The Wasteland Saga: Three Novels: Old Man and the Wasteland, The Savage Boy, The Road is a River

by Nick Cole

  He looks at the charging gauge. The plastic cover is melted. Even the seat vinyl is peeling.

  He moves his hand to the switch that will engage the electric motor.

  “Well, I’ve got lots of solar. Lots of that . . .” And he stops himself because he knows he will laugh again.

  Chapter 4

  The Old Man has been up for a few weeks. In the mornings he tries to help at breakfast. Tries to see if anyone will need assistance with their various projects. But when he does, they smile politely and tell him he needs to rest more. Then they disappear when he is not looking.

  He returns to the office and watches them working in the streets below. Fixing up their new homes, salvaging in the afternoons farther out.

  He takes walks at the end of the day. After the heat has given its best to destroy them all. He always walks first to see where his granddaughter is working. He tries to remember how thirteen-year-old girls spent their time when he was her age. In gymnastics and soccer and . . . boys? No, that was later. Or maybe I didn’t notice when. Finally, he decides, maybe they, all those long-gone girls from his youth, didn’t want anyone to know how they felt about boys when they were just thirteen years old. Her father, his son, is trying to start a farm. Their community will need fresh produce. Most of her work is done by the early afternoon and together they walk the streets and see what each neighbor has done that day. A new fence. A newfound treasure. A new life.

  Look what I found today . . .

  An antique double-barreled shotgun with scrollwork engraving.

  Fifty feet of surgical tubing.

  This beautiful painting. Each day at breakfast there are fewer and fewer of the villagers who come and eat in the dining hall at the Federal Building.

  They are making their own lives now behind their fences in the houses where they store their treasures rescued from Before. Not like in the village where we all ate together in the evenings and the sky was our painting.

  At night he returns to the Federal Building. The sentry gun, waiting on its tripod, its snout pointing toward the entrance, waits like a silent guard dog. He pats it on the head-like sensor, like he might pat a friendly dog, and returns to his room.

  For a while he listens to the radio, their little station that Jason the Fixer had up and running in a day, playing the old programmed music from Before. Even Jason cannot figure how to change that. But, if they ever need to, they can interrupt the program and broadcast a message. Each night one of them takes a turn at the station. Watching the ancient computers. Just in case there is an emergency. Then all the radios in all the new homes of the once-villagers can be used to summon help.

  We can still help one another that way. We are still a village.

  So the Old Man leaves the radio playing softly through the night just in case there is some kind of emergency that will bring them all together again. Every so often he hears the voice of the villager whose turn it is to watch the station, saying something as the long dark passes slowly into dawn.

  And he reads.

  He has read the book once more.

  He is glad he had his friend in the book, Santiago, there with him out in the desert. When he reaches the end of the book he is glad for Santiago, that he made it home to his shack by the sea and for the boy who was his best friend. Again.

  He thinks of his granddaughter.

  She is my best friend.

  But for how long?

  Girls become women.

  He remembers being sick and hot and hearing her voice calling him back from wherever he was going.

  If I think of the sickness, I will think of the nightmare and then it will come while I sleep and I will wake up to get away from it.

  So he goes down to the library.

  He tries to pick a new book. But so many of the modern books, books from right before the bombs, seem like they might remind him of people and times that are now gone.

  I’ll pick a classic.

  How will you know which is and is not a classic?

  The Old Man stands before the quiet, dusty shelves inhaling their thickness and plenty, then sighing as the burden of choice overwhelms him.

  A classic will be something from a time I never lived in. That way I will not be reminded of war and all that is gone because I never knew it. I’ll read about the Roaring Twenties as told by a southerner or the London fog of Dickens or even the Mississippi as it was.

  I have not seen a river in forty years.

  Nothing with war.

  In a corner between other books he finds one that he knows is a classic, knows it from school though he cannot say whether he’d ever read it. But he knows it was a classic.

  He takes it back to the office, his room, and lies down on his sleeping bag. He watches the night sky for a moment and listens to the radio playing softly on the other side of the room.

  It will play all through the night, even while I am asleep. Like Before.

  He opens the first page and begins to read.

  Chapter 5

  Sam Roberts had a few more hours to live.

  He wanted to know how much radiation he’d absorbed in escaping the front entrance of the bunker, but the dosimeter had stopped working by the time he was clear of the massive door and the freaks in front of it.

  Still, he would’ve liked to know how many rads he’d soaked up.

  It was just before dawn.

  He could see the lights of Tucson far off to the west, lying on the southern side of a gigantic black rock that heaved itself up from the desert floor. The pinpoints of light twinkled softly in the rising pink of first morning like tiny jewels set amid gray pillars of sun-bleached stone.

  Earlier, outside Hatch, a small town that had collapsed into the drifting sands and rolling weeds, he’d stopped to scribble a message onto a piece of paper, his hands badly shaking.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be something,’ he’d thought. ‘To come all this way and I’m too sick to tell them the message.’

  As he threw up again he tried to say, “Help me!” But no sound came out. His voice box was gone. Either scorched by the acid his stomach seemed to churn up, and that came out of him constantly, or fried by the radiation of two high-yield Chinese nuclear warheads deposited at the front door of his lifelong home forty years ago. Either way, he would never speak again. So he wrote the note. Then he added, Please stay away from me. I’m contaminated with radiation.

  He watched the far city. Morning light opened the desert up to Captain Roberts. There were so many different colors. The golden sand. The pink rock. The blue sky. The red earth.

  ‘Best day of my life,’ he thought. ‘And I saw it all at least once’ . . .

  He blacked out.

  When he came to, it was noon.

  His heartbeat pounded throughout his entire body, but it was slow and intermittent. Captain Roberts reached into his chest pocket. He took out the emergency syringe and jammed it into his thigh. His vision cleared as his heart began to race.

  ‘Last one,’ he thought.

  On the horizon, Tucson looked gray amid the shimmering heat waves that rose above the road. Already his vision was starting to blur. ‘These injections aren’t lasting long,’ he thought.

  He started the engine. The cells were below half full. He’d forgotten to set them to charge. I don’t know if it’s enough, but it’s all I have.

  He took a safety pin out of the medical kit that lay sprawled across the passenger seat. He’d done a bad job of bandaging his own blisters. He pinned the message to his jumpsuit. ‘All I gotta do now,’ he thought, ‘is get close enough for them to find me.’

  He gunned the engine and felt the acceleration press what was left of his thin body backward. He did his best to keep the dune buggy on the road with what little time he had left. The road shifted and swerved in the heat and sweat as his dying heart thundered out its last.

  It was tough going. But he did his best.

  Chapter 6

  The Old Man walked to the wide wind
ow of the office. Below he could see the villagers congregating in the park. Or what had once been a park. Now someone was hard at work down there preparing the ground for crops. That someone worked with a hoe, turning the bleached and hard, forty-year baked mud over into dark soil, waiting and ready for rows and eventually tiny seeds.

  The Old Man watched them for a long while. When the discussion seemed to grow in intensity, he closed the book and took the elevator down, passing the silent sentry machine-gun dog, patting it as he always did, and walked through the lobby and out into the heat of the afternoon.

  It will be a hot summer this year. It’s good we have these buildings. If it gets too hot I can sit down in the bottom of the garage near the tanks and it will be cool there. I can even read if I bring a light.

  When he reached the discussion, he saw his son and the others debating over something one of the younger villagers had found. A man he remembered once being a boy was now waving a piece of paper in the air.

  “What’d you do with him?” asked a kid the Old Man thought looked more like his father, who had not survived the first ten years, and less like his mother, who had.

  He’s not a kid. He’s a man now. Even though they were all once children. They are men and women now.

  Time is cruel that way. It erases us. It erases the children we once were.

  “I left him there!” whined Cork Petersen.

  That’s his name. We’d called him “Corky” and he would follow Big Pedro and me sometimes. Now his name is Cork.

  Time.

  “He’s dead anyways,” mumbled Cork.

  The Old Man sidled up behind his son.

  “Dad,” his son acknowledged without looking at him.

  “What’s all this . . .” began the Old Man, and the words he knew he must use to complete the sentence escaped and ran off into the desert.

  His son looked at the Old Man and then turned back to the discussion, which seemed to be about the piece of paper Cork Petersen held on to.

  I’m not old. I just couldn’t . . . I just got lost in the middle of my words. It’s because I am still recovering from the sickness that almost took me. But I am not old.

  “Cork Petersen found a dead man in a dune buggy out in the desert,” whispered his son.

  The Old Man waited.

  “I say we do nothing.” It was Pancho Jimenez. If anyone led the village now, it was Pancho. He had been the strongest and best at salvage in recent years.

  I remember him also as a boy.

  “But the note says . . .” grumbled Cork.

  “Take care,” interrupted Pancho. “Take care of what the note says.” His voice was enough to silence the discussion as they all turned toward him. Ready to listen.

  When Pancho had their attention, their full attention, he began.

  “You saw the bodies along the way. You heard the Old Man’s tale of the desert. Those savages called the Horde.”

  Everyone turned to look at the Old Man for the briefest moment. Uncomfortably he smiled back at them and saw in some a look of pity.

  They’re surprised you’re still alive.

  I also am surprised.

  “We’ve found paradise.” All eyes were again on Pancho as he continued to speak. “We have found paradise now. We’re planting our gardens, late, but we are planting. We have houses, each family their own. We have an entire city to salvage from. And what happens? A man dies in the desert. Is that any of our concern? No, none at all. We have much to be concerned with and little time in which to accomplish those things we must.”

  “But the message is for us,” interrupted Cork.

  Pancho, patient, strong, confident in who he was, smiled.

  “And that, Cork, is who we must take care of. Us.”

  Everyone began to murmur.

  The Old Man turned away, looking down the street, searching for his granddaughter.

  Maybe I can find her and we can go salvaging in the afternoon. That would be fun if I feel up to it.

  “There are worse than those people called the Horde,” proclaimed Pancho above the clamor.

  “How do you know that?” someone asked.

  “How do you know there isn’t?” replied Pancho.

  Quiet.

  “We do what that note says and we open a door we may not be able to close.”

  Quieter.

  “Even now,” continued Pancho, “you are saying to yourselves ‘we have weapons, the tanks, some guns left by the Army.’ Well, you don’t have an endless supply. And do you want to go down that road? Do you want conflict? No, none of you do. You want tomatoes and lemons and homes just like I do. Right now, our greatest weapon is not the Old Man’s tank or our few rifles. Right now our greatest weapon is our invisibility. Whoever sent that man wants to confirm that we are here. They picked up our broadcast, which I advise we turn off immediately, and now they want to know who we are and what we’re doing out here. If we respond to that message, who knows who we’ll be talking to. All I ask is that you consider this. The world isn’t a nice place. It hasn’t been a nice place for a long time. We answer that message and we would be unwise if we did not expect the worst. In fact, we would be stupid.”

  “Says they need our help,” said Cork.

  “We need help!” shouted Pancho.

  More murmuring. A few comments. Cork handed the note to Pancho in defeat. Villagers drifted away. Only a few remained, all in agreement with Pancho. In agreement as he tossed the note into the wind and the paper fluttered down the street.

  And then they were all gone and only the Old Man remained, invisible and unconsidered.

  He went to pick up the note.

  On it was written a message.

  To whomever is operating the radio station at Tucson. Please tune your receiver to radio frequency 107.9 on the FM band and send us a message so that we can communicate with you. We are trapped inside a bunker and need help. Beneath that, Please stay away from me. I’m contaminated with radiation.

  Chapter 7

  That night the Old Man snuck out of his room and made his way to the radio station the villagers had set up inside the Federal Building.

  “Are you sure, Grandpa? Are you sure we should try to contact them?”

  He raised a finger to his lips.

  His granddaughter nodded, excited to be playing the game of not being found and doing things that should not be done in the dead of night while others slept.

  When they reached the radio room they found it unlocked. Inside all was dark. The equipment had been turned off. The Old Man closed the door behind them and for a moment the two of them listened to the silence.

  The Old Man switched on his flashlight.

  “How does it work, Grandpa?”

  “Power. Electronics require power. So we must find the switch or the button or the toggle that will turn it on.”

  “Toggle,” she pronounced and laughed softly.

  The Old Man searched and just when he had given up ever finding out how to turn on the power, his granddaughter’s thin hand darted forward.

  “Is this it, Grandpa?”

  The Old Man didn’t know if it was.

  “Do you want to try it?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Okay then. Try it.”

  She hesitated for a moment and then with only the confidence that the young possess in their movements, she flipped the switch. Soft yellow light rose behind the instruments. Green and red buttons illuminated. There was a faint scent of burning ozone.

  The Old Man watched power course through the ancient technology.

  After the bombs I never thought I would see such things again.

  He found the frequency keypad and typed in the numbers from the slip of paper.

  “Grandpa?”

  The Old Man stopped.

  “What if . . .” She hesitated and began again. “What if my dad and the others are right?”

  The Old Man could hear the worry in her voice.

  “They are ri
ght.”

  “They are?”

  “Yes. They are. But that doesn’t make it right to do nothing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s right to be afraid. It’s right to be afraid of what you don’t know. What could hurt you, you should be afraid of that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But sometimes you have to do a thing even if you are afraid to do it.”

  “Because it’s the right thing?”

  “Yes, and because the world has got to become a better place.”

  For you to grow old in.

  “Okay then, Grandpa. We’ll do it.”

  “You’re very smart. And brave too.”

  “You’re brave, Grandpa. Like when you were in the desert.”

  “I was afraid too.”

  “But brave also.”

  If you say so.

  “So do we do this? Do we try to help whoever sent the message?” he asked her.

  The young girl watched the power coursing through the machine as buttons lit up and needles wandered and settled. The Old Man watched her eyes. Watched her reach a decision.

  “Yes.”

  The Old Man hit ENTER and a green button lit up. Stamped in black letters upon it were the words “Active Freq.”

  The Old Man moved the speaking mic close to his mouth.

  “What do I say?” he asked his granddaughter.

  She reached forward and pointed at a button.

  “You have to push this when you talk.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I’ve watched others.”

  Of course you did. Nothing escapes you.

  “All right, then, what should I say once I push that button?”

  She touched her tiny chin with her thumb and forefinger, which was her way of thinking and was a gesture he remembered her first making when she was only three turning four.

  “Tell them, ‘we are here.’ ”

  “Just that? ‘We are here’?”

  “Yes, just that.”

  The Old Man cleared his throat. He moved closer to the mic again and this time took hold of it. His finger hovered over the button his granddaughter had indicated he should push.