by Nick Cole
That was what the Capitol had looked like to the Boy in those last moments of daylight.
In the early evening of that long lost waiting-day, Sergeant Presley had finally come up the hill to their camp above the swamp. Threading his way through the tall grass, Sergeant Presley took off the bug-eyed gas mask. He dropped or threw the mask off into the sea of silent yellow grass. He tore off the suit, coughing. Crystal droplets of sweat stood out in his short curly hair.
The Boy gave him water from their bag, then some of the cakes they always made back then.
Still hot in there. Sergeant Presley coughed.
The Boy said nothing.
“Hot” meant forbidden. If sometimes they saw a city on the horizon, like the one by the big lake, its tall towers skeletal and bent, Sergeant Presley would simply say still hot. And sometimes he would add, When you’re an old man, if you live long enough, you can go in there. But I never will.
Sergeant Presley drank more water and coughed.
I woulda brought you somethin’, but it’s too hot in there. I swear I came right up on a bomb crater. Must’ve been low yield. But hell if it didn’t go up twenty degrees. I look around and everything is black ash. Even the marble on one of them old government buildings, the House I think it was called, had turned black.
He coughed again.
‘He will never stop coughing,’ thought the Boy. That was when the coughing had started. That day everything changed, though at the time neither of them knew it.
Sergeant Presley knew it, he suspected. But he didn’t say anything.
Sergeant Presley coughed again.
Made it all the way to the White House.
He coughed and then drank, swallowing thickly.
There was never anything there. It wasn’t a direct hit. See, back then our enemies were fighting unconventionally. Dirty-bomb strikes by remote-controlled aircraft launched within our borders. Terrorists. They went after Washington early on. We knew that. It wasn’t until later, when China got involved, that we didn’t know for sure what had really happened anywhere. After that it was just plain dark everywhere.
He chewed numbly on the cake, staring at their wispy fire. The Boy watched him, saying nothing.
The bunker was a deep hole. Must’ve used the Chinese equivalent of a J-Dam on it. I saw one of those take out the TransAmerica Building in Frisco. I’ll show you when we get there. Anyways, they must have used a “bunker buster” on it. Then, whether before or after, there must have been a nuclear strike, probably an airburst. Whole place was cooked.
He coughed, choking on the cake.
NOW THE BOY looked up at the night sky. It had stopped snowing. The stars were out, shimmering in the late night or early morning. His face was hot. He stood up and walked to the cliff wall.
He leaned against it, feeling the cold stone on his back.
You should sleep, Boy. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.
‘I wish,’ thought the Boy, ‘that all of the days that had been were long days. I wish you were here.’
He did not hear the voice of Sergeant Presley and wondered if he had ever heard it. Or if he would ever hear it again.
As he walked back to the fire, a pebble fell off the side of the cliff and the Boy turned, staring up into the heights. His shadow loomed large against the wall. He saw his powerful, strong right arm and when he moved the withered left arm, it looked little more than a thin branch.
He stared at the wall and its many shadows. For a moment he could almost see a man.
The man was sitting. Hunched over. Staring sightlessly out into the world. His hand was holding something up to his mouth.
A cake.
It was as though he was looking at Sergeant Presley on that hot, sweaty, and very long day outside the ruins of the Capitol.
Sergeant Presley, sitting, tired, sweating. Eating a cake. Alive.
He turned back to the fire after staring at the image for too long. But he wished it were true. He wished Sergeant Presley were here with him now, across the country. Almost to the Army. Alive.
He picked up a piece of burnt wood from Escondido’s lodge.
He turned back to the cliff wall.
And he began to draw that long lost day. Sergeant Presley at the end of his mission. At the end of his country. At the beginning of the end of his life.
Chapter 14
At first light he checked the river. In a pool off the main channel he spotted three trout lying in the current, close to the bottom. He watched them for a long while, listening to the constant, steady crash of the river downstream.
The backs of the trout remind him of broken green glass bottles he’d once seen in a building where he and Sergeant Presley had slept for the night. Wine bottles, Sergeant Presley muttered simply, as an epitaph over the heap of green glass. The Boy remembered holding a piece up, examining it in the wavering light of their fire. Careful, Sergeant Presley had warned him. Don’t cut yourself, Boy.
He found a long piece of driftwood waiting on the rocks by the river, left by the springtime flooding of that year. He returned to camp with the driftwood and after inspecting Horse’s wound, which looked bad and worse now in the bright light of morning, he dug out wet grass from underneath the snowfall and laid it near Horse’s head. Horse seemed not to notice.
He laid more wood on the fire, its wetness making white smoke erupt into the cold air.
The Boy sat down next to the smoking fire with the driftwood stick lying away from his body. Taking one end of the wood, he cut long peels of bark away from himself and soon the white flesh of the wood underneath lay exposed. He fed the soft peels of wood into the fire as he continued to bring the stick to a point. In the end, it became a sharp spear.
He returned to the pool and waited. There was no sign of the broken-wine-bottle-colored trout. He sat on his haunches watching the gentle current drift along the bottom of the rock-covered pool.
Later, one of the fish entered the pool. The Boy waited, watching it move first one way and then another. He got little flashes of white from off its belly as it turned. Finding the current, the emerald-colored trout settled into it. After a moment, when the Boy knew it would be sleeping, he raised up, leaning over the pool, the spear drawn back over his good shoulder, the point just above the surface of the water.
He waited.
He felt a breath enter his lungs and as he let the air go, when there was little left in him, he plunged the spear through the surface, catching the trout in the back, just behind its head. It bent to the left, sending up a splash of water with its wide tail, and the Boy hauled it from the pool, amazed at his prize. Its rainbow-colored flanks fell away from its wine-bottle back, the white belly pure and meaty. It was a creature of beauty.
When the catch was gutted and spitted over the smoking fire, the Boy made more herb paste and applied it to Horse’s wound, wiping away the oozing pus as best he could.
He’d tried to lead Horse to the water before doing this, but the animal wouldn’t even bother to raise his head, much less stand.
“Okay, rest then,” said the Boy and heard the croak in his voice against the deafening fall of water over rock.
When the fish was cooked, he walked while eating, back to the drawing of Sergeant Presley on the cliff wall. He’d worked on it late into the night, immune to the cold. When he’d returned to the fire, he’d felt frozen. The heat stung his skin as it warmed him. He’d thought the drawing had been complete, but now looking at it in the late-morning light he could see where features would need to be added—filled in and shaded.
In the afternoon he tried to improve the shelter, but other than laying green pine branches across the top, there was little that could be done.
You’ve got to find better shelter, Boy! If this lodge was here from before the war then chances are there are others like it.
The Boy had seen many buildings from Before built in clusters; the towns they had passed through and the cities he had wanted to visit. Clusters.
He heard a loud twig snap underneath his feet.
Too loud, Boy! No go.
Everything Sergeant Presley had taught him had been graded. When the time had come for the Boy to perform a task, the standard for pass or fail was always “good to go” or “no go.” He’d hated when Sergeant Presley wrenched his mouth to the side and said, No go.
Upstream the river began to curve to the north, winding through a series of rapids. Off to the left he could see the steep, conical mountain Escondido had warned him of, where at the top a bear made its den.
It was winter now. Bears should be asleep.
There were no other lodges, or if there had been, what remained of them could not be found.
It was hard to imagine the world as a place where people could either live in cities or in the forest. What was so special about cities?
You always wanted to go there, Boy.
I did. I wanted to know what was in them.
And . . .
What would I have been like if I had lived in one?
Standing at the bend in the river, feeling his withered leg and arm stiffen in the late-afternoon cold as the sun fell behind tall peaks to the west, he thought of people he once knew and could not remember.
They had always lived in the cold plains. His first memory was of running. Of a woman screaming. Of seeing the sky, blue and cold in one moment, and the ground, yellow stubble, race by in the next.
Sergeant Presley had rarely mentioned “your people.”
Not like in tents, not like your people.
All gone over to animals, not like your people.
They don’t ride horses, like your people do.
THAT NIGHT THE temperature dropped and the snow came down in hard clumps without end. He lay next to Horse, who moved little and whose breathing was shallow. At one point, the Boy was so cold he thought he should surely die.
When he awoke in the morning everything was covered in snow.
THE BEST TIME to do something about a thing is to do it now, Boy!
We won’t last out here another night.
When Horse opened his eyes they fluttered.
You won’t make it out here like this, will you, Horse?
He laid his hand on Horse’s belly, feeling the heat both comforting and sickening at once.
He knew what he had to do. He had known it in the freezing night when the snow had stopped falling and the wind rushed through the pines, seeming to make things even colder than when the snow had fallen. Even the sound of the icy water falling along the rapids seemed to make the world colder.
The Boy had known in the night what he must do.
He’d waited for Sergeant Presley to tell him not to do it.
“You would say,” he thought aloud, pretending to be Sergeant Presley’s voice. “You would say it was fool’s business. That’s what you would say.”
He waited, listening to the rush of the water in the river.
He looked upriver, his eyes falling on the small, steep, conical mountain.
You would say that.
Ain’t nothin’ but a thang, Boy. Mind over matter. You don’t mind, it don’t matter.
You would say that also.
You got to kill that bear, Boy. No two ways about it.
Chapter 15
That morning he collected three long poles of fresh wood that wouldn’t snap. Working with his knife he sharpened the ends into stakes, hardening them in the fire until the tips were black.
By noon he’d fed Horse, who ate little of the fire-dried grass the Boy had placed before him. He sat by the fire putting a fresh edge on the steel tomahawk Sergeant Presley had given him. Its bright finish was a thing made in the past, never to be seen again. Often, when they had encountered strangers, he’d seen their eyes fall to it, wanting it for their own.
Laying aside the sharpened tomahawk, he gave the knife an edge. They’d made these knives at the Cotter family forge. Sergeant Presley’s knife lay wrapped within a bundle the Boy had carried away from the grave on the side of the road surrounded by the wild corn that had seemed to grow everywhere, a bundle the Boy had no desire to open.
You might need it for this one, Boy.
But the Boy couldn’t see what an extra knife might do for him. He knew if his plan was a “no go” and he found himself down to his own knife, there wouldn’t be much hope left in an extra knife.
That’s right, Boy; work smarter, not harder. Knife work is hard work.
Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that.
The last thing the Boy would need for his plan would be what was left of the precious parachute cord. There was less than thirty feet of it now. As a child, the Boy had always been fascinated by the large coil, amazed at it, as he always was of the things from Before. There had been so much of the parachute cord, it had once seemed endless, always coiled about Sergeant Presley’s shoulder to hip as they walked. One time Sergeant Presley had even made a knotted section of it for him to play with, muttering, Merry Christmas, as he’d handed it to the Boy on that long-ago winter day. Years passed, and traps and snares and other bits that could no longer be salvaged had reduced the large coil to less than thirty feet.
The Boy withdrew the last of it from his pack.
I don’t want to use even this, but if I have to I will.
He thought of the bear.
He’d seen bears killed. The Cotter family hunted them for sport and meat. He’d followed one hunting party and watched them run down a small, fast black bear that was more interested in getting away than fighting. In the end, it had played dead until they’d put a bolt under its left shoulder blade.
They had seen big bears in the Rockies. Most of them had kept their distance, or charged, only to veer off. Horse was good for scaring things away. Once Horse went up on his hind legs, most animals knew he wasn’t interested in running.
He looked at Horse.
Are you dying too? Like Sergeant Presley?
He patted the big brown belly; Horse stirred only slightly.
“I’m going to clear out a place for us to hole up in through the rest of winter.” Then, “I’ll be back.”
He went down to the river and speared another of the broken-wine-bottle trout. Gutting and filleting the trout, he laid its body out on planks of charred wood over the embers of the fire.
After eating the fish he collected his gear, shouldering the three heavy poles and placing the thin coil of rope over his head to hang down from his neck.
Everything was moving too fast.
He could feel the tomahawk hanging from his belt, the knife in its sheath at his back.
What am I missing?
Mind over matter, Boy.
You don’t mind, it don’t matter.
HE CLIMBED THE conical hill, hauling himself up its snow-covered granite ledges. He avoided any pines that grew out of the rock, knowing them to be untrustworthy because of the shallow soil they grew in.
He found the cave just underneath the top of the hill. It would be a useless exercise if the cave was too low for Horse to squeeze into. What would be the use of dislodging the bear only to find his shelter too small? But the cave was like a wide frown on a mouth. It was tall enough at its highest point for Horse. Getting him up here would be another story—collecting wood also.
It’s not ideal, but it’s all I have.
You’re assuming victory, Boy. First you got to kill that bear. But it’s good you’re thinkin’ about tomorrow all the same.
A wide, flat ledge lay before the opening and below that, a sheer drop to the river below. He set the poles down, laying them gently in a crevice running through the cold gray granite. The poles came together, echoing, and the Boy waited, unsure what he would do i
f the bear were suddenly to appear.
I’ll attack her.
That would be bad, Boy.
But what else was there to do? If she chases me I won’t get away. If I attack, maybe she’ll run.
In the moment that followed, the Boy could hear only the distant sound of the river below.
On a thick tree, stunted and growing out of the rock, he could see the deep indentations of the bear’s claw marks.
What do you know about your enemy, Boy?
It’s a bear.
A sow.
Cubs two years back, which means they’ve left.
I don’t know if it’s a grizzly or one of the browns, which are the worst. Too bad it’s not one of the black ones.
And you would ask me about the battlefield. That’s what you would ask me next, Sergeant Presley.
Where you gonna fight, Boy?
He looked at the flat ledge. It wasn’t more than twenty feet wide and as much across.
I could make a trap, but I don’t know where. I’d have to get her down the hill and chasing me.
Deadfalls are the best, Boy.
To do that, I’ll have to get her down the side of the mountain and into the forest. Even then, the ground is frozen. It would take me a day or two to make a pit. One more night like the last and we won’t make it.
So it’s the ledge then, Boy.
I go in hard with a spear. If she’s asleep I put one into her. I back up, grab another and put it in. By the time I get to the third . . .
You’ll be at the edge of the cliff. That drop’ll do the job, Boy.
She’ll have to have a reason to go over.
If you’ve put three spears into her, Boy, you’ll be the reason. All she can think of at that point is wanting you dead and then going back to sleep.
Here’s what you do, you anchor the parachute cord and tie it about your waist, Boy. Wait until the last second and she’ll follow you over.
Numbly he took the coil of rope off his neck. His heart was beating quickly.
