THE ROAD IS A RIVER
Part Three of The Wasteland Saga
Nick Cole

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Epilogue

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Nick Cole

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Can you let go?

The Old Man is sick. The Old Man is dying.

His fever is high in him and the days pass long and hot, as though having no end to them. The villagers come one by one, and it seems to all of them that what’s left of the Old Man will not be enough. Though there are no goodbyes, there are words and looks that mean just as much.

Yet she will not let him go.

“No, Grandpa,” she says to him through the long days and even longer nights. “I need you.”

Can you let go?

He has told the villagers as much as he can of Tucson through the ragged flaming trench that is his throat. The security of the Federal Building. The untouched mountain of salvage. The tank. The villagers are going there.

That could be enough. They have Tucson now.

He lies back and feels that swollen, fiery ache within every muscle.

Just rest.

Most of them, most of the villagers have gone on to Tucson and all that he has promised them of a better life waiting there. A new life, in fact.

Can you let go?

The Old Man is sick.

The Old Man is dying.

My wife.

He thinks of her olive skin.

Will I be with her again?

Soon.

He is glad he thought of her when the wolves were beneath him and his hands were burning as he’d crossed over the abyss. He is glad he still loved her when he needed to remember something other than the burning pain in his fingers.

“No, Grandpa. I need you.”

The Old Man thinks, in the darkest of moments when it seems as if he is crossing from this life to the next, that there are things worse than wolves snapping their jaws beneath you as you pull yourself across an abyss while thinking of your wife.

And he can hear the worst.

What is the worst?

His eyes are closed.

His granddaughter, Emily—she is his best friend, he remembers—is crying.

“No, Grandpa. I need you.”

And he is going. Almost gone. Fading.

He hears her sobs. Weeping. Weeping for him.

His failure to live just a little longer.

She needs him just a little longer. “Forever,” she tells him.

The worst is when you imagine the grief of your loved ones after you have gone.

‘When you are sick in the night,’ he thinks, ‘you imagine the worst. To hear my granddaughter in grief for me … that is the worst I can imagine.’

Can you let go?

‘Not yet,’ he thinks. ‘For her I will stay just a little longer, and maybe I can die later when it won’t matter so much. She still needs me now.’

That is the love of staying when you know you must go.

And the Old Man lives.

Chapter Two

What follows are moments.

Individual moments, each one like a picture. A photograph before there was digital. Just before the end. Before the bombs. Snapshots of the hot days that follow.

The Old Man lies in his bed. When his voice returns, he is surprised. He didn’t even know it was missing, he’d been so many days gone to the wasteland. He tells them of Tucson.

He tells them of the tank.

The wolves.

The Horde.

Sergeant Major Preston.

When he is finished, he is so tired that his words merge into a dream of nonsense. When he awakes, he sees stars through the openings in the roof of his shed. He hears the voices of the villagers outside. He feels his granddaughter’s tiny hand holding his old hand, and as he drifts back to sleep he hopes that he will not have that terrible nightmare again. The one in which he is falling and he can hear her.

No, Grandpa. I need you.

Snapshot.

It is morning. The cold wind blows across his face as they carry him out from his shed.

Am I dead?

But he can see his granddaughter. She is holding his rucksack, the one from the tower in Tucson, stuffed with the treasures that were once lost and now found.

They are taking me out to bury me.

“The book is for you,” he hears himself mumble across cracked lips. His granddaughter turns to him and smiles.

I love her smile. It is the best smile ever. There is no good thing like it.

Maybe her laugh too.

“I have it with your other things, Grandpa. Right here.” She pats his rucksack proudly.

All the villagers above turn and smile down at him hopefully.

The sky beyond them is gray. It is still monsoon season.

“We’re taking you to Tucson now, Dad,” says his son who has now bent down to adjust the blankets high about the Old Man’s thin neck. “Hang in there, Dad. You’re the last. We’re leaving the village for good.”

Sadness overwhelms the Old Man and then he thinks of his granddaughter and her smile as weapons against the darkness. Against a dragon that is too much for any mere man. He thinks of her perfect, lovely, best ever smile as sleep, fatigue, and a tiredness from so many days in the wasteland overwhelm him.

Her smile will keep the nightmare away.

Snapshot.

The red desert, east of Tucson.

We must be near the Y where I found the staked-out bodies. The warning the Horde had left. Please …

Snapshot.

He feels her hand.

It is a darkness beyond anything he has ever known.

Like the night I walked after the moon had gone down. The night after the motel.

It is quiet. Thick and heavy. Familiar.

He wakes with a start.

He is back in the office. The office where he found the last words of Sergeant Major Preston. He is lying in his sleeping bag.

I never made it back. I’ve been so sick I’ve stayed here too long.

In the hall outside he hears voices. A bright knife of light cuts the carpet on the floor.

“Dad?” says his son.

“It’s me,” replies the Old Man.

“Are you okay?”

Am I?

“Yes.”

“Are you hungry?”

If I am, it means I am well and that I’ll live.

“Yes.”

“I’ll get you something to eat. Be back in a few minutes.”

“Thank you.”

And he falls once more into the pit that almost took him and he does not have time to think of her, his granddaughter, or her smile. And so the nightmare comes and he has nothing with which to defend himself.

The snapshots fall together too quickly and soon become a movie.

He sees the blue Arizona sky, wide and seemingly forever, play out across the high windows. For a long time he watches the bright white clouds come and grow across its cornflower blue depths.

He hears an explosion. Dull, far away. It rattles the windows of the building. When he stands up and moves to the window, he sees a far-off column of black smoke rising out over the silent city. For a long time he stands watching the smoky, dark column. He feels unconnected and shaky. Occasionally he sees his fellow villagers moving down a street or exiting from a building. It is too far away to tell who each one is. But they are dressed differently than he has ever known them to dress. Almost new clothing, found here in this treasure trove, not the worn-out and handmade things of their years in the desert.

Time has resumed its normal pace. The sickness and fever fade. But not the nightmare. The nightmare remains, waiting for him.

What will become of us now?

Down the street, he sees a man pushing a grand piano out onto the sidewalk.

Chapter Three

Sam Roberts leans his blistered head against the hot steering wheel. Every ounce of him feels sunburned and sickened. He’d torn off the rearview mirror of the dune buggy three days ago. He couldn’t stand seeing what was happening to him.

The dune buggy rests in the thin shade provided by an ancient building, part of some lost desert gas station. Now that he’s running on electric, the gas within the buggy’s small tank is useless, dead weight now that he has escaped. He’d only needed it for speed in the brief run through the gauntlet of crazies lying in wait outside the blasted main entrance of the bunker.

The sun hammers the dry and quiet landscape of hard brown dirt, blistered-faded road, and sun-bleached stone. The yawning blue of the sky reaches away toward the curvature of the earth. There is no wind, no movement, no sound.

Sam Roberts has spent the morning allowing the solar cells to recharge while patching the large rear tire. His sweat pours through the radiation burns on his skin. He feels it on his head where there was once hair. His eyes are closed. Even with the visor down, it is too bright at noon.

‘But I can’t drive in the dark,’ he thinks.

He was born underground.

He has lived his entire life, other than the last three days, underground.

He is dying of severe radiation poisoning.

He is twenty-three years old.

He is a captain in the United States Air Force.

He moves his bleeding fingers to the ignition. The act of grasping the key and simply turning it feels as though it will kill him.

“I was dead the moment I left,” he says to the dry air and the southern nothingness he must find his way through. “I was dead the moment someone turned on that radio station.”

He laughs to himself and begins to cough and that leads to the rusty blood he spits into his glove.

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 Four

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 Five

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 Six

The Old Man walked to the wide window 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 Seven

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 right.”

“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.

He pressed the button.

“Hello,” he began. He looked at his granddaughter. She nodded.

“We are here,” said the Old Man.

“Let go of the button now, Grandpa,” she whispered.

They waited.

And then they heard the voice.

“Who am I speaking with?” The voice was a woman. Older. But clear and crisp. A voice used to giving commands and having them obeyed.

“Us,” said the Old Man who had needed to be reminded that he must touch the button to reply.

“All right,” said the voice cautiously. “Are you operating the radio station that just went active a few weeks ago in Tucson?”

“Yes,” replied the Old Man. “Who are you?”

“My name is Brigadier General Natalie Watt. I’m the commander of forces at Cheyenne Mountain Complex and we need your help. We’re trapped inside our bunker and we need to get out very soon.”

The Old Man and his granddaughter looked at each other in the thick silence of the radio room.

“Are you still there?” asked the General.

“Yes.”

“Can you help us?” she asked.

Pause.

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

Pause.

“Yes,” said the Old Man.

Chapter Eight

The Old Man watched from the high window as his granddaughter slipped back through the quiet streets of Tucson to her family’s home. It was well after midnight.

If I go on this journey, I must go alone. It is too dangerous for her to come with me.

He thought of the route. All the way into California, then back to Nevada, through New Mexico, and up to Colorado Springs.

It is over a thousand miles. The tank can only hold two hundred and sixty-four miles’ worth of fuel according to General Natalie Watt. She said I could scavenge. Tanks can draw fuel from many sources. Even kerosene. There are no guarantees of fuel and then there is the radiation. Well, that would be why you need to go to California for the extra gear. And after I cross all that desert, I am to aim a laser at the back of a mountain surrounded by unknown enemies. A Laser Target Designator. And who are these enemies? The General doesn’t know. She only knows they are trying to tunnel into the bunker and that when they do, they will flood the complex with radiation and kill everyone inside. They only opened the main door once so that the dead man, Captain Roberts, could drive his dune buggy out of the complex.

There is too much for just an old man like me to think about. This is too much for just me.

A one-way trip, my friend. He’d volunteered.

General Watt said the radiation is so bad at the front entrance that Captain Roberts probably absorbed a lethal dose in just the few minutes it took him to drive away. So I cannot take my granddaughter with me to such a place.

The Old Man watched the night.

In my nightmare she is crying for me. I am dying. Just like I almost did after the last time I went into the wasteland alone. She is crying and there is nothing I can do to make it better. The last thing I will ever hear is her grief for me.

It’s just a nightmare, my friend, heard the Old Man as though his friend from the book were with him and they were discussing some problem of fishing or salvage together.

But it is my nightmare.

Everyone dies. What would you have her do? Laugh about it? Of course she will weep.

I was hoping it would be later. When she has her own family and everyone is tired of me. When I have become such a burden to them all that they will be glad to see me go. Then, that would be a good time to die.

She will still cry for you.

Of course.

The Old Man felt the night. Felt its emptiness was only a lie and that all the world and the places and dangers hidden in it were waiting to devour him.

I need to leave soon. In the dream she says, No, Grandpa. I need you. It’s terrible. I never want to disappoint her. I never want to hear her say those words. I never want her to have to say them. Is it too much to ask to just fade away and have no one miss me until I’ve been gone for a long time?

And yet you must leave, my friend. Soon.

Yes. If I leave when no one is watching, just as I did last time, then I will not hear her grief.

Still, you will know. You will know she’ll say that which you do not want to hear. And even if you don’t hear her, in your heart the nightmare will lie to you and tell you that you did all the same.

Yes, that is the thing about nightmares. They embrace us when we are vulnerable, telling lies that seem very real. Like an older child who teases a younger child by making the child believe things that aren’t true.

In our nightmares we are all children.

The Old Man looked down. In his nervousness he had picked up his copy of the book. The one he had read for those forty years in the desert. The one with his friend inside.

The Old Man settled into his sleeping bag. He held the book in his hands and watched the ceiling.

So we will go together, my friend?

Yes.

The Old Man listened to the soft howl of the wind outside the large windows.

Soon I will be asleep and tomorrow all this might have just been a nightmare. Things will be different by the light of day, right, Santiago?

They are trapped in the bunker, my friend. They need someone to come and help them.

Yes.

She said she was going with you.

Yes.

And you must leave soon.

Yes, that too.

Chapter Nine

The Old Man gathers the supplies he will need. There are only a few people inside the Federal Building now. Most have staked out homes and are busy salvaging throughout Tucson. Hours pass before any one person might encounter another in a city so large and the villagers so few.

There are only eleven rounds left for the main gun.

But there are the smoke grenades still in their canisters alongside the turret. You could use those when you need to run away from trouble, my friend.

Yes, Santiago, what I don’t think of you will, my friend from the book.

Yes.

He takes a large map that covers all the places he must go and folds it down until it fits in his pocket. He takes a hunting rifle and two boxes of ammunition. Canned and packaged food. Plastic drums full of water. He places his crowbar inside the tank.

When his granddaughter finds him in the late morning, he is exhausted and sweating from his efforts. She takes hold of the box of food he has been carrying and together they take it down into the depths of the garage and to the tank waiting in the darkness.

“When are we going to leave, Grandpa?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

They went ten more steps toward the tank.

“Grandpa, are we going to leave tonight, or in the morning, or when?”

“I’m not leaving tonight,” says the Old Man. “I’m too tired.”

“That’s why you need me, Grandpa.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

I need you more than you’ll possibly ever know, not because I can barely do it with the hoist and winch, but because you are the most important person in the world to me.

“That’s why,” he said simply and turned to check the heavy straps they’d used to secure the fuel drums to the side of the turret.

The tank is loaded by nightfall. She takes the keys and stuffs them in the pocket of her cargo pants.

I’ll get another hundred miles out of these drums at best. Taking her would be the most selfish thing you could do.

It would seem so, my friend.

“If you go without me, I’ll follow you, Grandpa.”

If I keep her with me, then maybe the nightmare will be powerless to harm me.

Do you think so?

Yes. And I hope so too.

“All right.”

“All right what, Grandpa?”

“We’ll leave in the morning.”

And maybe in the night I will just leave without her.

“Why not now, Grandpa? You drove most of the route we’d cover tonight in the dark last time.”

I’m tired.

Do you think you will actually sleep tonight?

No.

Then maybe it’s better to be done with the waiting. You know what you must do. Now do it, my friend.

I feel like I haven’t thought everything through.

Did you the last time? Did you have any idea what you were getting into the last time? And yet you survived.

Barely. And now I’m even considering taking her with me. Do you want the truth?

Yes, my friend. Always.

Besides not wanting the nightmare to torment me … If I admit to myself a truth I do not want to hear, then yes I am taking her with me because I feel too weak for this. Not as strong as I was Before. The others should do this, but they won’t.

Those people are trapped.

The Old Man sighed.

“Climb aboard then,” he said to her.

Her face, tiny, elfin, perfect, exploded in a brief moment of joy and was quickly replaced by determination as he helped her up onto the turret.

After all, we’ll be inside this thing. What can possibly hurt us?

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Grandpa.”

Only the young are excited about going anywhere.

Maybe it is because they are too willing to believe in what they will find where they are going, my friend. That something good might happen at any moment. Expecting it simply must.

“You must do everything I say, no matter what. Promise me you will do that.”

“I will, Grandpa.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. And you have to promise me you’ll never leave and go salvaging again without me, Grandpa.”

“I promise.”

Someday I will die and you will remember that I promised. Please forgive me when I must break that promise. I won’t want to, but death will make me. I hope you’ll understand then.

Inside the turret they strapped on their thick green helmets and plugged communications cords into their stations, the Old Man in the commander’s seat, his granddaughter in the loader’s station below him. He turned on the auxiliary power unit, the APU. He could hear their breathing over the soft dull hum of the communications net.

“I’m glad you’re with me this time,” he said and squeezed her shoulder tightly.

“Me too, Grandpa.”

Her eyes shone darkly in the red light of the interior as she stared about at all the equipment. He started the main turbine and the tank roared to life in the dark garage.

“Here we go.”

Chapter Ten

In the night, the headlight of the tank flooded the streets with bright light. Only one woman, out late and coming home with a pushcart of salvage, saw them as they turned onto the overpass and headed north into the midnight desert. He expected someone, anyone, all of them maybe, to come rushing out and stop him. To save him from himself and his foolishness. But they passed only the woman with the pushcart and no one came out to stop them.

Are you really going to do this?

The Old Man looked down at his granddaughter. She was smiling as the tank bounced over the crumbling remains of the interstate.

It seems I already have.

The night covered them all the way past Picacho Peak, where the Old Man could no longer smell the rotting bodies of the Horde above the exhaust and heat of the tank.

But they are out there in the dirt and the scrub all the same.

“When can I see where we’re going?” asked his granddaughter over the intercom.

“It’s too dark and there is nothing to see right now.”

“Here,” he said. “Move to this seat below my knees and do not touch anything. It’s where the gunner sat.”

She unplugged her helmet cord, and after squeezing by the feet of the Old Man, she found herself looking out onto the desert floor through the targeting optics.

The Old Man drove on toward the fire-blackened remains of Gila Bend and felt they should stop, but he knew the road and knew their village was just another few hours beyond the charred dust of the place.

We can stay in our village one more night. At least it will be familiar.

When they arrived at the village, the Old Man shut down the tank and stood in the hatch looking at the collection of shacks in the darkness. He turned off the tank’s headlight and waited to hear the sounds of the desert.

This is madness. In the morning I will wake up and take us back home. Maybe no one will have missed us.

“Grandpa?”

“Yes?”

“How will we get there?”

“Aren’t you tired?”

They were rolling out their sleeping bags onto the floor of the tank.

“Not really.”

“I suppose we will drive this tank as far as it will go. After that, we will walk.”

“The lady said we needed to hurry.”

“First we must find fuel at the old fort outside Yuma. The Proving Ground it was called.”

It was quiet in the dark tank now as they settled into their bags. The Old Man left the hatch open, and through it he could see the stars above. He thought of closing the hatch but leaving it open seemed to him like a small act of bravery. As though he were preparing himself for other times when he might need more courage. As though giving into fear now would welcome an uninvited guest.

And it is still our village. There was no one here but us for all the years that we lived here and I doubt anyone’s come along since.

“That’s where you got the hot radio.”

The Old Man thought of the desert and the wasteland and the radio that had sent him off on his own. For many nights as he recovered from the sickness, those days in the wasteland had seemed a dream or a story that had happened to someone who was not him.

I was free though.

And you were scared, my friend.

I was that too.

“We’re never to go salvaging in the Proving Ground. It’s too close to Yuma. Everyone knows what happened to Yuma, Grandpa.”

The Old Man was drifting now, thinking of his days on the road and the heat of it beneath his huaraches.

“Was there really a bomb, Grandpa?”

“Yes.”

“And you saw it go off?”

“I did.”

“Then how can we go to Yuma for fuel?”

Almost asleep now, in fact probably just, the Old Man called as if from down a well, “The fort is far out in the desert, north of the city. I always told them it would be okay to salvage there. But its name was also Yuma and so they would not go.”

Soon they both slept.

At first light, familiar birds they’d heard all their lives began to sing in the cool before the heat of the day. The Old Man, lying in the tank, looked up through the open hatch and watched the last stars disappear as morning dark turned into a soft blue above them. He slid silently from the tank while his granddaughter slept.

He walked the streets of the deserted village, his home for forty years, as morning washed everything in clear gold.

We should go back today. This was foolish to start with and it is even more foolish to go on. I was still sick and I got carried away. To go all the way with no promise of fuel is …

He came to his shack. He opened his door. Only the bed and the table remained. Everything was covered in dust.

What is expected of us is too much for just an old man and his granddaughter.

When he returned to the tank, his granddaughter was opening a package of food and kicking her feet on the side of the tank as she chewed, which was a thing she did often when she ate.

I cannot remember when I had so much energy to spare that I could kick my feet as I chewed and smile and think of the day as nothing but a waiting adventure or something to be explored.

“Maybe we should go back,” he said standing in front of her.

She continued to chew.

“If we do, then we should call the lady and tell her we’re not coming, Grandpa.”

The Old Man paced the length of the tank looking for something he had no idea of.

“Would you be mad if we returned?”

“No, Grandpa. I understand. But you should call her. Tell her we’re not coming.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

The Old Man climbed back into the turret, donned his helmet, and switched the comm channel button near the hatch over to the radio setting. He pushed the button on the cord and began to speak.

“General Watt.”

A moment later the voice of General Watt was there in his helmet.

“Yes, go ahead.”

“We …”

He paused.

Tell her. Tell her you’ve left and you’re not coming all the way. Tell her you’re giving up now.

“We … are beyond Gila Bend and proceeding toward a fort we know of north of Yuma. We think we might find some fuel there.”

There was a pause.

“Thank you.”

Her voice was tired.

“I wasn’t sure if you were actually coming. I didn’t think … just, thank you. I’m glad Captain Roberts’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain.”

The Old Man lowered his head. Then he raised the mic to his mouth and said, “Save that until we make it there. We still have a long way to go.”

His granddaughter’s face, solemn as she considered the morning’s breakfast, erupted in the smile he loved. She took off her helmet, put down her breakfast, jumped to the ground, and began to do cartwheels.

“So we’ll go to the old fort above Yuma and look for some fuel,” said the Old Man.

“I might be able to alter a satellite to search the Yuma Proving Ground for you. I’ll allocate my resources immediately. I have limited access to the outside world, but we’re not powerless down here,” replied the General.

The Old Man thought of the satellite he had once seen in the night.

They are still up there.

“Anything would be helpful.”

“I understand,” said the voice of General Watt in his helmet. “I can still contact the automated systems of certain facilities. There may be more help along the way.”

“Anything would be appreciated. To tell you the truth …”

Words refused to come.

His granddaughter disappeared off into the place where she had been born and where they had lived their entire lives until recently.

I thought we would always live here. I was happy here.

“I almost felt …” said the Old Man.

“Like it was too much?” the General asked.

“Yes,” whispered the Old Man.

“I understand that too,” said the General.

The Old Man felt tired. Felt like he could let go of a burden he’d never remembered picking up but had been carrying for longer than he could remember.

“I brought my granddaughter with me. She’s just thirteen years old. I was afraid this would be too much for just the two of us.”

“But you will continue?”

“Yes.”

“If you weren’t afraid, I’d be concerned you were some kind of idiot.”

The Old Man watched his granddaughter run from one shack to another, flinging open doors in the morning light, dust motes swirling about her.

“I won’t lie to you,” said General Watt. “What you’re heading into is very dangerous. If you turned off this radio and went home and never answered it again … I would understand. I have children and grandchildren too. But please don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Old Man.

“Don’t be. If you knew my story, you would know that when I was … let’s just say it was never considered possible for me to have children. But I have them and they are mine now. I will do everything I can to save them. Sadly, I have done everything and it isn’t enough to overcome the one problem we’ve faced since the mountain above us collapsed down onto our emergency exit. You sound like a good man. Maybe if there had been more like you back before the war, we wouldn’t be stuck here now.”

“I was only twenty-seven then,” said the Old Man. Static rose like a sudden ocean wave cresting and then falling violently onto the shore.

“I know what I’m asking you to do is beyond … reason. But I have to. You are our last hope. My grandchildren’s last hope.”

The Old Man wiped a sudden hot tear of shame from his eye.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of there,” he said.

Static.

“Thank you,” said General Watt just before a storm of white noise consumed her voice.

Chapter Eleven

The Old Man turned to look at the village one last time as it disappeared on the far horizon behind them. The desert, a sandy plain dotted by dry mesquite growing low and close to the ground, swallowed the village and replaced it with more, an endless-seeming supply of itself.

I will never see my village again.

He let the whispering roar of the turbine overwhelm his thoughts, disintegrate them, and turn them into fuel to be spat out the back of the lumbering tank.

You don’t know that. Good things and adventures might be just ahead.

Like what?

The noise of the tank filled the Old Man’s thoughts as he waited, trying to imagine what good could possibly come of this journey. He could think of nothing.

Rivers, my friend. Rivers that must lead to an ocean.

I cannot remember when I last saw a river. A river—to be on a raft and to float and to fish … that would be heaven. There are no rivers in the desert. Only riverbeds.

Maybe we will find a river and we can make a raft, my friend. She would like that.

“Grandpa,” came her high voice over the intercom as they jounced off-road. The interstate was damaged and the outermost remains of the Great Wreck were beginning to clog the highway.

I wonder if my car is still here.

Of course it is, where would it have gone?

True.

Before him the Great Wreck, as they’d called it all those years, lay spreading in every direction. In the distance he could see where the two broken semis that had collided and overturned formed the epicenter. From there rusting cargo vans and sinking station wagons had tumbled away down the road or off into the nearby desert, torn to pieces by the remorseless forces of fearful momentum meeting sudden obstacles. Other cars, hundreds of others, had driven off into the thick sand, becoming stuck as still more and more vehicles, unseen from the Old Man’s vantage point, had continued to hurtle themselves into the wall of destruction as they fled the nuclear fireball over Yuma. On that last long-ago day everything had been smoke and screams and rending metal and people rushing away to the east and the fireball in the west where Yuma had once been. Now it was quiet and rusty and sinking year by year into the soft piles of sand that were dunes marching east.

“Yes?”

“Why did you change your mind about going back?”

The Old Man maneuvered the left stick to avoid a rusting station wagon that had fallen backward off the road. The tank clipped the front end and crushed it before the Old Man could adjust their direction.

“Because they need our help and because we must always help one another.”

“Even strangers, Grandpa?”

But the Old Man did not answer as he edged the tank closer to the massive destruction of the Great Wreck.

“Let’s stretch our legs for a moment and see how we might get around all these old cars and trucks.”

They walked a ways from the rumbling tank, heading toward the massive wall of rusting and smashed vehicles that had piled up just beyond the last valley.

It’s like coming home … but that doesn’t seem right does it?

No, it doesn’t. But it all began here. Here was the day after. After what I had once been or was becoming. I can’t even remember now. But it was here on that last day when my car died.

“What happened here, Grandpa?”

“Most of the people you know in the village, we all met here on the day of the bombs.”

“Did you plan to meet? Like did you know one another before the world ended?”

Before the world ended. That must seem like a strange phrase to her. Strange because the world has gone on.

“No. We were just all here on that day. Or we met on the one that followed as we walked east away from the bombs.”

“What was it like?”

The Old Man looked at the two semis around which most of the wreckage centered.

I remember all of us getting out of our cars, trapped by the wreck, turning to see the mushroom cloud rising in the distance over Yuma behind us. I remember a woman screaming and then crying. Men were shouting.

“There was ash and dust. Fires on the horizons. Everyone was afraid.”

Like we’d done something wrong. Broken something that could never be replaced. Committed an unpardonable crime.

“Were you afraid, Grandpa?”

“I can’t remember.”

She laughed.

He took out the map he’d found in the library.

“We can’t go into Yuma. It’s too hot from the bomb I saw go off there. But if we cut through those plains off to the north, we should pick up the old road heading to the Fort. I found that radio along the road leading there.”

“Can I drive?”

“Not yet, you’re still too small.”

“There’s another compartment in front of the tank with a couch where you lie down with a handlebar like a motorcycle. I sat in it, Grandpa.”

“Could you reach the pedals?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“Soon, though. Soon.”

“Yes, soon.”

Rusting cars, bashed and torn, crushed by careening fear-driven freight-laden semis with drivers who had watched the world end in their rearview mirrors, remained, spreading across the blistered road.

Into the desert.

Underneath the sand.

Rusting destruction piled long ago during the end of the world.

Chapter Twelve

“This is General Watt calling.”

“We’re here,” said the Old Man into his mic after a moment of fumbling with the communications system.

“I have some good news,” she said as a static squall crested and then was gone.

The Old Man stopped the tank.

They were on a small rise far out in the bowl of the desert. Somewhere within all the brown dust ahead lay the Proving Ground, the military base north of Yuma the villagers had avoided simply because it shared the same name of another place they had all seen destroyed.

I feel I don’t know everything I need to know about what we’re doing. But what am I supposed to ask her? This person, this General, she could be keeping the truth from me. And the others, Pancho, they could have been right all along.

For now, you must play the game according to its rules, my friend.

Maybe I should turn back.

“Our installation keeps a record of all the communications we tracked before the nets went completely offline. I’ve conducted a data search and found that a convoy carrying JP-9 arrived in the Yuma Proving Ground a week before the city of Yuma was destroyed. There is a chance that you may find the remains of that convoy somewhere within the facility.”

“Would this JP-9 be usable? It’s been forty years,” asked the Old Man.

“If it still exists, then theoretically, yes. JP-9 was a prototype fuel rushed into production in the lead-up to the war. The Defense Department officials foresaw the need for a long-shelf-life fuel replacement and ordered as much of it as they were able to in the months prior to the war. There were some concerns over its use, but at this stage, it might be your only option. Unless someone took the time to use fuel stabilizers and conduct an additive removal process, the chances of finding a completely airtight fuel source are highly improbable. Your only other option will be clean diesel or kerosene. Again, these are not optimal sources, but the M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank uses a multifuel vehicle system.”

“What will these tankers look like?”

“They resemble standard military fuel transports and there should be twelve of them. JP-9 had a projected eighty-year shelf life. Though this was never tested, reports indicate the lifespan was achievable.”

Our whole journey depends on the word “reports.”

“All right then, we’ll try and find the tankers.”

The Old Man listened to the tank, letting the massive turbine idle in its screaming high-pitched drone as he scanned the horizon once more with his binoculars.

There is no sign of the Proving Ground. We are nearing the end of our fuel. Soon, I’ll have to pump our two fifty-gallon drums.

“Grandpa, below that mountain there’s a sign sticking out of the ground. Maybe we should go and see what’s written on it?”

It’s a good thing she has come with me; I never would’ve seen that sign.

“I can’t see the sign,” said the Old Man. “Where is it?”

“See that mountain, the low one off to our left that’s all shadowy and bumpy and rocky?”

“Yes.”

“Right in there.”

The Old Man found the sign through his binoculars but it was still too far away to read what, if anything at all, was still written upon it.

He took hold of the controls, pressed his foot onto the pedal slightly, and watched the terrain ahead. I have to keep the tank on the firmest ground. We cannot get stuck. If we do, there is no way to rescue the tank that I can think of right now.

Then maybe you will think of a way when you need to, my friend. Try not to worry about what has not happened to you. And may never happen at all.

“How did you see the sign?”

“I can make this target thing bigger with a dial on the side of it.”

“I don’t think we should touch those buttons. We don’t want to make the gun go off.”

“It also sees in the dark if you turn this knob,” she continued.

“You’re very smart. But we must be careful. We don’t know everything yet. Still, you’re very smart and I am proud of you. Much smarter than me.”

When they reached the sign, the Old Man got down off the tank as his granddaughter watched him from the hatch she’d learned to open on the side of the tank. Again a new thing she understood about the tank and which he hadn’t yet figured out.

The sign was sand scoured, and what words had once been written upon it were gone. But the Old Man could feel the hard remains of a road buried beneath the drifting sand under his boots. He took out his map and began to look around.

The Proving Ground must be that way. On the map they are north of Yuma.

There were people all alongside the highway that day, camped out, hoping to get to the airport, onto a plane, and flee. I remember the rumor that airplanes were waiting to take us all somewhere safe.

I remember wanting to believe the rumor was true, which is the terrible thing about rumors.

In his mind he could see Air Force One floating across the sky. Black smoke trailed from one of its engines, coming in to land one last time.

That was a long time ago.

Concentrate! That last day doesn’t have anything to do with today. Today you must find these trucks that contain the fuel. If you don’t find them, then you have failed.

The Old Man climbed back into the tank and checked the dosimeter.

The needle is still within the green, so we must be far enough away from Yuma to avoid its radiation.

Are you asking or hoping, my friend? Because all your hoping and asking depends on whether the weather compass that is your dosimeter still works.

They followed the mostly buried road as best they could. As it rounded the craggy hill his granddaughter had called a mountain, ahead of them ran the fading, spider silk line of a highway, and off in the distance, the Old Man could see buildings.

“Can you see those building through the target scope?” asked the Old Man.

“Gimme a second, Grandpa.”

Suddenly the turret began to rotate as the gun barrel came to rest on the far horizon.

In every moment she figures out some new thing.

“Yes, they’re brown and dirty. Low and flat.”

“Do you see the tankers we’re looking for?”

After a moment she said, “No. They’re not there.”

The Old Man waited, watching the tiny buildings shimmer in the heat of the fading afternoon.

“Do you see any people?”

“No. There’s no one there.”

The needle in the fuel gauge hovered just above empty when the Old Man finally shut down the tank amid the silent buildings being swallowed by the first low dunes of sand.

If we don’t find these fuel tankers soon, I’ll need to pump the drums and head back to Tucson.

He took his crowbar and exited the hatch stiffly, his granddaughter already lowering herself down onto the intersection they’d stopped in.

Flat, dust-brown uniform buildings from a different era stretched off in orderly lines down quiet, sand-swept streets. Murky windows hid what lay within. The air was dry and hot.

Signs and street markings had been scoured to meaninglessness. The outlines of once-lawns were everywhere. Within their borders, brown weeds withered under the final waves of the day’s heat.

“Hello,” the Old Man called out into the silence.

There was no reply and his voice was swallowed by the soft quiet of the dunes.

“It’s spooky, Grandpa. I don’t think anyone has been here for a long time.”

They searched the small streets for any sign of the tankers. But there weren’t any vehicles, of any kind.

Inside buildings they found dust-covered museums of life as it had once been. Coffee mugs forever waiting to be picked up lay next to piles of yellowed and desiccating paperwork on dry desks that felt sapped of any sturdiness they’d once possessed.

When the Old Man picked up a newspaper it came apart, and he was left holding only a few feathery scraps. He tried to read the paperwork without touching it. But anything meaningful was lost in a haze of military jargon that he could not understand. He scanned for the words “fuel” or “tankers.”

There is no mention of either.

Outside, the day was turning to orange as the sun sank into the dusty west. Gray shadows threw themselves away from the flat military buildings. A light breeze came and shifted the sand a little closer to the surrendering outpost.

“So what do we do now, Grandpa?”

The Old Man stood in front of the largest building.

Probably the headquarters. They picked an idiot. They picked an idiot to come and rescue them. Remember the curse of the hot radio.

The Old Man walked back to the tank. He felt stupid and useless.

It isn’t my fault the tankers aren’t here.

“We’ll camp outside tonight. It seems safe enough. In the morning, maybe we’ll have a new idea.”

“We’re not giving up, are we, Grandpa?”

“No, we won’t give up.”

She seemed relieved and soon she was back in the tank handing out their bags and sleeping gear for the night.

“Can we have a fire?”

“Yes.”

“A story?”

“Yes, of course.”

“A ghost story?”

“I don’t know any.”

“I do.”

“I don’t like them before I go to sleep.”

“Oh, Grandpa.” She snorted and laughed.

Later, when their gear was out and they’d made camp in front of the ancient headquarters building, clearing a space along the broad sidewalk that ran through the ghost of the once-lawn, she said, “This is the best salvage trip ever, Grandpa.”

“But we haven’t salvaged anything yet.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not the best.”

“Yes, you’re right, it is the best.”

They ate food as the stars began to appear, as the sky turned from orange to purple, then from purple to deep blue.

Night.

The Old Man watched, listening to his granddaughter talk about the tank. He watched for the satellite above. The one that General Watt was using to talk to them.

The satellites are still up there crossing the sky.

Like me crossing this land.

Which is something, if you think about it.

In the night, long after she had drifted to sleep listening to him tell about the time he had seen the fox walking down the old highway, he awoke. The fire was low. There is nothing left to burn but the weeds of this old lawn. Unless I want to pull the boards off these buildings, but the sound would wake her. Besides, the night is warm enough.

The Old Man rose.

Because the ground is too hard and I need to pee. And also because I am not sleeping.

Tomorrow we will have to turn back. Without fuel, it’s just not possible to make it all the way. The tankers were most likely in Yuma, at the airport, when the bomb went off. Now, they are gone.

He tried to remember if he’d seen any such vehicles forty years ago on the last hot day of his country.

I can’t remember. She will be disappointed.

He turned and crossed the ancient outline of the weed-choked lawn, hearing the dry crunch beneath his feet.

Why would the Army have lawns in the desert?

I guess that was the way the military did things. They imposed order and rules regardless of the situation and location.

They were crazy to try to grow grass in the desert.

But they did. As long as they had water they must’ve grown these lawns. The world was crazy then.

We were all crazy.

And then he knew where he would find fuel. Or at least he hoped to. Excited, he drifted back to sleep for what remained of the night as though he had found a missing puzzle piece or remembered something good that would happen. Excited that he would not disappoint her. Excited that the best salvage trip ever might go on for at least one more day.

The best ever.

In the morning they found where the military kept its gardening equipment. Ancient rakes, rusty shovels and time frozen hedge trimmers. Dust-choked oily lawnmowers forever resting in dress-right-dress formation waited at the back of a large dark hangar. And off to one side, an immense storage tank of military-grade kerosene.

The Old Man drew off a little of the kerosene in a coffee mug he’d found in an office where clipboards hung neatly on the wall. He took it back outside as his granddaughter followed with questions, unsure of his game.

“Will it make the tank go, Grandpa?”

“If it’s still good, it might.”

The Old Man took a match from his pocket. He had loaded up on matches for this trip, remembering the last three matches inside the sewers beneath the hangar the wolves had chased him into. He struck the match and dropped it into the fuel. It caught and made a heavy chemical smell erupt in gray waves of smoke.

They rode the lumbering tank away, leaving the dry and dusty military post to itself and the years that must consume it. Off to the west, sand dunes rose in the afternoon heat.

Soon the sand dunes will arrive here as they march across the desert. Then they will cover this place and the kerosene that still remains inside that big storage tank.

But I will be gone by then.

Now we must hope there will be other fuel sources along the road. We may not find our river, my friend, but in a way the road is like that.

And what ocean will it lead to?

That night, the Old Man dreamed that he and Santiago were on a wide sea, under a hot sun, watching the flying fish leap from the water. Waiting for the big fish they would catch.

Chapter Thirteen

Ahead we will find places I once knew long ago and have forgotten since. And I can only imagine what time and the bombs have done to them. I can only imagine that my past memories have changed to present nightmares.

Yes, my friend.

The tank trundled down a long, dirty, brown slope. In the distance they could see a strand of Highway 10 cutting the landscape in two.

It too is still there.

His granddaughter, ahead in the separate compartment containing the driver’s couch, steered the tank across the crumbling dirt slope. Often he needed to remind her to slow down.

I feel like we’ve gone off the edge of something. The edge of everything we’ve ever known. Did you feel that way, Santiago, as you pulled at the oars farther and farther out into the gulf, watching the color of the water deepen until it was dark and not blue? Did you too feel like you were going off the edge of something?

And yet I knew it all once and long ago.

Memories of the cities of the West began to come and stand around the Old Man like mourners near an open grave.

You must forget all this melancholy and think only of the facts. You have enough fuel to reach China Lake. If you don’t find fuel there, then crossing Death Valley into Area 51, will be impossible. You must follow this road until you come to an old tactical outpost set up alongside the highway. General Watt told us we would find it there.

“Grandpa, there’s someone on the road ahead.”

The Old Man scanned the horizon.

Far to their right, in the direction they must go, he could see the dark silhouette of a human.

It stood, unmoving in the late heat of the day.

The Old Man continued to watch the unmoving man-shaped shadow far down the cracked road as the tank heaved itself up onto the old highway. His granddaughter maneuvered the tank to point west at his instruction. A mile off, the lone figure remained unmoving beside the road they would follow.

I wish I knew how to work these optics like she has already learned to.

“Can you tell me what he looks like?” he asked her.

He knew she would be using her viewfinder.

“He’s tall,” she said after a moment. “Long dirty hair. Maybe a salvager, but not like anyone from our village. Oh, and he has a hat.”

His mind stayed on the words “Not like anyone from our village.”

The Old Man felt a cold river of fear sweep through him.

“Out there.”

And …

Too many “Done” things.

“Let’s move forward. But don’t stop unless I tell you to, okay?”

“Okay.”

I am afraid of this stranger on the road. Why?

We know why, my friend; it’s just that we’re not always willing to be honest with ourselves when we must. It is better to admit that you are afraid now than to pretend you are not.

The dark man-shadow, before the setting sun, seemed to lean toward them and out into the blistered highway as they approached. As they closed the distance between them the Old Man saw the shadow revealed. Saw him clearly as one might see something dead beside the road and want to look away in that passing instant of speed. His face was gaunt. Sun stretched by time and all the years since the end of the world. All the years on the road.

Worn rawhide boots. Faded dusty pants. A long coat made of license plates stitched together. A thick staff he leaned on heavily, though his frame was spare. Two small skulls dangled from its topmost tip. He wore a faded wide and weak-brimmed hat under which shining hawk-like eyes watched the Old Man. Had watched since they’d first appeared, the Old Man was sure of that.

He’s a killer.

The Old Man could feel the slightest decrease in their acceleration.

“No!” he shouted into his mic. “Keep going!”

The tank lurched forward, and as they hurtled past the Roadside Killer, the vessel of all things unclean, the gaunt man raised one bony arm from the sleeve of his license-plate mail coat and extended a claw-like hand that might have been a plea.

The Old Man knew his granddaughter would be staring, wide-eyed, as they raced past, throwing grit and gravel, drawing up the road behind them.

Do not look back.

The Old Man rose in the hatch, watching the highway ahead.

“Why didn’t we stop, Grandpa? He looked like he needed help.”

Do not look back.

“Grandpa?”

“Because,” said the Old Man after a moment. “Because we must help those inside the bunker.”

It was later, in the early evening, beyond a fallen collection of wind-shattered buildings the map once marked as the town of Quartzite, where they buttoned up the tank for the night. In the dark they’d settled into their bags, feeling the tank sway in the thundering wind that had risen up out of nowhere late that afternoon.

“Why didn’t we help him, Grandpa?”

The Old Man listened to the sand strike the sides of the tank and thought of some acid they’d once drained from a car battery to weaken the lock on a tractor trailer they’d salvaged.

The wind sounds like acid tonight.

“Not everyone needs our help.”

“But some people, the people inside General Watt’s bunker, do?”

“Yes, they do.”

And I wonder if they truly do. How do I know this isn’t some game, a complex game, to draw us all into a trap?

You don’t know, my friend.

“How did you know the man today didn’t really need our help?”

“I just did.”

And how will I teach you to know such things when I am gone?

“So we only help those who really need our help, Grandpa?”

“Yes. Only those whom we can tell really need our help.”

I will have to think of a better way to teach her to know how and when to help, but not tonight. I cannot think of a way tonight.

Soon she was asleep and the Old Man lay awake for a long time listening to the sand dissolving the tank, and when he slept he dreamed of the cities of the West and the stranger beside the road and serial killers and empty diners where there was no food anymore.

Chapter Fourteen

“You’re just two thousand meters away from the last known location of the tactical command post.” General Watt’s transmission was breaking up within intermittent bouts of white noise. “I have not been able to get a satellite with a working camera over the location. There are only a few operating satellites remaining, otherwise I might have been able to give you better data regarding the container’s location.”

They were passing through a wide sprawl of ancient warehouses that rose up like giant monoliths from the desert floor surrounding Barstow.

“What will this container look like?” asked the Old Man, hoping General Watt’s transmission would be understood.

“Green …” Static. “Size of a box …”

The Old Man asked the General to repeat the description, but the electronic snowstorm he listened within contained no reply. The satellite she had been bouncing the transmission off had finally disappeared far over the western horizon. The General had told them she wouldn’t be able to reach them again for another twelve hours.

The Old Man watched the silent place of massive box-like buildings. From this distance they seemed little more than dirty tombstones, but as his granddaughter maneuvered the tank up the road, he could see the telltale signs of time and wind. Metal strips had been ripped away in sections, as if peeled from the superstructure of the buildings. A place like this would have been an obvious choice for salvagers. But this is California. Everyone fled California when all the big cities had been hit. L.A. before I’d even left. San Diego a day later. But there was no sign of the box General Watt said they must find.

And what is in this box?

The Old Man shut down the tank.

They were exactly where General Watt had said they would find the tactical command post. And somewhere nearby would be the container, but there was nothing. No command post.

Dusty, wide alleyways led between the ancient warehouses.

If it was a small box, what would’ve prevented someone from merely carrying it away?

Then it must be a big box, my friend.

“Maybe it’s in one these buildings, Grandpa.”

They left the tank, feeling the increasing heat of the day rise from the ancient pavement of the loading docks.

Inside they found darkness through which dusty shafts of orange light shot from torn places in the superstructure. The Old Man clutched his crowbar tightly, stepping ahead of his granddaughter. There is a story here. A story of salvage. If you tell the story, you’ll find the salvage. He waited, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. You know part of the story. The General told you that part.

The days of the bombs had begun. Los Angeles was gone. But the Chinese, which was news to me because that must have happened after Yuma, were invading the western United States. The military, the Third Armored Division, or so General Watt said, staged its forces here in the deserts of Southern California. Supplies were air-dropped in as well as tanks and soldiers. They would counterattack the Chinese on American soil.

Imagine that.

At least they were supposed to have. But what happened in those days of bombs and EMPs and the rumors that spread like a supervirus is not clearly known and all the General can tell me is what was known. What was known before the jury-rigged, EMP-savaged communications networks that were able to route traffic through the bunker at Cheyenne Mountain collapsed. What was known before everything went dark.

And after?

The success of the counter-attack?

The tanks and soldiers?

The Chinese?

During those first days as we walked east, away from the Great Wreck, I had thought the world had ended. But in truth we knew so little of the story because who really knew everything that was going on and how could they tell us as we carried our possessions in our hands along the highway. The world had gone on ending long after we thought it was dead.

Nothing is known clearly now, and it is no longer important on this hot day forty years later.

The important matter for today is to find a container that was air-dropped and went wide of the landing zone as soldiers and tanks readied themselves to meet the enemy. The container’s GPS locator broadcast for years. But even that fading signal ended a long time ago.

“What’s inside?” the Old Man had asked General Watt.

“I’ll need to explain that later. I only have a limited time to communicate with you before the satellite I’m currently hijacking disappears over the Pacific horizon. Find the container and get it open. I’ll explain what you’ll need to do once you’ve obtained the supplies.”

Why do I have the feeling bad news has made an appointment?

Because you are cautious, my friend. And right now is the time to be cautious. So if you are cautious, you are doing well.

If we were on the boat I dreamed of last night, Santiago, seeing the flying fish jump, watching our lines, waiting for the big fish that was like a monster to come up from the deep to fight him together, you would say such things to me when my confidence was low.

Confidence can work both ways, my friend.

Yes, there is that.

That is not important now. Right now you need to find this box, my friend. Later you can decide how you feel about the bad news that you fear might be inside.

There is a story here also. A story of salvage.

The Old Man searches the gloom of the warehouse and sees very little. He smells wood smoke and decay from long ago.

Dead animals. Dried blood. Huddled bodies. Decay.

“Go to the tank, please, and bring me back the flashlight,” he whispers to his granddaughter.

When she returns, he scans the interior of the warehouse with the beam. Its light is weak and barely penetrates the dark. All batteries are old now in these many years after the bombs.

They walk forward into the gloom. She has brought a flashlight for herself also and he watches her beam move with energy, like her, never staying in any one place for too long, also like her. His beam is slow and searching. He finds the remains of the campfire in the center of the warehouse before she does. It was a large fire.

Around it are storage racks and iron beams, arranged as though many might sit and watch the fire through long winter nights that must have seemed unending and as though the entire world was frozen forever.

I know those nights.

I know those fire-watching nights.

I am always hungry when I think back on them and the howling wind that was constant.

You were very hungry then.

The whole world must have been hungry.

But there is no box here.

They search the building, even shining their lights into the high recesses of the fractured roof.

There is nothing.

In the next building, the centermost of the three, they find the remains of the same style bonfire, and she, his granddaughter, on the farthest wall, at the back of the massive warehouse, finds the drawings.

Taken in parts they are merely a collection of scribblings.

Stick figure people. A Man-Wolf. Slant-Eyed Invaders waving guns. Mushroom clouds. Stick figure people who wear the wide-brimmed hat. Like that Roadside Killer. Stick figure people with spikes that come from the tops of their misshapen heads. Many dead Spike Heads. The bonfire. The Hat People stare into it.

“Who are they, Grandpa?”

Her voice startles him in the gloom beyond the cone of light he stares into, trying to know the meanings of these scribblings.

“I don’t know.”

He follows the drawings from left to right and finds no mention of the container.

He finds they are a people. A people who wore hats like the one the Roadside Killer wore. A people surrounded by decay who waited through the long winter after the bombs and stared into fire.

A people like his village. The same and different.

Mushroom clouds.

The Man-Wolf leads them all away.

Leads them toward the Slant-Eyed Invaders who wave guns and trample over other stick figures beneath their stick feet.

“I don’t know,” he says again, his voice swallowed within the quiet.

And he realizes he is all alone.

“Where are you?” he calls out.

From high above he hears her voice.

“I found a ladder, Grandpa.” She is straining to pull herself up. “If it leads to the roof, I can look around and see where the box is.”

He shines his light about and can see nothing of her.

His mind thinks only of rusted metal and snapping bolts that pull away from crumbling walls with a dusty smuph.

And falling.

A moment later he hears metal banging on metal and knows it to be the sound of a crowbar smashing against a door. The sound is a familiar cadence to him and reminds him for a moment of the comforts one finds in what one does. The music of salvage.

He shines his light high into the rafters and finds her against the ceiling.

She is so small.

She is so high up.

I regret all of this.

Her crowbar gives that final smash he knows so well, when the wielder knows what must give way will give way with the next strike, and a frame of light shoots down within the darkness, illuminating the Old Man.

“I’m through, Grandpa!”

No one will ever stop you will they?

“I’m going up, Grandpa.”

Please be safe!

A few minutes later, the longest minutes of the Old Man’s life, he can hear her voice shouting down into the darkness in which he stands.

“I see it, Grandpa! It’s on the roof of another building. It’s very big.”

Later, after her descent, in which he can think of nothing but her falling and knowing he will try to catch her and knowing further that both his arms will be broken and that it doesn’t matter as long as he saves her so he must catch her, they climb again onto the roof of the other building.

The yawning blue sky burns above their heads as they crawl out onto the wide hot roof.

The roof is bigger than a football field.

Along a far edge, the container, its parachute little more than scrappy silk rags, sinks into the roof.

The Old Man approaches cautiously, feeling the thinness of the roof beneath his feet. He waves for her to stand back and let him go on alone.

When she obeys, he proceeds, one cautious foot after the other, ready to fling himself backward onto the burning floor of the roof.

At the container he finds the heavy lock.

He knows this kind of lock. He has broken it many times and if one knows how to use a crowbar, the design of the container and the position of the lock will do most of the work.

The Old Man knows.

Forgetting the precarious and illusory roof, thinking only of salvage, blinded by salvage, he breaks the lock.

The doors swing open on a rusty bass note groan.

The Old Man smells the thick scent of cardboard.

Inside, stacked to the ceiling of the container are thin boxes, one lying atop another, long and flat.

He takes hold of the topmost and drags it away from the container onto the roof and back a bit where he feels it will be safer to stand.

Bending over the box he reads, seeing his granddaughter’s little girl shadow lengthen next to his, as the day turns past noon. He reads the words the military once printed on these long flat boxes.

“Radiation Shielding Kit, M-1 Abrams MK-3, 1 ea.”

Chapter Fifteen

“By the time communication with the outside world had completely failed,” explained General Watt after they’d re-established contact, “fourteen military-grade nuclear weapons had already been used within Colorado alone. I determined that it would be beneficial to you and your team to obtain a shielding kit in order to protect you, once you enter Colorado.”

The Old Man watched the radio, thinking.

He held the mic in his trembling fingers, his weathered thumb as far away as possible from the transmit button.

“We have no idea …” General Watt paused, her voice tired. “I have no idea how bad things are above. But I wanted you to have some protection. Just in case. That’s the reason I directed you to obtain the Radiation Shielding Kit.”

“And was that also the reason you didn’t tell us what we were going to find until we found it?”

You know the reason, my friend. You are angry at someone because they lied to you in order to save their life.

I am angry because …

Because of that, my friend. Because of that, and nothing more.

“Is there anything else you’re not telling us, General?” asked the Old Man.

“No,” replied General Watt. “There is nothing. I know very little beyond our limited access to a failing satellite network. In truth …”

Pause.

Static.

The Old Man saw the satellite in his mind, aging, drifting steadily out over the Pacific horizon once more.

“The truth, General.”

“Call me Natalie.”

“The truth, Natalie,” said the Old Man softening his tone.

“The truth is, I don’t even know if this plan will work. It is merely our last chance. I didn’t want to tell you about the Radiation Shielding Kit because I estimated that you might not want to become involved if you knew there was a possibility of being exposed to high levels of radiation. Though I have no contact with those on the surface, I hypothesize that a fear of radiation poisoning has evolved into a healthy respect, if not outright avoidance policy, among postwar communities.”

Sometimes she sounds so detached. As if the world is little more than mathematical chances and equations that must be solved so that an answer can be found.

And hoped for, my friend. After so many years of living underground, what else might she have except some numbers that give her hope?

And if I know she is lying to me, why are we continuing down this road?

Because you don’t know if she is lying to you.

“All right, General,” said the Old Man. “I’m sorry. Thank you for trying to protect us.”

I should turn back now. We …

“Natalie.”

“Natalie,” agreed the Old Man.

Natalie.

“The shielding kit will protect you through most of southern Colorado. All you have to do is get close to the collapsed backdoor entrance and then aim the Laser Target Designator at the back of the mountain. We’ll do the rest.”

The rest.

Do I want to know what the rest is? Not today. There has been too much already for just today.

That is the love of letting things go for now.

The day that follows is hot and dusty.

They pass through the crumbling remains of eastern Southern California.

All day long they maneuver through scattered debris, time-frozen traffic jams, and long-collapsed overpasses while the Old Man scans the western horizon.

I was raised over there, beyond those mountains that stand in the way, near the sea. Like you, Santiago.

I have not thought of those places since the bombs. Which is not true.

In the days after, I thought of them all the time.

And then you married your wife and forgot them, my friend.

Yes. There was the work of salvage and you had to concentrate to dig out its story. There was no time for where I had come from. There was no time to think of where I could never go again. There was salvage. My wife. Our shack. My son. His family. My granddaughter. They were my salvage and they replaced all those burned-up places that were gone.

“Grandpa, how will we know where the 395 is?”

I thought only of them, my new family, in the days that followed the bombs.

“Roads lead to roads,” he said. “If we follow this big road, we will find another road. In time we will find this little highway once called the 395.”

The dull hum of the tank’s communications system.

“Some always leads to more, right, Grandpa?”

“Right.”

Some always leads to more.

That night they camp near the off-ramp at the intersection where the big highway spends itself into the untouchable west and the little ribbon of road the map names the 395 drops off into the lowest places of the earth. Death Valley.

They eat rations heated in the Old Man’s blue percolator and sit around a campfire made of ancient wood pulled from the wreckage of a fallen house built long before the bombs and well before the science that would reveal their terribleness.

Yucca trees, spiky and dark, alien against the fading light, surround them and the silent tank.

The Old Man thinks of the fuel gauge and its needle just below the halfway point.

The drums atop the tank are empty.

If you think all night you will not sleep, my friend.

Natalie says there will be fuel, of a sort, in China Lake.

General Watt.

Natalie.

She sounds old. Like me. “Grandpa, why do they call it the Death Valley?”

She has been quiet for most of the afternoon. Her questions have been few, as though the place that makes all her questions is overwhelmed by the road and our adventure upon it.

Maybe the world is bigger than she ever imagined, my friend.

“It was called Death Valley even before I was born.”

“So not because of the bombs?”

“No. When people first crossed this country I guess they didn’t like Death Valley, so they chose a bad name for it.”

“Did everyone avoid it?”

The Old Man tries to remember.

Instead, he remembers other things.

Ice cream.

A place he worked at.

Steam.

The beach.

“No, I remember people went there on vacation. It was a place people needed to go and see what was there.”

She watches the fire.

He can see each question forming deep within her.

I can almost snatch them out of the air above her head.

Tonight, when I sleep, I would like to really sleep. Only sleep, and no nightmares.

Especially the one nightmare.

Yes.

The one in which she is calling you as you die, as you abandon her.

As you fall.

As you leave, my friend.

Yes. That one.

No, Grandpa, I need you.

Yes.

“Will it be dangerous there?” she asks.

The Old Man searches the night for one of Natalie’s satellites.

“No. No more than any other place we have been.”

“I’m not afraid, Grandpa. Just the name, it’s a little scary.”

“Yes. Just a little.”

She laughs.

I know what it is like to be afraid of a name and also a nameless thing. My sleeping nightmare is like Death Valley to her.

“Since we might be the first people to cross Death Valley in a long time, we could give it a new name. One that isn’t so scary.”

She stops chewing and he watches the machine inside her turn. The machine that makes an endless supply of questions. The gears and cogs that labor constantly so that she becomes who she will become in each moment and the next.

Sometimes she is so exact.

It might be against her rules to change the name.

To change the game.

No, Grandpa. I need you.

I would change that if I could.

“What could we call it?” she asks.

She is willing to rewrite history. Willing to make something new. Willing to change the rules of the game.

“I don’t know. I guess … when we get there we could see what we think of it and then come up with a new name. What do you say about that?”

They both hear a bat crossing the lonely desert, flying up the desolate highway, beating its leathery wings in the twilight.

Tomorrow we will follow him beyond those rocks and down into the desert at the bottom of the world.

“I would like that, Grandpa. Yes.”

In the dark, the Old Man is falling into even darker depths.

I was falling.

No, Grandpa. I need you.

Yes.

The nightmare.

If only I could change it like we’re going to change the name of Death Valley.

The Old Man drinks cold water from his canteen.

His granddaughter sleeps, her face peaceful.

No, Grandpa. I need you.

The Old Man lies back and considers the night above, though his mind is really thinking of, and trying to forget, the nightmare all at once.

I wish I were free of it.

I wish I could change the rules of its game.

If she called me by another name, then the nightmare wouldn’t frighten me anymore. Then, I would remember in the dream that she calls me by another name and I could hold on to that.

And thinking of names, his eyes close and the sky above marches on and turns toward dawn.

Chapter Sixteen

The morning sky is a clean, almost electric bright and burning blue. The desert is wide, stretching toward the east and the north. Small rocky hills loom alongside the road.

They have finished their breakfast and make ready to leave.

The Old Man starts the auxiliary power unit and a moment later, the tank. He watches the needles and gauges.

What could I do if there was a problem with any one of them?

Natalie might know something.

We should get as close to Death Valley as we can today. Then cross it tomorrow.

He watches his granddaughter lower herself into the driver’s seat. She smiles and waves from underneath the oversize helmet and a moment later her high soprano voice is in his ear.

“Can I drive today, Grandpa?”

“Stay on the road and when we come to an obstacle, like a burned-up car or a truck that has flipped across the lanes, stop and I’ll tell you which way to go around, okay?”

“Okay, Grandpa.”

They cross onto the highway and she pivots the tank left and toward the north. She overcorrects and for a moment they are off-road.

“Sorry, Grandpa!”

“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”

She gets them back on the road and the tank bumps forward with a sudden burst of acceleration as she adjusts her grip.

“Slow and steady,” he reminds her.

“I know, Grandpa.”

They drive for a while, crossing through a high desert town whose wounded windows gape dully out on the dry, brown landscape and prickly stunted yuccas as peeling paint seems to fall away in the sudden morning breeze of the passing tank.

“Are you excited about finding a new name for the valley we’ll cross tomorrow?”

She doesn’t reply for a moment as the tank skirts around a twisted tractor trailer flipped across the road long ago. Inside, the Old Man can see bleached and cracked bones within the driver’s cab.

“Yes, I am.”

The dull hum of the communications system fills the space between their words. Each time they speak, they sound suddenly close to each other.

“If you were going to give me a new name, what would it be?”

The dull hum.

Wheels turning.

“Why would I do that, Grandpa?”

Why would you indeed?

Because I am frightened that I might die and leave you abandoned out here, all alone.

Because a nightmare torments me and calls me by the same name you do.

Because I am trying to change the rules of the game.

And.

Because I love you.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says the Old Man. “Sometimes ‘Grandpa’ makes me feels old.”

“But that’s who you are. You’re Grandpa!”

Silence.

If we can change the name of a valley, can we change my name?

“I don’t know,” he hears her say. “You’re not so old, Grandpa.”

“I know.”

“But I guess … I guess if you wanted to be something else, I could call you … Poppa, maybe?”

I like that.

If I were Poppa, then when I was stuck in the nightmare, I could remember my new name.

And then I would remember it is just a nightmare, and that all I need to do is wake up.

I don’t ever want to be anything else but Poppa.

“I like Poppa. It sounds young. Like I’m full of beans.”

Silence.

They start up the grade that climbs into rocky wastes beyond the fallen buildings of the little town that once was and is now no more.

Where did all the people go? To our west is the Central Valley, Bakersfield, and the Grapevine. I remember passing by those fields on long highways. Long drives are some of my first memories. We had family in Northern California.

Fried chicken.

Summer corn.

White gravy with pepper.

Sweet tea.

The Kern River.

There was a song about the Kern River. My father always sang it when he thought of home. When he found himself in places far away, places where the big jets he flew had taken him. Places not home.

“Poppa?”

The Old Man felt the heat of those long-gone kitchens and early Saturday evenings when the Sacramento Delta breeze came up through the screen doors. Evenings that promised such things would always remain so.

How did they promise?

The Old Man thought.

Because when you are young and in that moment of food and family and time, you cannot imagine things might ever be different.

Or even gone someday.

“Poppa!”

That’s me. I’m Poppa now.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Just practicing. You need to practice too if you’re going to be Poppa now.”

“Okay. I’ll be ready next time.”

“Okay, Grandp—I mean … okay, Poppa.”

Fried chicken.

Saturday dinners.

The heat of the oven.

The Kern River.

Poppa.

The day was at its brutal zenith when they saw the Boy crawling out of the cracked, parched hardpan toward the road. Their road. Dragging himself forward. Dragging himself through the wide stretch of dust and heat that swallowed the horizon.

“Poppa, what do we do?”

She has taken to Poppa. She’s smarter and faster than anyone I ever knew.

“Poppa!”

I don’t want to stop and help this roadside killer.

He thought of the drawings inside the warehouses.

He thought of what the world had become.

He thought of the Horde.

The Roadside Killer.

But you told her, ‘The world has got to become a better place.’

“We’ll stop and see what this person needs.”

The Old Man grabbed his crowbar from its place inside the tank.

They stopped the tank and climbed down onto the hot road, feeling its heat melt through the soles of their shoes, new shoes from long ago that they had taken from the supplies Sergeant Major Preston had stocked.

The Boy was young. Just a few years older than his granddaughter.

One side of him was rippled by thick, long muscles.

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