were two halls leading in opposite directions. On one wall another hand-painted sign read THIS WAY! He followed.
The door at the end of the hallway with the next hand-painted sign was at the corner of the building. The sign read Enter and the Old Man did.
Inside, a large desk and an executive chair looked out over the iron blue skies of Tucson. The Old Man could see the northwestern section of the city from here. On the desk lay a composition book. Written on the cover were the words “Read Me.”
The Old Man sat in the chair, his rucksack still hanging from his tired frame. He leaned back in the chair and didn’t feel as sick as he knew he should feel. His throat still felt raw.
You’re excited. Too excited.
He closed his eyes and listened to the tick of the building. He heard clocks. A creak somewhere. But mostly silence. He thought he heard the breeze outside the windows. He felt his mouth open and he heard himself snore for a second.
I cannot remember when I have ever been so comfortable.
He sat up, wiping the drool from his lips, and set his ruck down next to the chair.
He turned to the desk and opened the book.
“IF YOU COULDN’T read, you wouldn’t have made it past the sentry gun. So you must be civilized. Or no one ever came and the building’s back-up batteries finally ran down, though that shouldn’t have happened for another hundred years after I wrote this. Which means I was the last and these markings mean nothing to you. So go ahead and burn it for fire. At least that might be the start of a civilization.
“If on the other hand you can read, it means you are probably from my time; is that the right answer? My civilization. You survived the bombs or knew someone who did and they taught you. I guess.
“I survived.
“My name is John Preston. I was a tank platoon sergeant in the last days before the bombs. Our cavalry troop guarded the border. We were sent here to restore order. The city had been evacuated by the time we got here. Everyone had left because of the bombs. They figured Tucson must have been on someone’s list and that they’d get to it eventually. We spent three weeks here. There was an airburst out over the desert to the east but I think it was a low-yield bomb. It didn’t damage much, and the winds shifted the fallout over eastern Arizona and New Mexico. By then most of the troop had deserted. They figured America was done for and they went to find their loved ones.
“I stayed. We had a lot of equipment here and the city was still intact. So I figured someone had better keep the lights on. Haha. I tried to protect the city and all the supplies. I boarded up as many stores as I could and I covered things in plastic. I cleaned out all the home improvement centers and a few other places. I placed cars, generators, and tractors and a lot of other things in the parking garage below this building, which used to be the Federal Building. Now it’s Fort Tucson.
“Here’s the truth: no one ever came. I think you all must have thought every city went up in a cloud. Probably did. Somehow Tucson made it. Did you know it’s the oldest continually inhabited place in North America? I learned that in a book about Tucson. Now it’s got that record by a long shot. I saved every book I could find in this city. They are in libraries I set up throughout the building.
“I know Phoenix is gone. We saw it on TV in the early days. I also drove there in a tank about two years after the bombs, when the winter was winding down. It’s gone. Don’t go there.
“There are people. Maybe you’re one of them, but if you are who I am thinking of, you probably wouldn’t come near Tucson because of the Dragon. I’m the Dragon. Or more importantly, the M-1 MK3 Abrams Main Battle Tank that I managed to keep operational is the Dragon.
“So here’s the story of the Dragon. You can judge if you want. I don’t suspect it matters much in my current situation. When I took that drive to Phoenix in the tank I found a settlement living in the gas station and the rocks of Picacho Peak. I tried to tell ’em they could come back to the city but they said city ways is what caused all this mess. They wanted to start a new society. No rules. Had a college
professor, or so he said he was, that ran the whole place. We were friendly enough at first. I’d drive out every six months or so and give what medical aid I could. But every trip they got wilder and wilder. Crazy stuff I don’t need to go into. But you will find a movie in the video library on the third floor, room 307, called Apocalypse Now. That might explain how it got. Anyway the professor, as they called him, was running amok. He had a harem. I suspected he was killing his people. Maybe just his enemies within the tribe, which I took to calling the Horde after this computer game I played when I was kid, called Warcraft. Or just because he could. People I’d treat wouldn’t be there the next time for me to follow up. I’d ask, but no one could tell me what happened to them. They were eating a lot of peyote. Lots of accidents, burns, falls, that sort of thing. I let it go.
“One day I go out there and they’re gone. I looked over the whole place and that’s when I found the bone pile beneath the peak. I climbed up to the top of the peak. They had a whole weird cave system slash temple up there. Chalk drawings of what they were doing told me the whole story. But they were gone. I tried to track them down. I found another settlement out in the west called Ajo, which means ‘garlic’ in Spanish. It was easy to follow the Horde because they moved like locusts. This was ten, maybe fifteen years after the bombs. There were lots of them by then. Anyway, Ajo had been surviving out there. They had a sheriff. Walls. A store. The Horde found them and destroyed the whole town. It was terrible what they did to those people who had survived out there for so long.
“You might ask ‘Do I feel bad about what happened to those people in Ajo?’ I do. Anyone would. But I had my orders and they were to save Tucson and hold position. I was trying to keep the candle burning by saving as much as I could for whoever would come along. It wasn’t my job to go find those people and bring ’em in. I should have, but I didn’t and that’s the way it is. Like I said you can judge me if you want.
“The Horde moved on over the border of Mexico. I figured they would either die out there or never come back, and that was for the best. I continued to work on the Fort, and periodically I started driving out to other towns on the map, a day’s journey or so out. Most were dead. Some had their own stories of what went wrong. You could tell by the bodies and the bloodstains the Horde got to a few. I checked Picacho Peak. It was quiet for a long time. I waited. About ten years ago they came back. They started the sacrifices as soon as they got back. I shot the head off the leader with a Barrett from a ways off, as he was about to throw an infant off the top of the peak. He and the kid tumbled into the crowd below and they . . . well, forget it.
