James
Lawson was nothing if not a proud man.
In the light of a clearing
dawn, with low fog down by the river, he looked over his domain with
satisfaction. The house had been a small, sagging, moldering frame
dwelling in a dark stand of fir trees when he'd chosen it. Crowded in
by lilacs and vinca, roofed with moss, trash all over. But in the
right kind of place, the top of a rise, with ground steadily dropping
away in all directions. Now it was encased in thick stone walls with
steel-shuttered windows, with a commanding view across his clearing
to the woods beyond; there was no dead ground between. Most of the
work had been making the clearing; now anyone approaching would have
to show their hand.
Here he had chosen to stop running and
make a home for his wife and three boys, now almost grown, and the
five of them had gotten by on deer, fish and small game, some wild
greens and foraged fruits, and God's own clean, clear water, which
could be hauled up from their hand-dug, stone-lined well right in the
kitchen. It was a crowded house, but James felt things might not yet
be settled out there in the world; Soon, though, the boys would
become restless. They'd want their own domains.
Where would
they come up with women?
Not from those damned socialists
over the hill, that's for effing sure. Effing commune! With taxes, no
less. They all brought their crops to the old-timers in that old
sawmill they used for a castle, like the prancing nymphs and centaurs
in the old Disney movie. Godless left-wing commies; it's enough to
make you sick.
They'd recruited him, too.
You all come on over here, they'd cooed, oh, yeah, lots for you to do
for us and our lords and masters, you bet. His sons had looked
interested, too, dammit. Maybe 'cause he'd explained to them about
the loose morals of those folks. He'd had to lay it on the line for
all and sundry. No moving in with tax-obsessed socialists, no
commerce with 'em, no nothing! He, James H. Lawson, was a man whose
soul stood within the saving grace of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who
would provide all things in season. Ask, and ye shall receive. And
they had.
How did it go? The prayers of a righteous man
accomplisheth much? Some such. A bible in the top bedside drawer of
every effing motel in God's own country and he hadn't managed to
bring one here. Or teach the boys to read, either. But he'd taught
them how to kneel and pray, praise Jesus, hunt, fish, tan hides, make
and keep a fire without matches, and use a kettle and tripod. They
were all set. Now if only some good folks would come along and
they could get a church going...
The two queers, that
half-black abomination and the blond one, had made sad faces and gone
off, and the next morning one of his boys had found a bag of oats on
a stump. Didn't have a way to grow any, really, but it had come
in handy last winter for porridge. Hated to keep it but it would have
been a waste in a tough land, and it hadn't changed his mind any.
James came out of his reverie with a snap. Somebody was watching
him, he was sure of it; and not that nosy little Creek kid on the
mountainside, neither. Something was in the woods to the west.
His wife, sallow-faced, hard bitten – but who wasn't – a hard
worker in whom he'd found a godly helpmeet, came to the door, drying
her hands in a long apron. A wisp of her gray hair, which had been
tied in a tight bun, hung over her face.
"Charity, get
me the Winchester. Quick." From the corner of his eye, he could
see all three of the boys coming up from the river, one of them
carrying a steelhead, still flopping. Too close together, dammit!
Their dog, an old yellow lab, had been frisking at their feet,
sniffing at the fish, but suddenly gave attention to the woods to the
west, and advanced in that direction, barking.
Charity
turned inside and came back to the door with Lawson's old, oiled,
loaded, and much-beloved model 1892 carbine. It was never used to
hunt now – not enough rounds, and they didn't always go off. She
reached it to him on the stoop.
"Get back inside and
grab your bow. Now."
She opened her mouth as if
to ask what could be the matter, but a small hole appeared in her
cheekbone and she fell back into the living room.
As
she did so, her husband heard the crack of a rifle. James Lawson spun
around, jacking a .30-30 into the chamber of his carbine, but there
was no target to be seen along the long line of cottonwoods to his
left, nor beneath the distant line of Douglas fir and bigleaf maple
to his right. His three sons should'ha dove into the tall brown
grasses of the clearing at the first shot, but they seemed
momentarily frozen.
"Down. Down!" he
shouted, but the distant rifle cracked again, once each for two of
the boys, who fell over like puppets whose strings had been cut. The
third one threw away the fish and ran back.
James
had by this time assumed a prone position behind a steel tub that lay
upside down in the dooryard. He still could not find a target. Crack!
The barking stopped. Still no one to be seen. The tub leaped. A
hole appeared in the steel, right in front of his shoulder, and he
felt the bullet's impact before he heard the distant weapon's small
thunder one more time.
James crawled for the house, carbine
cradled in his arms. His crawling slowed, his breathing rasped, and
he found himself fighting
tunnel vision. Charity's bare right foot lolled in the doorway; he'd
have to climb over it. Getting up those two steps was going to take
enough concentration as it was, with so much water – where was
all this water coming from? bubbling up his windpipe. Why was he
dribbling? Jesus, help me. Help me get those bastards! Effin'
queers, I knew they were stringing me along. Effin' backstabbers.
A
sandaled foot appeared in his narrowed vision. "'Scuse me, bud,
I'll take that."
A hand reached down, secured the
trigger of the carbine, lowered the hammer gently with its thumb, and
pried the weapon from his failing grasp. Another hand grasped him by
the hair on the back of his head, and tilted his face upward. No one
he'd seen before. Beard; cheekbones painted black. Sad, expressive
eyes.
"Hi. Name's Wolf. I'd ask ya yours, but ya don't
look like you'll be needin' it any more."
And then
James Lawson became no one at all.
:::
Avery
Murchison sat in his wheelchair and contemplated his fate. He, who
had lived for sunshine, woods and water, and exulted in the strength
of his limbs and the speed with which he could run, had had an ideal
if rather strict childhood, really he had, and married a fine girl
and raised an outstanding daughter and then it all went to hell in a
hurry.
He'd been IED'd by his own side accidentally, while
fighting a gang of half-starved bandits. His now-useless body had
been carted to Chaney's butcher shop for a double amputation, and
when he'd been brought home, months later, found himself a paraplegic
and a widower – lost Juney to some illness the bandits had brought
with them – and young Mo-reen had become his whole world, just like
that. But the girl was determined to take his place in the security
force, and was seldom home.
And now she had said, "love
ya" to the three of them, Avery, Mom, and Dad, and drifted away
in a wisp of smoke minutes later.
Being off shift after
that, he'd taken the opportunity to get roaring drunk. Then Dad had
called and said that Mom was hurt, too, in a fight on Ball Butte. Not
too bad, he hoped.
Not too bad.
He hoped!
Eff! What was all this for, anyway?
He'd
begun to think, long ago, that his parents' project was cockeyed and
doomed, and now he was sure of it.
Avery stared at the
cement wall and its peeling battleship-gray paint; the wall stared
back without comment. His parents had worked in this strange
installation before the Undoing; they seemed to have some lingering
idea that they would find someone to hand it over to, someday;
someone representing a tribe, much bigger than the Creek, to which
their ultimate loyalty still held.
They'd tried to explain,
reeling off fragments of their world from memory: "... in order
to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic
tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general
welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our
posterity...."
Not so many blessings, he thought. Not
so effing much posterity, either. He looked sourly down upon his
truncated person, stumps encased in neatly seamed trouser ends.
Nice chair, anyway. A lightweight, deeply cambered
anodized-aluminum Quickie racer in candy red with black nylon
webbing, it served, as did so many things in here, to remind one of
all that had, apparently, been lost forever. Avery blew out the lamp
and wheeled himself, with fingerless gloves on the rubber of the
pneumatic tires, down the dimly lit hall through the open steel
doorway to the command post.
Avery shoved himself over to
the console with its buttons, LED lamps and vernier controls. None of
it worked, so far as anyone could tell. But five floors below, lights
actually glowed, after all these years, on another panel with two
keyholes in it, five feet apart. Something was asleep down there
that, apparently, needed no outside sources of power.
From
here, through heavy quartzite windows that were difficult to spot
from outside, unless one was up really close, he could look to the
four horizons.
The rain clouds had mostly cleared away,
tattering off to the east.
East. Fresh snow on the volcanoes
– Dad had taught him to call them the old names: Mt. Jefferson and
the Three Sisters; south, the Coburg Hills; west, the great Valley
and across to Mary's Peak with a light dusting of snow near the
summit, and north, Ball Butte, Maggie's Hill, and the long, faint
line of what had been the freeway, with, to this day, a smattering of
wrecked and abandoned vehicles in bright but fading designer colors.
Artifacts of the world that had produced this room, and its
mysterious instrument panel, and that half-sleeping beast in its
steel lozenge and thirty feet of concrete.
Something to do
with the Murchison loyalty to the very country that, by their own
account, had so ruined everyone's lives.
He looked, for the
thousandth time, at one of the quaint cautionary signs, in metallic
lettering, riveted onto the slanted console.
MAINS
ENERGIZED? KEEP ALL CIRCUIT BREAKERS UNDER COVER EXCEPT WHEN ACTUALLY
SWITCHING ON OR OFF. TO INITIATE PROCEDURE, CLOSE CIRCUITS IN ORDER
FROM RIGHT TO LEFT. TO CANCEL PROCEDURE, OPEN ALL CIRCUITS IN ORDER
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. WHEN ALL CIRCUITS ARE CLOSED, AND ONLY WHEN ALL
CIRCUITS ARE CLOSED, CONTROLS A, B, AND C ARE AVAILABLE. SEE MANUAL,
DARPA SECDOC A25065A, PP. 22-32. INCL.
Available for what
purpose? Carey and Ellen didn't seem to know. They had only been
security guards, home for an easy break from the idiotic oil war
which, as all could so easily see, was slowly killing Dad. And
apparently no one alive today knew what the thing was for, or how
long it was supposed to last.
Time to go to work. Avery
glassed Ball Butte, for starters. There was activity there; he
switched to the spotter scope. Ah.
They were collecting the
dead.
Quite a few.
These were being loaded onto
stretchers, and would be borne with reverence, friend and foe alike,
to the House of the Dead at Hall Farm. Each would be carefully spread
open, from head to foot, before being consigned, with a little prayer
to Jeeah, to the long, low compost heaps at Common Farm #1, next
door. This year's designated cemetery was every third heap. Would
those be enough – with a full-scale war on at last?
Might
have to resort to exposure, such as the Indians had done on
platforms.
Another way of giving back to Jeeah. Farmers might
begrudge the "waste," but the vultures would not. And, of
course, it was clear we could lose this one.
Exposure
by default.
He supposed, given its current function, that
particular "common" farm would never be settled. Or perhaps
the cooks, who doubled as morticians of a sort, would move there. He
wouldn't be surprised if, in another generation, they became priests!
An odd little religion Mrs. Chaney had come up with. But she was an
odd bird, anyway.
Avery looked down into the Creek valley to
the east. He could not see the sunless farms under the brow of Ridge,
but there was smoke from the kitchen chimneys of Maggie's, Lazar's,
Beeman's, Jones and Ames. All good there. Beyond Ames was another
Common farm, with no buildings as yet. Couple of deer browsing in the
open.
Activity caught the corner of his right eye. For a
moment, Avery tensed, and checked for the throwing knives strapped to
the arms of his chair. But the movement was the on-duty Ridge scout,
back from her vantage point on the south slopes. Running, with strung
bow on her shoulder and binoculars in hand. He could see the urgency
of her efforts from here. Billee ran out of sight to the left around
the rocks.
Avery twirled his chair and awaited Billee's
entrance.
Billee paused in the doorway to catch her breath,
then reported in.
"Sir. Lawsons are all dead."
She looked at him bug-eyed.
Welcome
to my world, child, he thought. "Dead or down?"
"Well, down, but there was shooting, and it wasn't them."
"See the shooters?"
"Yessir. They
came out of the woods over thataway." She pointed west. And made
a face. "They even shot the dog."
"Numbers?"
"Twenty, maybe twenty-five."
He raised his eyebrow.
"Well, it was hard to tell,
they were back and forth so much."
At least she wasn't
pouting. "Weapons?"
"Bows, crossbows. But the
Lawsons were shot from an awfully long way off. I'm surprised you
didn't hear it from here."
"Wrapped in this much
concrete? So, at least one rifle."
"Mm-hmm."
she nodded vigorously.
"Maybe a scoped weapon.
Apparently taking no prisoners. Huh. Well, thank you. Go back and
watch them some more, but don't be seen."
"Sir!"
She departed on the bounce.
Yes, that would be the crowd
that hit Ball Butte. Clearly making a flanking maneuver after getting
their nose bloodied by Mom.
Avery smiled grimly to himself.
He could appreciate the ironies. If these raiders knew how little the
Creek can really defend itself, they would have come straight in by
the bridge. The Creek might have gone down as easily as Lawson's.
Time to get on the horn.
:::
Elsa
Chaney opened her eyes. By the shadows on the bedroom wall it must be
nearly ten o'clock; she felt a moment's panic and then recalled that
it had been a long night with the wounded, and that others were
sharing the bedroom with her. She herself lay on the rope bed, in the
narrow groove her body had worn into the mattress, stuffed with old
crumbly foam rubber, that she'd made with her own hands years ago.
Tom had worn another groove in it, next to hers, over time; they
joked about visiting back and forth from valley to valley, but there
hadn't been so much visiting really; not for years. She'd given up
four babies, each to bone marrow disease and then to Jeeah, and they
had been taken gently away by the kindly farmers at Hall.
She had
wanted no more such sad emptiness after that; and Tom had
understood.
He wasn't in the bed. Elsa looked around and
found five young people rolled up in blankets on the floor; four
boys, and that strange creature, Karen, who had walked alone across
the mountains, told her story once, as if she felt obligated to do
that much, and then mostly closed herself up. She was all "yes,
ma'am" and "no ma'am," washed and stitched wounds,
fetched alky and blankets, as directed, and then she would just stand
there, waiting for the next thing, watching but not commenting.
Commenting was the life blood of the Creek; in the absence of a
culture of media – no internet, phones, television, radio,
newspapers or magazines, and few books and almost no one able to read
them, everyone gossiped incessantly. Word of the girl's arrival, for
example, had led to endless discussion and speculation on all the
farms.
Karen, in contrast, had been fed upon print culture from a
bygone age. She was like the Elders in outlook, but like the young
people of the Creek in having few expectations, fast reflexes, and
some general notion of war as a norm. It might be on a very tiny
scale nowadays, but war it certainly was.
For Elsa, war was
not a norm.
She might, for all she knew, be the last
of the old protesters. A liberal and a pacifist herself, she had
stood on street corners among Quakers and Mennonites and waved a sign
reading "Genocide is Un-American/U.S. out of Mexico" –
dangerous and thankless, and by then very illegal, work, and that
last time the little aluminum dragonfly had flown right up to her
face and snapped her portrait and then she'd done time in a minimum
security prison.
They'd all been released when the Undoing
had halted sufficient deliveries of food and supplies for their
guards and for them. Elsa had walked right out in her orange jumpsuit
into the chaos and met Tom, who was patching hurt people on the
streets: a policeman and a "rowdy," side by side. He was in
blood up to his elbows and unremittingly kindly.
It was love
at first sight.
She hadn't found her old friends. They'd
held one more demonstration, she heard later, and the police had
turned the truck-borne antenna on them and cranked it up to full
power. The little aluminum-foil hats had not availed.
Peace
was what she'd always sought, and with Tom, she had largely found it.
They had had a few adventures on the edge of the horror that was the
Freeway Corridor. Then they lucked into the community that the
Murchisons were gathering into an abandoned tributary valley of the
Cascade Foothills, less than a hundred miles from Elsa's home town.
Tom had, at Carey Murchison's urging, become the local "doctor"
and she'd, because the Murchisons suggested every household should
try to organize itself around food production, become the
farmer-in-chief at "Chaney's."
There had been no
one to marry her to Tom but herself; Elsa simply joined her life to
his, and assumed his last name because she wanted to. The farm, and
its crew, came to be called "Chaney's" – a signpost, in
speech and usage, of where to go to find the doctor.
Karen
was stirring; Elsa sat up in bed. The young woman was not a deep
sleeper but she seemed very disoriented on waking. Elsa gave her time
to get her eyes open and to get her bearings, then caught her
attention, making gestures she hoped meant "tiptoe out" and
"tea" and was pleased when Karen nodded. Somebody ought
to give that girl a hairbrush, Elsa thought.
Fire had
been kept going by the Chaney's crew all night, and there was hot
water on the big earth stove in the long kitchen – one of the first
such stoves – ovens really – that had been built on the Creek.
Lydee, a girl several years Karen's junior, was tending fire and
stirring rolled oats with plums and apple slices in a large kettle,
for whomever might wander in for a late breakfast or early lunch. Hot
water was available, and Elsa strained some through a mixture of
dried and crumbled peppermint and sage leaves into mugs for herself
and Karen. She offered both mugs; Karen chose green. Elsa watched her
reading the text and then knitting her brows.
"'Sixty
is the new thirty.' It was a joke mug. Somebody got that for their
birthday."
"Oh."
Each waited for her
mug to cool, then took long, meditative sips, watching Lydee serve up
oatmeal in bowls to two young men from Bledsoe's. Both looked
banged-up and bushed; one of them, a muscular fellow with a whistle
hanging from a thong round his neck, seemed to know Lydee well and
was chatting her up a bit while absorbing welcome heat from the fire.
Now a veteran of battle, he was using his new-found mystique to "make
an impression." Elsa found this both amusing and endearing, but
with sad undertones. Karen watched, but seemed not to understand what
was going forward.
"You did good work last night,
Karen; I'm grateful. It was my job but my old eyes were giving out in
that lamplight."
"Thank you." Karen sipped
some more; her eyes inventoried the room.
Yep. Not chatty.
"Is it all right if I ask you what you can do – sort of a
skills list?"
"Yes."
"Well,
umm, if you'll help me out here, maybe you could tell me some
of these things?"
"Oh. Read and follow
instructions. Sew, a little. Leather: awls, punches, mallets. Metals:
salvage, disassemble, lubricate, polish, reassemble; drill press,
lathe, hacksaw. Molds and casting. Carpentry: hammer, plane,
crosscut, rip, miter, try square, chisel ..."
Elsa
laughed. "Okay, I get it. Your dad gave you the run of his work
bench. I remember something about his work bench."
Something about the way that was put seemed to have been off-putting
to Karen, who looked about to draw back into her shell. Elsa thought
for a moment, then added: "Oh, 'the run of' is not quite quite.
He wanted to make you a Renaissance woman, I'd guess."
"Excuse me?"
"An expression for – skilled
in all trades."
"Something like that, yes,
ma'am."
"What did he stress most?"
"Situational awareness."
This wasn't quite where
Elsa thought this was going. "Oh ... could you enlarge on
that?"
Karen seemed primed for the question, as if in
recitation.
"Don't look, see. Once an area is
secured, forage. Purify water. Avoid hypothermia, heat stroke,
starvation, dehydration and injury. Apply wayfinding, judging of
terrain, and inventory maintenance. If area becomes insecure, fall
back on avoidance and escape; failing that, marksmanship, manual of
arms, knife fighting, judo."
I just had to
ask, didn't I? Jeeah help us! "Probably just what's wanted
around here," replied Elsa with a hint of bitterness. "If I
may ask – why?"
"He said that the core of any
life worth living is self-respect. That one has to earn that through
self-discipline. And that self-discipline requires clarity. All the
rest follows."
"And this led him to stress ...
fighting?"
"No, ma'am, not fighting, clarity.
So as not to be led away from self-respect."
"I
like some of what I'm hearing, but does that follow from – fight
training?"
"Well ... you can't think when
you're dead."
Karen took another sip of her tea and
glanced over toward the door, which was opening.
Dr. Chaney,
looking very much the worse for wear, came into the kitchen with
Emilio of Ames Farm. "Ah, here she is. So, Emilio, have time for
breakfast with us, or will you round up your soldier and go tearing
off right away?"
"Hello, Karen, Mrs. Chaney. It is
simple and not simple at one time. If I may carry away some oatmeal
in a container, for my crew?" he asked Lydee. Lydee jumped down
from her perch and, finding a clean polyethylene half-gallon bucket
with a handle, ladled mush into it.
Emilio nodded to
Huskey, the young man who'd been talking to Lydee, and turned again
to the Chaneys and Karen. "There has been word from Ridge that
those who attacked us last night appear to have abandoned their camp
downstream. They are seen to be making their way round toward the
pass."
"Oh!" Elsa sat upright, spilling her
tea. "The Lawsons!"
"For them, already, if I
understood what was said, there is nothing to be done."
"I must go," said Karen to Elsa.
"Well, that
is my other information," said Emilio. "Savage Mary has
asked to have a look at you, and the Captain I think seems to favor
this idea."
"But your family! And Mrs. Ames!"
Karen was on her feet and half-turned toward the door.
"It
is true we wish to have you with us at this time, and I am happy you
share the feeling. So. Perhaps I have forgotten Mary's request in the
heat of the moment. We can do one thing and then remember the other,
yes?" Emilio seemed to make light of it, but his expression
remained grim.
"Of course," put in the doctor.
"Only right thing to do."
"Should we come?"
asked Huskey, by the stove, putting down his bowl.
"No,
Bledsoes should go back to Hall and await re-deployment at Bridge or
Butte, as I understand. The Captain will want you soon. We are almost
fifty going up the Creek already."
As Emilio said this,
Karen ran round to the isolation room and scooped up her gear. Ellen
Murchison lay there, still sleeping, as did Elberd, the young man
with the cheek that had been peeled open. Karen had given him a mug
of chamomile-peppermint tea in the wee hours, and watched him relax
and drift away – the first person, other than herself, she had ever
sewn up.
She slung her gear over her shoulders and headed
for the kitchen.
Sometimes needle and thread is best, she
thought. Sometimes bow and broadhead.