by Robert Adams
Bookerman just nodded. "Yes, I saw it all, and I suspect that she most likely was thoroughly—well, as thoroughly as any camel ever is—domesticated long ago, before the War, in her youth. You see, Milo, a camel lives for thirty to fifty years, and she is clearly an elderly one, the other two being most probably her daughters.
"Interbreed the camels if you wish, although as the only bull camels we have are dromedaries, I suspect that when next our three volunteers come into their estrus, it would be worth the lives of any of us to try to interfere with interbreeding. But do not expect lamb-gentle offspring, my friend, for you will most assuredly be bitterly disappointed. Those offspring, when once they have achieved their full growth—will be—rather than tall, very strong, long-legged, impressive murderous beasts—relatively short, shaggy, ponderous-bodied murderous beasts."
"How the hell do you know so much about camels, anyway, Doctor?" Milo demanded.
Bookerman smiled another of his fleeting smiles. "Quite easily explained, my dear Milo. My father spent a good bit of time in the Middle East just after World War Two, after having already served some time in North Africa with General Erwin Rommel and, a bit later, in Tuscany, where camels had been in use as beasts of burden for generations. He talked much to me of his experiences, Milo, and he also wrote and privately published a book about those experiences. I studied that book quite often."
In the end, some half-dozen extended families refused to take leave of Cheyenne at all, and a number of others insisted on lading their transport with plows, other tilling implements, seed corn and plant slips; they also carried large items of furniture, in some cases, and drove along, with the help of dogs and children, small herds of domestic swine.
Most of the folk who left, however, drove only cattle, sheep and goats. These traveled far more lightly than did the minority—bringing along tents, bedding, small and easily portable furnishings, carpets, weapons, spare clothing and footwear, cutlery and utensils, here and there a homemade spinning wheel or a small loom, tools of various sorts and usages, ropes and thongs to repair harnesses, tanned hides and oddments of hardware, jewelry and small personal possessions, perhaps a few books and reference manuals.
Because he had no wife or children to drive it for him, Milo had ordered no cart or wagon for himself; rather, he rode his dromedary, Fatima, and packed his tent and other gear on the bull dromedary, Shagnasty, and the oldest two-humped cow camel, Dishim, leaving his horses to be herded with the remuda. His two baggage beasts hitched behind the carts of friends, Milo himself spent most of every day patrolling the length of the winding columns, from vanguard to rearguard on his long-legged, distance-eating, almost-tireless mount, his path ofttimes crossing that of Dr. Bookerman, mounted on the younger bull dromedary, Sultan.
The physician was an enigma to Milo. He gave an age at wild variance to his appearance and physical abilities. Furthermore, conversations with the man were seldom less than surprising to Milo, for the physician usually demonstrated detailed knowledge of subjects, places and events of which it seemed impossible for a single individual of only some seventy-odd years to know.
Bookerman was definitely a skilled surgeon—Milo had seen him at work—but he was also so very much else, besides—natural horseman, crack shot with rifle and pistol or smoothbore, fast and accurate and very powerful with the saber, far better than Milo at use of a lance from horseback, a born leader of men and skilled in the necessary aspects of organization and administration of those he led. The anomalies, however, started with the fact that although he had at one time said that he had emigrated to the United States as soon as he had taken his M.D. in Germany and had then left his adopted homeland but seldom and even then for very short trips, he seemed to know most of Europe in detail, as well as parts of North Africa and the Middle East. The only languages with which Milo was conversant that Bookerman was not were those of the Far East—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and the like. Otherwise, the physician could write, read and fluently speak Latin, archaic Greek, modern Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, numerous dialects of German and Arabic, French, Italian, European Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and other Slavic languages, Finnish, Swedish and Danish and Norwegian, English, Dutch, Latin American Spanish and God alone knew what else. The natural "ear" for languages which Booker-man always claimed might have accounted for his fluency in speech but not, to Milo's way of thinking, for the concurrent abilities to read and write that veritable host of widely diverse tongues.
In addition, Milo had spent most of his remembered life in one army or another, the first few as an enlisted man and the remainder as a commissioned officer. Bookerman claimed never to have served in the military, yet continually, certain of his behavior patterns and comments led Milo to silently question those claims. Often the physician comported himself as nothing more nor less than the quintessential Prussian officer of the old pattern.
Milo honestly liked and highly respected the man, and he wanted to believe his accounts of his prewar life, but there were simply too many inconsistencies, and these seriously bothered him, for everyone knew that, despite the council, he and Bookerman shared the actual command and leadership of the people.
While he rode the swaying dromedary and pondered, Milo had no way of knowing just how very soon all of the responsibilities of command and leadership would fall upon his shoulders alone.
The column was quick to scavenge and scrounge arms, ammo and any other usable artifacts from homes, farms, ranches, crossroads and small towns they passed along the way. They had anticipated this and brought along empty carts to contain the loot, for to have done less would have been, under the circumstances, extremely stupid. Milo and Bookerman and the council did, however, draw the line at plastic sheetings and containers, for these could not be repaired when holed or worn and replacements would not be certainly available. Containers and utensils of the thicker, heavier grades of aluminum were permitted but not really encouraged, those of iron, steel, copper, pewter or silver and silverplate being preferred by the leaders.
They found that they also were forced to draw a definite line as to the quantities of precious metals, gems and jewelry that any one family was allowed to add to their baggage and personal adornment, else there would not have been enough animals in all the column to pack or draw all the pretty but presently useless baubles. Liquors and wines, too, had to be held down to a certain allowance per person for reasons of space and weight, though Milo and Bookerman agreed to be a bit more lenient on canned and bottled beers, ales and soft drinks, since droving, driving, riding and walking in the warm to hot late-spring days were hot, dusty work and these potables were sovereign thirst-quenchers, good sources of nutrients and needed calories, and either low in alcoholic content or lacking it entirely.
In addition to alcohol, jewelry and arms or ammunition, the choicer items included tents and tarps, especially the larger ones which could house a family, best-quality carpets and bedding, clothing and boots, saddlery and harness, rope, any still-usable foodstuffs, metal canteens and larger flasks, books dealing with identification of edible wild plants, matches and disposable lighters, hunting and fishing equipment of any sort, pipes and still-sealed tins of tobacco and cigars, cigarette papers and snuff and chewing tobacco, horseshoes and any other farriers' equipment found, still-pliable rubber tires that could be cut up to provide traction and protection on the highways for the hooves of horses and the steel rims of wheels, edge weapons such as sabers or swords or longer bayonets, medical and dental supplies and nonelectrical equipment for the use of Dr. Bookerman and the other doctor and the two dentists in their party, all older men and women.
Several times during the cross-country trek, one or another of the diehard farmers announced an intention of settling in a rich-looking, well-watered area, but each time Bookerman was able to discourage these dreamers through the expedient of pointing out that, though well-watered now, following a long winter with very heavy snows and a wet spring, these watercourses were clearly seasonal and
no one could predict just how long they might decline in drier weather or conditions. And so everyone continued on, finally coming onto what had been Interstate 70, a little to the northwest of the sometime settlement of Agate, Colorado.
They found, to their general consternation, that the place had not only been thoroughly looted, but burned, as well . . . recently burned, for it had been a whole unblemished ghost town when Milo, Bookerman and the other two men had ridden their dromedaries through it bare weeks before.
Following this discovery, a heavily guarded perimeter was marked out around the night's camp and march of the succeeding day was preceded by a well-armed vanguard, flanked by outriders and trailed by alert rearguards.
Milo did not like to be suspicious of the motives of fellow human beings, rare as they had now become in this once-populous land, but the long caravan and the herds raised a dust cloud that could be perceived for many miles hereabouts, yet no one had so far bothered to approach them in peace by day or to come in to the cheery beacons of their fires by night. Nor was he alone; Bookerman and the council shared his trepidation and heartily endorsed all the security measures.
On the second day out of ruined Agate, Milo and a half-dozen other men were riding in a well-spread skirmish-line pattern a quarter-mile ahead of the van, along the fringes of the roadway. About halfway through a narrow draw, a pair of bearded men, rifles slung across their backs, sprang out of the brush. One of them grabbed at Fatima's headstall, while the other—a huge, thick-armed man—extended his ham-sized hands with the clear intention of dragging Milo out of his saddle.
The dromedary cow felt well served, and the smaller of the two bushwhackers immediately learned to his sorrow and agony just what those two-inch cursive fangs mounted in a camel's jaws are intended to accomplish. While he staggered back, bleeding profusely from his torn, ragged wounds, trying vainly to fend off the attack Fatima was eagerly pressing, obviously relishing the rich taste of human blood, Milo first kicked the bigger man in the face, then shortened his grip on the slender lance and drove the edgeless point deep into the barrel chest under a tattered and faded camouflage shirt.
The entire encounter took but bare seconds of elapsed time, and only a few more seconds were required for him to blow a single, long, piercing blast of his brass police whistle, draw the small pyrotechnic projector from one of his belt pouches and send a single red star flare arching high to explode in the cloudless blue sky. Having rendered the predetermined signals for danger, he made to turn Fatima about, but she would have none of it, still being intent on following her prey into the brush, and as her strength and stubbornness were more than he could easily handle, Milo found himself compelled to acquiesce and proceed forward. However, he used his free hand to place the ferrule of the pennoned lance in its socket and loop its thong securely to the saddle, loosen his saber in its sheath, then draw and load and arm the submachine gun and sling it from his neck within easy reach, while gripping the shotgun with its gaping twelve-gauge foot-long barrels—he had discovered the deadly value of shotguns and buckshot loads in Vietnam and in Africa.
As the blood-mad Fatima bore him willy-nilly ahead into unknown dangers, he could hear other whistles passing on his danger signal, quickly followed by the triple blasts from the vanguard acknowledging the receipt of the warning.
Ail at once, another man nearly as big as the one he had lanced, kneed a short- and thick-legged mount no larger than a Connemara pony out of the concealing, more than head-high brush and fired at Milo with a short-barreled semiautomatic rifle of some sort. Because of the dancing of his small horse, the man could not have achieved any meaningful sort of aim; nonetheless, Fatima squalled once and her rider felt the tugs of swift-flying bullets as they passed through portions of his jacket.
Extending the sawed-off smoothbore at the full length of his arm, Milo squeezed the trigger and saw the puffs of dust as the double-ought buckshot load took the rifleman in the chest and upper abdomen. The stubby rifle went clattering to the ground at the feet of the panicky horse, which suddenly reared and dumped the fatally wounded rider onto his back to be ruthlessly trod upon by Fatima. The unfamiliar stench of camel filling its distended nostrils, the little horse bolted into the brush and out of sight.
As he rode over the jerking body of the rifleman, Milo's keen vision detected a flicker of movement in the thick brush a bit ahead and to his right, and he quickly fired the other shotgun shell at it, to be rewarded by a hoarse scream and a frenzied thrashing about within the heavy undergrowth. Taking Fatima's reins between his teeth, he broke the double gun, extracted a brace of shells from his bandolier and reloaded it.
And not a split second too soon, either. Four shaggy-haired men, with beards to their chests and clad in a miscellany of old and newer clothing, ran out of the flanking brush, shouting, their weapons spouting flame from the muzzles.
He could feel the impacts of the bullets that struck Fatima's big, virtually unmissable body, and as the stricken beast began to go down, he leaped off her, coming down in a roll into the brush. Immediately he came to a stop, he unslung the submachine gun and dropped the four men with a long burst and two shorter ones. Lying there upon the hard, sun-hot ground, he could feel the swelling thunder of fast-approaching hooves, quite a goodly number of them. He hoped that those riders were his people rather than more of the scruffy bushwhackers, for he had dropped the shotgun somewhere in his roll for safety and he estimated that he now had only half a magazine load or less left in the automatic. There were eight rounds in his pistol, and he would have to expose himself -to retrieve either saber, light axe, lance or ammunition pouches from the gasping, groaning Fatima. He then resolved in future to carry his saber and at least one big knife hung from his body rather than his mount's.
Spotting the downed camel, Harry Krueger waved the men behind him into the brush on either side, then advanced up the trail on foot, his reins hooked with elbow, his pump shotgun ready, at high port, as Milo had taught him and the others back in the Snake River country. When he saw the familiar boots sticking out of a clump of brush at the side of the trail, just beyond the felled camel, he felt his heart rise suddenly up to painfully distend his throat. He realized, all in a rush, that he simply could not think of, contemplate, a daily life without Uncle Milo, the man who had been around all of his remembered life, who had taught him and his peers so very much of living and survival. If Uncle Milo now lay dead up there . . .
"Damn fool boy!" Harry heard the well-known voice hiss. "Let that damn horse go and go to ground, before you eat a bullet. These bastards are murderous—no question, just an attack of some kind."
But they found no more foemen that day, just eight bodies and six horses. All of the rifles turned out to be military-issue—M16s of the semiautomatic configuration—though without exception, old, well used and in very poor condition, so they were stripped of magazines, ammunition and any still-usable parts, then rendered useless by Milo and Jim Olsen, who also did the same for the assortment of rusty revolvers and pistols packed by the dead men.
Strangely enough, Dr. Bookerman announced, following a gingerly but thorough examination of Fatima, that he thought her wounds to be superficial, no bones having been broken and none of her vital organs seemingly affected. When Milo remounted the now-kneeling beast and gave her the signal to arise, she did so as grudgingly as always, but she seemed to maintain as good a pace as ever she had, though often groaning, bawling, squalling, hissing, snarling and mumbling to herself. But that night, Fatima dropped a stillborn calf, which Bookerman declared to have been delivered well before its appointed time.
The dawn after the day of the attack on Milo did not see the usual campbreaking and column formation; the camp was left in place and its perimeter heavily guarded while a well-armed contingent rode out eastward to check the highway, the countryside and the nearby town of Limon. These were under the command of Bookerman, it being his day to head the vanguards, as the previous day had been Milo's.
Just bef
ore noon, he rode back into camp with a handful of his men and three strangers. Immediately upon dismounting, he called for Milo and the council.
The spokesman and apparent leader of the trio was of less than average height—about five feet seven, Milo guessed—but big-boned and, for all his thinning white hair, navel-length white beard and posture that was a bit stooped with age, still a powerful man, with broad, thick shoulders and firm handclasp. He identified himself as Keith Wheelock, once a colonel of the Colorado National Guard. Milo thought that while the old man looked distinguished enough, he resembled less an elderly retired officer and more a Cecil B. De Mille version of a biblical prophet.
Colonel Wheelock's voice was strong but controlled, and his speech was literate. "Gentlemen, you and your party must be very wary while passing through this area, for there are roving bands of human scum now in these parts. They have attacked our settlement six times within the last fortnight after overwhelming the smaller settlement that our people had established to the west, in the town of Agate. These renegades are well armed, though lacking any meaningful number of horses. Although it is me and my people that they are really after, having trailed us here from our previous settlements, they are like mad dogs and will most certainly attack you for your horses, weapons and ammo or simply to see your blood flow."
Milo nodded. "I sincerely thank you for your warning, sir, though it comes a bit late. I was attacked as I rode point yesterday; I had to shoot seven of the bastards and another of them was so badly savaged by my riding camel that he bled to death before he got far. We captured six rather sad and ill-kept specimens of horseflesh, some ratty saddles and harness, a few rounds of ammunition and a handful of usable parts off the worst-maintained weapons that I've seen in many a year. Here's the only piece that wasn't all dirt, fouling and rust." He laid a stainless-steel single-action revolver on the carpet.
Wheelock squatted, picked up the weapon and, after opening the loading gate and rotating the empty cylinder, examined the piece briefly. When he raised his head, his eyes could be seen to be abrim with tears. He grasped the barrel and extended the revolver to Milo, butt-first, saying, "Sir, if you will remove the grips from this weapon, you will find the letters K.B.W. and the numbers 9-19-71 engraved on the frame. This was once my pistol, then my son's; they must have taken it from his dead body, for I cannot conceive of any man's taking it from him while still he lived and drew breath. He was the leader of the Agate settlement."
