by Nick Cole
“I withdrew and called my commanders. They told me to hit the camp with everything we had but to stay clear. We spent the day shelling it and shooting up into the heights. Shooting as though there was no end in sight to our supplies, after ten straight years of fighting in the streets amid the rubble of San Francisco.”
It was quiet in the study. Warm sunshine made the air thick and heavy with the scent of flowers and dust.
“But that was not the end,” muttered the general after a long pause.
“I was ordered to put on chemical armor and go up the hill by myself. It was a very hot day. Earthquake weather, like today. It is always that way on hot days that follow the cold. I trudged through the tall burning grass up to their headquarters. There was no one there, only graves and the dead, lying in their cots and trenches.
“What can one say of such things? The war was finally over.”
Chapter 43
The knock at the back door of the shack in the quiet of the sleeping shantytown was deafening and the Boy willed it to be unheard in the night.
Her entering and embrace of him were one action.
“I had a . . .”—she uses a Chinese word he did not know—“a nightmare . . . in the afternoon as I slept.” Then, “I thought that . . . you had gone away . . . and that I had lost you forever.”
She held him and he could smell the jasmine in her long dark hair.
“You had gone away,” she said breathlessly between kisses. “And I kept thinking . . . in the dream, that I must start looking for you. But there was always some house task to perform.”
She buried her face in his chest as the Boy closed the back door.
“It was . . . horrible,” she murmured and he could feel her tears.
“Come with me. We’ll leave tomorrow,” he whispered, and he thought of the man who had been watching the shack all day from the other side of the alley.
Is he out there in the dark?
Can he hear our whispers?
She held him tighter.
“I will protect you,” he whispered.
“I will serve you,” he whispered.
“I will love you,” he whispered.
And with each murmuring she held him tighter and he could hear her whispering, “Yes,” over and over and over.
Involved is involved, Sergeant.
She left after midnight.
From the dock she stepped into the small boat.
“I will meet you in the ruins outside the . . . western gate, toward the bridge. Look for the house where only the fireplace remains standing, like a . . . pointing finger. When the sun is directly overhead, I will meet you there.”
THE BOY TRIED to sleep.
When he did, he dreamed.
He and Sergeant Presley were running through the night. They were running from those dogs. They were always running.
“I’ve got to find Jin,” he told Sergeant Presley. But in each moment there was some fresh terror in the old mall they ran through, the one with the corpses hanging over the central pool from the broken skylight above. The one with the dogs. The one with the bones.
“I’ve got to find Jin,” he told Sergeant Presley, whose eyes were calm and cool even though the Boy remembered that they were both very frightened that day. It had frightened the Boy even more when he’d looked at Sergeant Presley, who was starting to slow down that last summer before he died in the autumn, and had seen the fear in those eyes, which had been angry but never afraid.
In the dream, in the nightmare, he lost her. He knew it, and the look in Sergeant Presley’s calm dream-eyes told him that he was sad for the Boy. And it was something about that look that terrified the Boy more than anything else in the dream.
He awoke in the night.
“I will not lose her.”
He felt emptiness in his words.
As if he were a child saying he would conquer the world.
THE BOY SADDLED Horse that morning.
Soldiers passed in the alleyway, heading off to work along the growing wall.
He packed his things and led Horse into the lane. There was no sign of the watching man, only an old woman sweeping farther up the street.
Three cannon opened up with successive cracks and distant whumps.
He led Horse back toward the eastern wall, following the soldiers.
Great logs had been cut and lay stacked, waiting to be put in place along the wall.
They had no idea. They had no idea how big MacRaven’s army was.
The Boy mounted Horse and rode past a sentry who said something he did not understand. He seemed to want to stop him, as if only because the Boy was a stranger, but he did not.
The Boy rode through the gate and into the trees, heading east.
They’ll think I’ve gone to inform MacRaven.
You would ask me, What’s your plan, Boy?
I will ride through the hills and circle back around and come out along the western wall. They’ll send riders to head me off, thinking I’m going east. The Pacific is to the west and we don’t know about north. That leaves only one way, Sergeant.
From a small hillock just above the ruins of Sausalito and the inner city, the Boy saw the shantytown below, spreading out next to the bay, and the earthworks being cut into the fields beyond. The Boy watched the alarm being raised. The sentry was talking wildly and waving toward the east. Soldiers were gathering.
From the hill, the Boy could see the big rusting bridge that cut across the sparkling water into the pile of gray rock that was once San Francisco.
I should have checked the bridge to make sure it was safe.
But you would say, That’s all right, Boy. Sometimes you got to improvise.
HE RODE THROUGH the broken edges of the old town, casting his eyes about for the finger-pointing chimney.
If they have discovered our plan, then they will set a trap for me.
You would say, Always be think’n, Boy.
He found the pile of rubble that had collapsed around a lone redbrick chimney pointing up into the hot blue sky.
She came out carrying a bundle. Her face was joy.
Her face was relief.
Her face was hope.
He helped her up onto Horse and she held him tightly.
This was the way it would always feel from now on. To feel her holding him as they rode. As they rode into the face of the world. Into cities and wherever they might wish to go.
All their days should be such.
“Hold, boy,” came the gruff voice of the Chinese general. He hobbled as fast as he could down the cracked and broken street leading back to the inner city.
The sun was overhead and the day was hot.
“I know,” cried the Chinese general. “I know it must be this way. At first I thought it might be a trick of my old age, that I was seeing things that weren’t there. I thought I was beyond understanding the ways of the young when they are in love. But I sensed what passed between the two of you. Now you must leave and go as far away as you can. If our leaders know of your whereabouts, then they will send men after you.”
Jin speaks rapidly in Chinese. The Boy could tell she was pleading.
“It’s all right, granddaughter,” said the Chinese general, her grandfather, breathlessly. “I understand. I don’t need to forgive you . . .”
The Chinese general began to shake, wobbling back and forth. Horse reared and the Boy fought to bring him under control as Jin clung to his back. The rubble all about them began to shift in great piles.
As soon as the shaking had started, it stopped.
“It’s just a tremor, boy,” said the general. “But there will be more.”
The Boy patted Horse, whose eyes were rolling and wild with fear.
The old general came closer, pulling the folded map from his uniform.
“I have one more question to ask, boy.”
The Boy felt ashamed, as though he had stolen something from the general in spite of all the old soldier’s kindness.
“But first, take this.” The general held the folded map up with trembling, gnarled fingers. The Boy reached down and took it.
“And this.”
The general held up a small sack.
“There are American dimes made of silver inside. Most traders will barter for them. You will need to know where you are, that’s why I want the two of you to take the map. Where you have been is not important anymore. You will need to know where you are going now.”
The Chinese general turned to Jin.
“You are precious to me. Your father and mother named you well. I shall think of all our walks together, always. You have been a faithful granddaughter, and beyond that, my friend.”
There were great tears in his tired, rheumy eyes. They poured out onto the brown wrinkles of his fleshy face.
“It is I who must beg for forgiveness . . . from both of you,” sobbed the general, fighting to maintain his soldierly bearing.
Jin speaks in Chinese again, crying this time.
“No,” commanded the general. “I must. I must ask for forgiveness. I must ask you to forgive me and those of my generation for . . . for destroying the world. And you must forgive us, so that you can be free to make something new. I am sorry for what we did.”
The general turned to the Boy, wiping at tears, his voice winning the fight for composure.
“And now answer my question. We will not survive the attack of the barbarians, will we?”
The Boy wheeled Horse, still skittish after the earthquake.
“I do not think so.”
The general lowered his eyes, thinking.
“Go now. Do not look back, never return here. The world is yours now. Do better with it than we did.”
The Boy felt Jin’s hot tears on his bare shoulder.
“Go!” roared the general.
The Boy put his good foot into Horse’s flank and they were off down the old road leading to the rusting bridge that was once called the Golden Gate.
It was very quiet out.
THEY RODE INTO the forested hills above the bridge, dismounted and crawled forward to the edge of the ridge and watched the sentries below.
“There are more guards than usual,” whispered Jin of the sentries who were watching the bridge.
“It might be because of the invasion. Or us, if word has gotten out.”
They watched, hoping the extra guards would leave. The sun was high above.
“Tell me about the bridge. Is it safe?”
“It is . . . dangerous. But there is a marked way.”
“What will we find on the other side? Are there people?”
“No, not in the city. There is only destruction there. People go there . . . to salvage. There are small villages . . . away to the south.”
Horse cried, signaling the Boy.
The Boy loped back to Horse and saw the riders. Chinese cavalry—gray uniforms and crimson sashes—carrying their heavy rifles, twelve of them, following Horse’s trail up from the ruins of Sausalito.
Chapter 44
“Hold on tight.” Then, “Tighter!” screams the Boy.
Horse was sliding downslope through the scree that abutted the shattered remains of the road leading to the bridge. The Boy held on for dear life as Jin clung to him.
The guards at the bridge raised their weapons to port arms, as if this act, as it had so many times before, would bend the offenders to their will.
You said, Sergeant, Surprise the enemy and the battle might just be half won, Boy!
Horse checks a fall and the Boy yanks him on to the road and straight toward the bridge.
The riders who had followed their trail, at the top of the hill above the bridge now, began to fire down upon them. Their shots were wild and the sentries at the bridge began to scatter, fearing they were being shot at by invaders. A wild shot hit the chest of one of the Chinese bridge guards with a loud thump, knocking him to the pavement.
Horse crashed past two guards and raced onto the bridge, straining hard for the distant far end.
Great iron cables ran skyward toward the suspension pylons, but other numerous cables that once were connected to the roadway had fallen onto the bridge or lay draped in great coils spilling over the edge. It even seemed to the Boy that the bridge hung lower on one side. A few ancient trucks, decrepit with crusted rust, littered the bridge at odd angles.
“Stay to the right . . . it’s the safest side!” screamed Jin above the bullets, above the clop-cloppity-clop-clop of Horse’s sprint along the old roadway of the bridge.
The gusty wind dragged at the Boy’s long hair as he looked behind them to see riders and horses tumbling down the steep slope leading to the bridge.
I have a lead and a little time. That is good. But I’m riding into the unknown, and that is bad.
For a moment he felt the familiar fear that had chased him all his days. But the embrace of Jin, her thin arms about his chest, reminded him of wearing the bearskin in the dead of a winter storm.
At the end of this bridge, somewhere, there must be a cave like the bear cave for us.
Halfway across the bridge, the Boy could see the concrete piles of once–San Francisco. Huge jutting slabs of gray concrete rose up into small mountains, stacked at different protruding angles. Only a few emaciated buildings remained upright.
‘The destruction is almost complete here,’ thought the Boy, and in the moment he had this thought, his eyes, searching the rubble, watched as it began to slide in rising chalky yellow sheets of dust.
He blinked twice, assuming his eyes must be watering in the wind of the hard chase.
But now the road underneath them was shifting to the left, twisting, almost.
Cables above were waving back and forth. High and ahead, one ripped loose from the roadway and swung wildly across the bridge, sweeping a rusting wreck off the side and into the ocean below.
In San Francisco everything was shaking. Dust was rising everywhere. One of the tall buildings collapsed into itself and was replaced by plumes of thick brown dust billowing up into the bright noon sky.
Cables sang sickly in a high-pitched whine. The Boy could hear explosions as rusty metal bolts, gigantic, tore themselves away from their foundations on the bridge.
The shaking increased and the Boy drove Horse hard for the far side of the crossing.
It was only when they passed down the off-ramp and onto the other side of the bay, clearing the last of the sagging, shearing, crying, bending cables that the Boy breathed. He wheeled Horse about to check their pursuers and could see nothing of them.
The shaking had stopped and the air was filled with the sounds of birds calling and dogs barking.
The animal noise rose.
“Earthquake,” whispered Jin, shaking. “A big . . . one.”
The Boy turned Horse back to the once-city.
A moment later rending metal, groaning in chorus, sheared through the quiet.
When they turned back, Jin, Horse, and the Boy watched the Golden Gate Bridge twist and then crash into the ocean.
LATER, THEY RODE along the only avenue clear enough to pass through the city. It was a wide thoroughfare running along the waterfront. Every building was a pile of gray concrete and dusty redbrick. Pipes and rebar jutted from the wreckage like nerve endings caught forever in the act of sensory stimulus. What had not disintegrated into gigantic piles of rubble lay either heaped atop another building or forever fallen off at some odd angle.
“At least they cannot follow us now that the bridge is down,” said the Boy.
“But they will,” replied Jin.
They came upon the remains of a military defense. Artillery pieces lay scattered about, their long barrels blooming like sunflowers.
“Why will they follow?” asked the Boy.
“Because . . . they must,” replied Jin.
The Boy chose a narrow avenue through the rubble that led into the heart of the once-city.
They climbed up where buildings had spil
led themselves into one another and crossed streets littered with explosive sprays of redbrick thrown outward.
“They cannot let me go,” said Jin. “Because they are afraid of mixing with . . . the . . .”
“The barbarians.”
“Yes. The barbarians.”
Shortly they entered an open space. Gothic cathedral arches rose out of the debris, as did splintered beams of wood in front of what was once a small park.
They watched and listened within the silence of the place as Horse turned to the wild grass that survived in the park.
They drank water from their skins to wash away the floating dust.
“It is dangerous to be here. The rubble could shift at any time,” he said.
“Very. The old city . . . is a very dangerous place. We . . . will not want to be here for . . . long.”
“What lies to the south?”
“I have only heard . . . there are ruined cities in the south. But many have burnt down or are little more than . . . ruins. There is a fishing village along the Pacific Ocean beyond a city that faced south into the sea and burnt down long ago. I . . . have been there once, when I was a girl.”
“And beyond that?”
“The war . . . before the battles here . . . the big war was fought there. Many ‘nukes’ and . . . chemicals. The land is said to be poisoned and filled with monsters.”
“Oh.”
He brought her toward him and they kissed in the quiet and shattered remains of the square.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Even if we must go past the monsters?”
She kissed him again.
“Yes.”
THE REST OF the day was long and hot. At times they had to walk Horse up long hills of dangerous rubble, picking their way through the broken rock and twisting rusted metal.
In the late afternoon the wind picked up and they could hear the sound of bones dully knocking against each other in a haphazard fashion.
