скачать книгу бесплатно
Mall.
The Boy didn’t know the meaning or purposes of such places and possessed only vague notions of form and function when he recognized their remains.
In the center of town he saw more figures and brought Horse up short, hooves digging for purchase on the fractured road. The Ashy Whites formed a circle and within were the others. The Ashy Whites were standing. The others sat, huddled in groups.
“Help us!” someone cried out and one of the Ashy Whites clubbed at the sitting figure.
Behind him, the Boy could hear the ululations growing closer. Horse stamped his hooves, ready to run.
“Rumble light!” roared a large voice and the Boy was suddenly covered in daylight—white light like the “flashlight” they’d once found in the ruins of an old car factory. It had worked, but only for a day or so. Sergeant Presley had said light was once so common you didn’t even think about it. Now …
No time for memories, Boy!
Horse reared up and the Boy had to get hold of the mane to get him down and under control. Once Horse was down and settled, the Boy stared about into the blackness, seeing nothing, not even the moonlight. Just the bright shining light coming from where the Ashy Whites had been.
An Ashy White, large and fat, his face jowly, his lower lip swollen, his eyes bloodshot, stepped into the light from the darkness off to one side. He was carrying a gun.
What type of gun is this, Boy?
When they’d found empty guns Sergeant Presley would make him learn their type, even though, as he always said, They were no good to anyone now. How could they be? After all these years there ain’t no ammunition left, Boy. We burned it all up fightin’ the Chinese.
Shotgun, sawed off.
The Ashy White man walked forward pointing the shotgun at Horse.
What will it do? He heard Sergeant Presley ask.
Sprays gravel, short range.
The Ashy White continued to walk forward with all the authority of instant death possessed.
There can’t be any ammunition left. Not after all these years, Boy.
He kicked Horse in the flanks and charged the man. Pinned ears indicated Horse was only all too willing. Sometimes the Boy wondered if Horse hated everyone, even him.
In one motion the Boy drew his tomahawk.
The man raised the weapon.
Don’t let it go unless you mean to, might not get it back, Boy. He always heard Sergeant Presley and his words, every time he drew the tomahawk.
He’d killed before.
He’d kill again.
He was seventeen years old.
The world as Sergeant Presley had known it had been over for twenty-three years when the Boy whose own name even he had forgotten had been born on the windswept plains of what the map had once called Wyoming.
You strike with a tomahawk. Never sweep. It’ll get stuck that way Boy. Timing has to be perfect.
Jowls raised the shotgun, aiming it right into the Boy.
There can’t be any ammunition left, Boy. The world used it all up killing itself.
And the Boy struck. Once. Down. Splitting the skull. He rode off, out of the bright light and into the darkness.
Chapter Four
HE COULD HEAR the Ashy Whites throughout the night, far off, calling to one another. At dawn there were no birds and the calls ceased.
“Boy,” Sergeant Presley had said that time they’d spent a night and a day finding their way across the Mississippi. “Things ain’t the same anymore.”
They were crawling through and along a makeshift damn of river barges and debris that had collected in the mud-thickened torrents of the swollen river.
“You probably don’t know what that means, d’ya?” The mosquitoes were thick and they had to use all their hands and feet to hold on to anything they could as the debris-dam shifted and groaned in the treacherous currents. It felt like they were being eaten alive.
If I’d fallen into the water that day what could he have done to save me?
But you didn’t, Boy.
I was afraid.
I knew you was. So I kept telling you about how things were different now. About how sane, rational people had gone stark raving mad after the bombs. About how the strong oppressed the weak and turned them into slaves. About how the sick and evil were finally free to live out all of their cannibalistic craziness. And how sometimes, just sometimes, there might be someone, or a group of someones who kept to the good. But you couldn’t count on that anymore. And that was why we were crossing that rickety pile of junk in the river rather than trying for the bridge downstream. You smelled what those people who lived on the bridge were cookin’ same as I did. You knew what they were cooking, or who they were cooking. We didn’t need none of that. The world’s gone mostly crazy now. So much so, that all the good that’s left is so little you can’t hardly count on it when you need it. Better to mistrust everyone and live another day.
Like these Ashy Whites out in the night looking for me.
Seems like it, Boy.
Many times he and Sergeant Presley had avoided such people. Horse knew when to keep quiet. Evasion was a simple matter of leaving claimed territory, crossing and re-crossing trails and streams, always moving away from the center. The town was the center. Now, at dawn, he was on the far side of the valley and he could make out little of the town beyond its crisscross roads being swallowed by the general abandonment of such places.
You almost got caught, Boy.
But I didn’t.
We’ll see.
He waited in the shadows at the side of a building whose roof had long ago surrendered inward, leaving only the walls to remain in defeat. The warm sunshine on the cracked and broken pavement of the road heading west beckoned to him, promising to drive off the stiffness that clamped itself around his left side every night.
They’ll assume you’re gone by now, Boy.
The Boy waited.
When he hadn’t heard the ululations for some time, he walked Horse forward into the sunshine.
Later that morning he rode back to the town, disregarding the warnings Sergeant Presley had given him of such places.
Whoever the Ashy Whites were, they had gone.
And the others too, huddled within the circle of the Ashy Whites—that voice in the night, a woman he thought, calling for help.
Who were the others?
The answer lay in the concrete remains of a sign he spelled S-C-H-O-O-L.
School.
This had been their home. The fire that consumed it hadn’t been more than three days ago. But the Boy knew the look of a settlement. A fort, as Sergeant Presley would have called it. The bloated corpses of headless men lay rotting in the wan morning light.
This is where those who had huddled within the circle of the Ashy Whites had lived all the years since the end of the things that were.
Before.
He found the blind man at the back of the school, near the playground and the swing sets.
Remember when I pushed you on a swing that time, Boy? When we found that playground outside Wichita. We played and shot a deer with my crossbow. We barbecued the meat. It could have been the Fourth of July. Do you remember that, Boy?
I do, he had told Sergeant Presley in those last weeks of suffering.
It could have been the Fourth of July.
The blind man lay in the sandbox of the playground, his breath ragged, as drool ran down onto the dirty sand, mixing with the blood from the place where his eyes had once been.
The Boy thought it might be a trap.
He’d seen such tricks before, and even with Sergeant Presley they’d nearly fallen into them once or twice. After those times and in the years that followed, they’d avoided everyone when they could afford to.
He got down from Horse.
“There’s no more to give!” cried the blind man. “You’ve taken everything. Now take my life, you rotten cowards!”
The Boy walked back to Horse and got his water bag.
Not much left.
He knelt down next to the blind man and raised his head putting the spout near his lips. The blind man drank greedily.
After: “You’re not with them, are you?”
The Boy walked back to Horse.
“Kill me.”
He mounted Horse.
“Kill me. Don’t leave me like this. How …” The blind man began to sob. “How will I eat?”
The Boy atop Horse regarded the blind man for a moment.
How will any of us eat?
He rode off across the overgrown field and back through a broken-down wire fence.
That’s everything you need to know, Boy. Good. Tells you everything you need to know. Supremacists. Coming down out of their bunkers in the North. Don’t know these guys, but they’re worth avoiding. Probably here slavin’.
Probably.
Go west. Get into the Sierras before winter. The mountains will be a good place to go to ground for winter. It’s hard to live in the mountains but there’ll be less people up there. You plan, you prepare, and you’ll do just fine. Come spring, you cross the mountains and head for Oakland. Find the Army. Tell them.
In the days that followed, the Boy rode Horse hard across the broken and barren dirt of what the map called Nevada. On the big road, Freeway, which he kept off to his right, he passed horrendous wrecks rusting since long before he’d been born. He passed broken trucks and overturned cars, things he’d once wanted to explore as a boy. Sergeant Presley would often let him when they’d had the time for such games—the game of explaining what the Boy found inside the twisted metal, and what the lost treasures had once meant. Before.
Hairbrush.
Phone.
Eyeglasses.
There was little that remained after the years of scavenging by other passing travelers.
The winding, wide Freeway curved and climbed higher underneath dark peaks. Roads that left Freeway often disappeared into wild desert. Sometimes as he rested Horse he would wonder what he might find at the conclusion of such lonely roads.
At one intersection the rusting framework of a sign crossed the departing road. From the framework three skeletons dangled in the wind of the high desert, rotted and picked at by vultures.
Probably a warning, Boy. Whoever’s up that road doesn’t want company.
It was a cold day. Above he could see the snowcapped peaks turning blue in the shadow of the falling sun. Later that night as he rode down a long grade devoid of wrecks, snow began to fall and he was glad to be beyond the road-sign skeletons.
He made camp in the carport of a fallen house on the side of a rocky hill that overlooked the winding highway. He stacked rubble in the openings to hold in the warmth of his fire.
Chapter Five
SHE AND HER sisters came out that night, south out of the desert wastes ranging up toward the road. Winter was coming on fast, and they needed to make their kills soon and return south to their home near the big canyon. They had hunted the area lean of mule deer and for the last week had been reduced to eating jackrabbits. Far too little and lean for a pride of lions.
Did she think about what the world had become? Did she wonder how she had come to be hunting the lonely country of northern Nevada? Did she know anything of casinos and entertainments and that her ancestors had once roamed, groomed and well fed, behind glass enclosures while tourists snapped their pictures?
No.
She only thought of the male and their young and her sisters.
Tonight the wind was cold and dry. There was little moonlight for the hunt. If they could only come across a pack of wild dogs. It would be enough to start them south again. Once they were south, they would have food in the canyons. And if they had to, they could always search the old city. There was always someone there, a lone man digging amongst the ruins. There was always someone hiding within the open arches and shredded carpets, the overturned machines and the shining coins spilled out as though carelessly thrown down in anger.
She topped the small line of hills and saw the dark band of the highway heading west. They had always regarded this road as the extent of their northern wanderings. Now they had to turn south.
Her sisters growled. She watched the road, looking for a moving silhouette in the darkness. One sister came to rub her head with her own.
Let’s return. He is waiting.
And for a moment she smelled … a horse.
