Contents

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

Epilogue

More books by Nick Cole

Intermezzo

About the Author

By Nick Cole

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

YOU TAKE EVERYTHING with you.

That is the last lesson. The last of all the lessons. The last words of Staff Sergeant Presley.

You take everything with you, Boy.

The Boy tramped through the last of the crunchy brown stalks of wild corn, his weak left leg dragging as it did, his arms full. He carried weathered wooden slats taken from the old building at the edge of the nameless town. He listened to the single clang of some long unused lanyard, connecting against a flagpole in the fading warmth of the quiet autumn morning.

He knew.

Staff Sergeant Presley was gone now.

The last night had been the longest. The old man that Staff Sergeant Presley had become, bent and shriveled, faded as he gasped for air around the ragged remains of his throat, was gone. His once dark, chocolate brown skin turned gray. The muscles shriveled, the eyes milky. There had been brief moments of fire in those eyes over the final cold days. But at the last of Staff Sergeant Presley there had been no final moment. All of him had gone so quickly. As if stolen. As if taken.

You take everything with you.

The cold wind thundered against the sides of Gas Station all night long as it raced down from mountain passes far to the west. It careened across the dry whispering plain of husk and brush through a ravaged land of wild, dry corn. The wind raced past them in the night, moving east.

A week ago, Gas Station was as far as Staff Sergeant Presley could go, stopping as if they might start again, as they had so many times before. Gas Station was as far as the dying man could go. Would go.

I gotcha to the Eighty, Boy. Now all you got to do is follow it straight on into California. Follow it all the way to the Army in Oakland.

Now, in the morning’s heatless golden light, the Boy came back from hunting, having taken only a rabbit. Staff Sergeant Presley’s sunken chest did not rise. The Boy waited for a moment amongst the debris and broken glass turned to sandy grit of Gas Station, their final camp. He waited for Sergeant Presley to look at him and nod.

I’m okay.

I’ll be fine.

Get the wood.

But he did not. Staff Sergeant Presley lay unmoving in his blankets.

The Boy went out, crossing the open space where once a building stood. Now, wild corn had grown up through the cracked concrete pad that remained. He crossed the disappearing town to the old wooden shamble at its edge, maybe once a barn. Working with his tomahawk he had the slats off with a sharp crack in the cool, dry air of the high desert. Returning to Gas Station, he knew.

Staff Sergeant Presley was gone now.

The Boy crossed the open lot. Horse looked at him, then turned away. And there was something in that dismissal of Horse that told the Boy everything he needed to know and did not want to.

Staff Sergeant Presley was gone.

He laid the wood down near the crumbling curb and crossed into the tiny office that once watched the county road.

Staff Sergeant Presley’s hand was cold. His chest did not rise. His eyes were closed.

The Boy sat next to the body throughout that long afternoon until the wind came up.

You take everything with you.

And …

The Army is west. Keep going west, Boy. When you find them, show them the map. Tell them who I was. They’ll know what to do. Tell them Staff Sergeant Lyman Julius Presley, Third Battalion, 47th Infantry, Scouts. Tell them I made it all the way—all the way to D.C., never quit. Tell them there’s nothing left. No one.

And …

That’s the North Star.

And …

Don’t let that tomahawk fly unless you’re sure. Might not get it back.

And …

These were all towns. People once lived here. Not like your people. This was a neighborhood. You could have lived here if the world hadn’t ended. Gone to school, played sports. Not like your tents and horses.

And …

There are some who still know what it means to be human—to be a society. There are others … You got to avoid those others. That’s some craziness.

And …

“Boy” is what they called you. It’s the only thing you responded to. So “Boy” it is. This is how we…

Make camp.

Hunt.

Fight.

Ride Horse.

Track.

Spell.

Read.

Bury the dead.

Salute.

For a day the Boy watched the body. Later, he wrapped Staff Sergeant Presley in a blanket; blankets they had traded the Possum Hunters for, back two years ago, when their old blankets were worn thin from winter and the road, when Staff Sergeant Presley had still been young and always would be.

At the edge of the town that once was, in the golden light of morning, the Boy dug the grave. He selected a spot under a sign he could not spell because the words had faded. He dug in the warm, brown earth, pushing aside the yellowed, papery corn husks. The broken and cratered road nearby made a straight line into the west.

When the body was in the grave, covered, the Boy waited. Horse snorted. The wind came rolling across the wasteland of wild corn husks.

What now?

You take everything with you.

Horse.

Tomahawk.

Blankets.

Knife.

Map.

Find the Army, Boy. All the way west, near a big city called San Francisco. Tell them there’s nothing left and show them the map.

When he could still speak, that was what Staff Sergeant Presley had said.

And …

You take everything with you.

Which seemed something more than just a lesson.

Chapter Two

THE ROAD AND the map gave the number 80. For a time he knew where he was by the map’s lines and tracings. He alone would have to know where he was going from now on.

I followed him from the day he took me. Now I will need to lead, even if it is just myself and Horse.

Horse grazed by the side of the broken and cracked highway.

The short days were cold and it was best to let Horse eat when they could find dry grass. The Boy considered the snowcapped mountains rising in the distant west.

Sergeant Presley would’ve had a plan for those mountains.

You should be thinking about the snow, not about me, Boy.

The voice of Sergeant Presley in his head was strong, not as it had been in the last months of his life when it was little more than a rasp and in the end, nothing at all.

You’re just remembering me as I was, Boy.

I am.

You can’t think of me as someone who can get you outta trouble. I’m dead. I’m gone. You’ll have to take care of yourself now, Boy. I did all I could, taught you everything I knew about survival. Now you got to complete the mission. You got to survive. I told you there’d be mountains. Not like the ones you knew back east. These are real mountains. They’re gonna test you. Let me go now and keep moving, Boy.

The sun fell behind the mountains, creating a small flash as it disappeared beyond the snow-capped peaks. Horse moved forward in his impatient way. The Boy massaged his bad leg. This was the time when it began to hurt: at the end of the day as the heat faded and the cold night began.

Sometimes it’s better to ride through the night, Boy. Horse’ll keep you warm. Better than shiverin’ and not sleepin’. But stick to the roads if you do go on.

The Boy rode through the night, listening to Horse clop lazily along, the only sound for many hours. He watched his breath turn to vapor in the dark.

I should make a fire.

The Boy continued on, listening to Sergeant Presley’s voice and the stories he would tell of his life before the Boy.

“Ah got caught up in things I shouldn’t have. You do that and time gets away from you. It shoulda taken me two years to get across the States. Instead it’s taken me almost twenty-five or twenty-eight years. I’ve lost count at times. How old are you, Boy? You was eight when you come with me. But that was after I’d finished my business in Montana. That took me more than twenty to do. Maybe even thirty. Nah, couldn’t have been that much.”

“We fought over San Francisco maybe ten years. After the Chinese kicked us out of the city and dug in, that’s when the general sent us east to see if there was anyone left in D.C. My squad didn’t make it two weeks. Then it was just me. Until I met you, and that was up in Wyoming.”

“I spent three years fighting in a refugee camp up near Billings. That’s where I lost my guns. After that it was all the way up to Canada as a slave. Couldn’t believe it. A slave. I knew that camp was doomed from the start. I should’ve topped off on supplies and food and kept moving. Cost me all told seven years. And what I was thinking going back to get my guns after, I couldn’t tell you to this day. I knew there was no ammo. I didn’t have any ammo. But having a gun … People don’t know, see? Don’t know if it’s loaded. I musta walked a thousand miles round-trip to find out someone had dug up my guns. Stupid. Don’t ever do anything stupid, Boy.”

Later, the Boy limped alongside Horse thinking of “Reno,” and “Slave Camp” and “Billings” and “Influenza” and “Plague” and especially “Gone,” which was written next to many of the places that had once been cities. All the words that were written on Sergeant Presley’s map. And the names too.

In the night, the Boy and Horse entered a long valley. The old highway descended and he watched by moonlight its silver line trace the bottom of the valley and then rise again toward the mountains in the west. Below, in the center of the valley, he could see the remains of a town.

Picked over. Everything’s been picked over. You know it. I know it. It is known, Boy. Still you’ll want to have your look. You always did.

For a long time the Boy sat atop the rise until Horse began to fidget. Horse was getting crankier. Older. The Boy thought of Sergeant Presley. He patted Horse, rubbing his thick neck, then urged him forward not thinking about the slight pressure he’d put in his right leg to send the message that they should move on.

Chapter Three

THE BOY KEPT Horse to the side of the road, and in doing so he passed from bright moonlight into the shadows of long-limbed trees that grew alongside the road. He watched the dark countryside, waiting for a light to come on, smelling the wind for burning wood. Food. A figure moving in the dark.

At one point he put his right knee into Horse’s warm ribs, halting him. He rose up, feeling the ache across his left side. He’d smelled something. But it was gone now on a passing night breeze.

Be careful, Boy.

Sergeant Presley had avoided towns, people, and tribes whenever possible.

These days no good ever comes of such places, Boy. Society’s mostly gone now. We might as well be the last of humanity. At least, east of Frisco.

On the outskirts of a town, he came upon a farmhouse long collapsed in on itself.

I can come back here for wood in the morning.

Down the road he found another two-story farmhouse with a wide porch.

These are the best, Boy. You can hear if someone’s crossing the porch. You can be ready for ’em.

The Boy dismounted and led Horse across the overgrown field between the road and the old house.

He stopped.

He heard the soft and hollow hoot, hoot of an owl.

He watched the wide night sky to see if the bird would cross. But he saw nothing.

He dropped Horse’s lead and took his crossbow from its place on the saddle. He pulled a bolt from the quiver in his bag and loaded the crossbow.

He looked at Horse.

Horse would move when he moved. Stop when he stopped.

The Boy’s left side was stiff. It didn’t want to move and he had to drag it to the porch making more sound than he’d wished to. He opened the claw his withered left hand had become and rested the stock of the crossbow there.

He waited.

Again the owl. He heard the leathery flap of wings.

Your body will do what you tell it to, regardless of that broken wing you got, Boy.

The Boy took a breath and then silently climbed the rotting steps, willing himself to lightness. He crossed the porch in three quick steps, feeling sudden energy rush into his body as he drew his tomahawk off his belt.

Crossbow in the weak left hand, waiting, tomahawk held high in his strong right hand, the Boy listened.

Nothing.

He pushed gently, then firmly when the rotten door would not give. Inside there was nothing: some trash, a stone fireplace, bones. Stairs leading up into darkness.

When he was sure there was no one else in the old farmhouse he went back and led Horse inside. Working with the tomahawk he began to pull slats from the wall, and then gently laid them in the blackened stone fireplace. He made a fire, the first thing Sergeant Presley had taught him to do, and then closed the front door.

Don’t get comfortable yet. If they come, they’ll come soon.

He could not tell if this was himself or Sergeant Presley.

The Boy stood with his back to the fire, waiting.

When he heard their call in the night, his blood froze.

It was a short, high-pitched ululating like the sound of bubbling water. First he heard one, nearby. Then answers from far off.

You gotta choose, Boy. Git out or git ready.

The Boy climbed back onto Horse, who protested, and hooked the crossbow back into its place. He pulled the tomahawk out and bent low, whispering in Horse’s ear, the ceiling just above his head.

It’ll be fine. We can’t stay. Good Horse.

Horse flicked his tail.

I don’t know if he agrees, thought the Boy, but it doesn’t matter, does it?

The face that appeared in the window was chalk white, its eyes rimmed in black grease.

That’s camouflage, Boy. Lets him move around in the night. These are night people. Some of the worst kind.

The eyes in the window went wide, and then the face disappeared. He heard two quick ululations.

More coming, Boy!

The Boy kicked and aimed Horse toward the front door. Its shattered rottenness filled the Boy’s lungs as he clung to Horse’s side and they drove through the opening. He saw the shadow of a man thrown back against a wooden railing that gave way with a disinterested crack.

Other figures in dark clothes and with chalk-white faces crossed with black greased stripes ran through the high grass between the road and the farmhouse. The Boy kicked Horse toward an orchard of ragged bare-limbed trees that looked like broken bones in the moonlight.

Once in the orchard, he turned down a lane and charged back toward the road. Horse’s breathing came labored and hard.

“You were settling in for the night and now we must work,” he whispered into Horse’s twitching ears.

Ahead, one of the ash-white, black-striped figures leaped into the middle of the lane. The figure planted his feet, then raised a spear-carrying arm back over his shoulder.

The Boy tapped twice on the heaving flank with his toe and Horse careened to the right, disagreeing with a snort as he always did.

You wanted to run him down, thought the Boy.

They made the road leaping a broken fence. He stopped and listened. The Boy could hear the ululations behind them. He heard whistling sounds also.

Down the road quickly, get outta Dodge now, Boy!

He took the road farther into town, passing the crumbling remains of warehouses and barns long collapsed. Stone concrete slabs where some structure had burned down long ago rose up like gray rock in the light of the moon. Sergeant Presley had always spoken simply at such places.

Gas Station.

School.

Market.

Mall.

The Boy didn’t know the meaning or purposes of such places and possessed only vague notions of form and function when he recognized their remains.

In the center of town he saw more figures and brought Horse up short, hooves digging for purchase on the fractured road. The Ashy Whites formed a circle and within were the others. The Ashy Whites were standing. The others sat, huddled in groups.

“Help us!” someone cried out and one of the Ashy Whites clubbed at the sitting figure.

Behind him, the Boy could hear the ululations growing closer. Horse stamped his hooves, ready to run.

“Rumble light!” roared a large voice and the Boy was suddenly covered in daylight—white light like the “flashlight” they’d once found in the ruins of an old car factory. It had worked, but only for a day or so. Sergeant Presley had said light was once so common you didn’t even think about it. Now …

No time for memories, Boy!

Horse reared up and the Boy had to get hold of the mane to get him down and under control. Once Horse was down and settled, the Boy stared about into the blackness, seeing nothing, not even the moonlight. Just the bright shining light coming from where the Ashy Whites had been.

An Ashy White, large and fat, his face jowly, his lower lip swollen, his eyes bloodshot, stepped into the light from the darkness off to one side. He was carrying a gun.

What type of gun is this, Boy?

When they’d found empty guns Sergeant Presley would make him learn their type, even though, as he always said, They were no good to anyone now. How could they be? After all these years there ain’t no ammunition left, Boy. We burned it all up fightin’ the Chinese.

Shotgun, sawed off.

The Ashy White man walked forward pointing the shotgun at Horse.

What will it do? He heard Sergeant Presley ask.

Sprays gravel, short range.

The Ashy White continued to walk forward with all the authority of instant death possessed.

There can’t be any ammunition left. Not after all these years, Boy.

He kicked Horse in the flanks and charged the man. Pinned ears indicated Horse was only all too willing. Sometimes the Boy wondered if Horse hated everyone, even him.

In one motion the Boy drew his tomahawk.

The man raised the weapon.

Don’t let it go unless you mean to, might not get it back, Boy. He always heard Sergeant Presley and his words, every time he drew the tomahawk.

He’d killed before.

He’d kill again.

He was seventeen years old.

The world as Sergeant Presley had known it had been over for twenty-three years when the Boy whose own name even he had forgotten had been born on the windswept plains of what the map had once called Wyoming.

You strike with a tomahawk. Never sweep. It’ll get stuck that way Boy. Timing has to be perfect.

Jowls raised the shotgun, aiming it right into the Boy.

There can’t be any ammunition left, Boy. The world used it all up killing itself.

And the Boy struck. Once. Down. Splitting the skull. He rode off, out of the bright light and into the darkness.

Chapter Four

HE COULD HEAR the Ashy Whites throughout the night, far off, calling to one another. At dawn there were no birds and the calls ceased.

“Boy,” Sergeant Presley had said that time they’d spent a night and a day finding their way across the Mississippi. “Things ain’t the same anymore.”

They were crawling through and along a makeshift damn of river barges and debris that had collected in the mud-thickened torrents of the swollen river.

“You probably don’t know what that means, d’ya?” The mosquitoes were thick and they had to use all their hands and feet to hold on to anything they could as the debris-dam shifted and groaned in the treacherous currents. It felt like they were being eaten alive.

If I’d fallen into the water that day what could he have done to save me?

But you didn’t, Boy.

I was afraid.

I knew you was. So I kept telling you about how things were different now. About how sane, rational people had gone stark raving mad after the bombs. About how the strong oppressed the weak and turned them into slaves. About how the sick and evil were finally free to live out all of their cannibalistic craziness. And how sometimes, just sometimes, there might be someone, or a group of someones who kept to the good. But you couldn’t count on that anymore. And that was why we were crossing that rickety pile of junk in the river rather than trying for the bridge downstream. You smelled what those people who lived on the bridge were cookin’ same as I did. You knew what they were cooking, or who they were cooking. We didn’t need none of that. The world’s gone mostly crazy now. So much so, that all the good that’s left is so little you can’t hardly count on it when you need it. Better to mistrust everyone and live another day.

Like these Ashy Whites out in the night looking for me.

Seems like it, Boy.

Many times he and Sergeant Presley had avoided such people. Horse knew when to keep quiet. Evasion was a simple matter of leaving claimed territory, crossing and re-crossing trails and streams, always moving away from the center. The town was the center. Now, at dawn, he was on the far side of the valley and he could make out little of the town beyond its crisscross roads being swallowed by the general abandonment of such places.

You almost got caught, Boy.

But I didn’t.

We’ll see.

He waited in the shadows at the side of a building whose roof had long ago surrendered inward, leaving only the walls to remain in defeat. The warm sunshine on the cracked and broken pavement of the road heading west beckoned to him, promising to drive off the stiffness that clamped itself around his left side every night.

They’ll assume you’re gone by now, Boy.

The Boy waited.

When he hadn’t heard the ululations for some time, he walked Horse forward into the sunshine.

Later that morning he rode back to the town, disregarding the warnings Sergeant Presley had given him of such places.

Whoever the Ashy Whites were, they had gone.

And the others too, huddled within the circle of the Ashy Whites—that voice in the night, a woman he thought, calling for help.

Who were the others?

The answer lay in the concrete remains of a sign he spelled S-C-H-O-O-L.

School.

This had been their home. The fire that consumed it hadn’t been more than three days ago. But the Boy knew the look of a settlement. A fort, as Sergeant Presley would have called it. The bloated corpses of headless men lay rotting in the wan morning light.

This is where those who had huddled within the circle of the Ashy Whites had lived all the years since the end of the things that were.

Before.

He found the blind man at the back of the school, near the playground and the swing sets.

Remember when I pushed you on a swing that time, Boy? When we found that playground outside Wichita. We played and shot a deer with my crossbow. We barbecued the meat. It could have been the Fourth of July. Do you remember that, Boy?

I do, he had told Sergeant Presley in those last weeks of suffering.

It could have been the Fourth of July.

The blind man lay in the sandbox of the playground, his breath ragged, as drool ran down onto the dirty sand, mixing with the blood from the place where his eyes had once been.

The Boy thought it might be a trap.

He’d seen such tricks before, and even with Sergeant Presley they’d nearly fallen into them once or twice. After those times and in the years that followed, they’d avoided everyone when they could afford to.

He got down from Horse.

“There’s no more to give!” cried the blind man. “You’ve taken everything. Now take my life, you rotten cowards!”

The Boy walked back to Horse and got his water bag.

Not much left.

He knelt down next to the blind man and raised his head putting the spout near his lips. The blind man drank greedily.

After: “You’re not with them, are you?”

The Boy walked back to Horse.

“Kill me.”

He mounted Horse.

“Kill me. Don’t leave me like this. How …” The blind man began to sob. “How will I eat?”

The Boy atop Horse regarded the blind man for a moment.

How will any of us eat?

He rode off across the overgrown field and back through a broken-down wire fence.

That’s everything you need to know, Boy. Good. Tells you everything you need to know. Supremacists. Coming down out of their bunkers in the North. Don’t know these guys, but they’re worth avoiding. Probably here slavin’.

Probably.

Go west. Get into the Sierras before winter. The mountains will be a good place to go to ground for winter. It’s hard to live in the mountains but there’ll be less people up there. You plan, you prepare, and you’ll do just fine. Come spring, you cross the mountains and head for Oakland. Find the Army. Tell them.

In the days that followed, the Boy rode Horse hard across the broken and barren dirt of what the map called Nevada. On the big road, Freeway, which he kept off to his right, he passed horrendous wrecks rusting since long before he’d been born. He passed broken trucks and overturned cars, things he’d once wanted to explore as a boy. Sergeant Presley would often let him when they’d had the time for such games—the game of explaining what the Boy found inside the twisted metal, and what the lost treasures had once meant. Before.

Hairbrush.

Phone.

Eyeglasses.

There was little that remained after the years of scavenging by other passing travelers.

The winding, wide Freeway curved and climbed higher underneath dark peaks. Roads that left Freeway often disappeared into wild desert. Sometimes as he rested Horse he would wonder what he might find at the conclusion of such lonely roads.

At one intersection the rusting framework of a sign crossed the departing road. From the framework three skeletons dangled in the wind of the high desert, rotted and picked at by vultures.

Probably a warning, Boy. Whoever’s up that road doesn’t want company.

It was a cold day. Above he could see the snowcapped peaks turning blue in the shadow of the falling sun. Later that night as he rode down a long grade devoid of wrecks, snow began to fall and he was glad to be beyond the road-sign skeletons.

He made camp in the carport of a fallen house on the side of a rocky hill that overlooked the winding highway. He stacked rubble in the openings to hold in the warmth of his fire.

Chapter Five

SHE AND HER sisters came out that night, south out of the desert wastes ranging up toward the road. Winter was coming on fast, and they needed to make their kills soon and return south to their home near the big canyon. They had hunted the area lean of mule deer and for the last week had been reduced to eating jackrabbits. Far too little and lean for a pride of lions.

Did she think about what the world had become? Did she wonder how she had come to be hunting the lonely country of northern Nevada? Did she know anything of casinos and entertainments and that her ancestors had once roamed, groomed and well fed, behind glass enclosures while tourists snapped their pictures?

No.

She only thought of the male and their young and her sisters.

Tonight the wind was cold and dry. There was little moonlight for the hunt. If they could only come across a pack of wild dogs. It would be enough to start them south again. Once they were south, they would have food in the canyons. And if they had to, they could always search the old city. There was always someone there, a lone man digging amongst the ruins. There was always someone hiding within the open arches and shredded carpets, the overturned machines and the shining coins spilled out as though carelessly thrown down in anger.

She topped the small line of hills and saw the dark band of the highway heading west. They had always regarded this road as the extent of their northern wanderings. Now they had to turn south.

Her sisters growled. She watched the road, looking for a moving silhouette in the darkness. One sister came to rub her head with her own.

Let’s return. He is waiting.

And for a moment she smelled … a horse.

They had taken wild horse before.

When she was young.

Running down the panicked mustangs.

There had been more than enough.

She scented the wind coming out of the east and turned her triangular head to watch the curve of the road as it gently bent south along the ridgeline.

There was a horse along the road.

Chapter Six

IN THE LATE afternoon of the next day the Boy rode alongside the highway listening for any small sound within the quiet that blanketed the desolation of the high desert.

There is nothing in this land. It’s been hunted clean.

The Boy, used to little, felt the ache in his belly beginning to rumble. It had been two days since the last of a crow he’d roasted over a thin fire of brush and scrub wood.

So what’s that tell you, Boy?

Death in some form. Either predators who will see me as prey, or poison from the war.

That’s right, he heard Sergeant Presley say in the way he’d always pronounced the words “That” and “is,” making them one and removing the final “t.”

A place called Reno is in front of me. Maybe another day’s ride.

All cities are dead. The war saw to that, Boy.

Some cities. Remember the one called Memphis. It wasn’t poisoned.

Might as well have been, Boy. Might as well have been.

The big roar came from behind them. Horse turned as if to snarl, but when his large nostrils caught the scent of the predator he gave a short, fearful warning. The Boy patted Horse’s neck, calming him.

I’ve never heard an animal make a sound like that. Sounds like a big cat. But bigger than anything I’ve ever heard before.

He scanned the dusty hills behind him.

He saw movement in the fingers of the ridge he’d just passed.

And then he saw the lion. It trotted down a small ridge kicking up dust as it neared the bottom. For a moment the Boy wondered if the big cat might be after something else, until it came straight toward him. Behind the big lion, almost crouching, a smaller lion, sleeker—no great mane surrounding its triangular head—danced forward, scrambling through the dusty wake of the big lion.

He wheeled Horse about to the west, facing the place once called Reno, and screamed “Hyahhh!” as he drove the two of them forward.

Chapter Seven

THE IDIOT, THOUGHT the lioness. She’d only made him come along so he could roar at just the right moment and drive the horse into her sisters and the young lying in wait ahead. Instead he’d cried out in hunger at the first sight of the meaty flanks of the horse. She could hear the saliva in his roar. The cubs would be lucky to get any of this meal.

His cry had been early and she knew from the moment the horse began to gallop that her run would never catch the beast. For a short time she could be fast. But not for long. Not in a race. Her only hope now was that her sisters and the young were in a wide half circle ahead, and that the horse would continue its course into their trap.

The idiot, she thought again, as she slowed to a trot. He’s only good for fighting other males. For that, he is the best.

THE BOY RACED down alongside the ancient crumbling highway, but Horse was slowing as the ground required caution. A broken leg would be the death of them both. He reined in Horse hard at an off-ramp and sent them down onto an old road that seemed to head off to the south. Ahead, a slope rose into a series of sharp little hills, the ground smooth, windblown sand and hardpack. He spurred Horse forward up onto the rising slope. At the top he stopped and scanned behind him.

In the shadow of a crag, he could see the big lion doggedly trotting along the ridgeline. Ahead of the lion, crouched low and crawling, the sleeker lion had stopped. The Boy could feel its eyes on him.

“It’s us they’re after, Horse. I don’t think they’re going to take no for an answer.”

Horse snorted derisively and then began to shift as if wanting to turn and fight.

That’s jes big talk, Boy! Those lions’ll kill him dead and you with him. Don’t pay no attention to him, Horse’s jes big talk. Always has been.

Ahead to the west he could see a bleached and tired city on the horizon. But it was too far off to be of any use now.

And it could be poisoned, Boy. Radiation. Kill you later like it did me.

The Boy turned Horse and raced below the ridgeline, skirting its summit. They rounded the outmost tip of the rise, and beyond it lay a vast open space, empty and without comfort.

The ground sloped into a gentle half bowl and he could see the Freeway beyond.

I should never have left the road. We could have found a jackknifed trailer to hide in. Sergeant Presley said those were always the best places to sleep. We did many times.

He patted Horse once more on the neck whispering, “We’ll sprint for the road beyond the bowl. We’ll find a place there.”

Horse reared impolitely as if to say they should already be moving.

Halfway down the slope at a good canter, watching for squirrel and snake holes, places where Horse could easily snap one of his long legs, the Boy saw the trap.

There were five of them. All like the sleeker, mane-less lion. Females. Hunters. They were crouched low in a wide semicircle off to his right. All of them were watching him. He’d come into the left edge of their trap.

You know what to do, Boy! Barked Sergeant Presley in his teaching voice. His drill sergeant voice. The voice with which he’d taught the Boy to fight, to survive, to live just one more day.

Assault through the ambush.

Horse roared with fear. Angry fear.

The Boy guided Horse toward the extreme left edge of the trap, coaxing him with his knee as he unhooked the crossbow, cocked a bolt and raised it upward with his withered left hand.

Not the best to shoot with. But I’ll need the tomahawk for the other.

The sleek females darted in toward him, dashing through the dust, every golden muscle rippling, jaws clenched tight in determination.

This is bad.

The fear crept into the Boy as it always did before combat.

Ain’t nothin’ but a thang, Boy. Ain’t nothin’ but a thang. Mind over matter; you don’t mind, it don’t matter.

The closest cat charged forward, its fangs out, and in that instant the Boy knew it would leap. Its desire to leap and clutch at Horse’s flanks telegraphed in the cat’s wicked burst of speed.

The Boy lowered the crossbow onto the flat of his good arm holding the tomahawk, aimed on the fly, and sent a bolt into the flurry of dust and claws from which the terrible fanged mouth and triangular head watched him through cold eyes.

He heard a sharp, ripping yowl and kicked Horse to climb the small ridge at the edge of the bowl. On the other side he could see frames of half-built buildings below on the plain before the city.

Half-built buildings.

Construction site.

Maybe houses being built on the last day of the old world. Houses that would never be finished.

If I can stay ahead of them for just a moment …

Horse screamed and the Boy felt the weight of something angry tearing at Horse’s left flank.

One of the female lions had gone wide and raced for the lip of the ridgeline. Once on top, it had thrown everything into a leap that brought it right down onto Horse’s flank.

The Boy cursed as he swiped at the fierce cat with his tomahawk. But the lioness had landed on Horse’s left side and his axe was in his right hand. The Boy batted at the lioness with the crossbow. Its mouth was open, its fangs ready to sink into Horse’s spine, the Boy shoved the crossbow into the cat’s open jaws. Gagging and choking, the lioness released Horse’s torn flesh as its paws attempted to remove the crossbow. It fell away into the dust and Horse continued forward. Already the Boy could feel Horse slowing. His own feet, bent back onto Horse’s flanks, were dripping with warm blood.

“Don’t slow down,” he pleaded into Horse’s pinned ears, doubting whether he was heard at all. “Just make it into those ruins.”

When Horse didn’t respond with his usual snort, the Boy knew the wound was bad.

Chapter Eight

THE BOY DROVE Horse hard through the drifting sand of the old ruins. Rotting frames of sun-bleached gray and bone-white wood, warped by forty years of savage heat and cruel ice seemed to offer little protection from the roaring lions now trotting downslope in a bouncing, almost expectant, gait.

They wove deeper into the dry fingers of wood erupting from the sand of Construction Site. The Boy heard the crack of ragged wooden snaps beneath Horse’s hooves. He hoped they might find a hole or even a completed building to hide in. But there was nothing. Behind them he could hear the cats beginning to growl, unsure how to proceed through the rotting forest of ancient lumber. The Big Lion gave a roar and the Boy knew they would be coming into the maze after them.

Near the far edge of the spreading ruins, the Boy found a half-constructed bell tower ringed with ancient scaffolding over a narrow opening. It was their only hope. He steered Horse in under the rickety scaffolding still clinging to its long unfinished exterior. In the shadowy dark he dismounted Horse and raced back outside. He swung his tomahawk at the ancient scaffolding, cutting through a rusty bar with one stroke. He stepped back inside once he’d smashed the other support bar. The scaffolding began to collapse across the entrance as he saw the Big Lion come crashing through the warped and bent forest of dry wood, charging directly at him.

The scaffolding slanted down across the entrance as shafts of fading daylight shot through the dust.

The Big Lion crossed the ground between them in bounds.

Focus, Boy.

The Boy reached up and crushed another support with his tomahawk and more abandoned building material came crashing down across the entrance. Dust and sand swallowed the world and the Boy closed his eyes and didn’t breathe. Horse screeched in fear as the Boy hoped the collapsed scaffolding would be enough to block the entrance.

When he opened his eyes he could see soft light filtering through the debris-cluttered opening.

He put his good hand on Horse, conveying calm where the Boy felt none, willing the terror-stricken animal to understand that they were safe for now.

Then he looked at the wound.

Claw marks straight down the side. The whole flank all the way to the hock was shaking. He took some of his water and washed the wound. Horse trembled, and the Boy placed his face near Horse’s neck, whispering.

It will be okay.

I will take care of you

The wound is still bleeding, so I’ll have to make a bandage.

He poured some water into the sand and made mud. He didn’t have much water, but it was vital to get the bleeding stopped.

He can’t bleed forever, Boy.

When the mixture was ready he packed it into the wound, steadying Horse as he went, murmuring above the lion’s roar as he applied the wet mud.

SHE PACED BACK and forth outside the never-to-be-finished bell tower.

The Horse was definitely inside. She could smell it. She could smell its fear.

At the top of the bell tower, fifteen feet high, she could see narrow arches. If she could leap from another structure she might get in there and make the kill.

The Male rose up on his hind legs and began to bat away at the collapsed opening. Wood splintered and cracked as he put all of his four hundred pounds onto the pile of debris. As usual he tired quickly and went to lie down, content to merely wait and watch the entrance. The sisters came up to him one by one, trying to reassure him that all would be well, but he seemed embarrassed—or frustrated. Normally expressive, his great face remained immobile, which the young usually took for thinking. But she knew he was merely tired and mostly out of ideas and generally unconcerned at how things might turn out.

She knew him—and loved him.

She paced away from the tower and then turned, gave two energetic bounds, and leaped. She almost made the top. Her claws extended, ripping into the dry stucco of the bell tower, revealing ancient dry wood beneath. She began to climb toward the opening, and a moment later a sheet of stucco ripped away and she fell backward.

There is wood like a tree underneath. Once this skin is off, she thought, I’ll be able to climb in.

She began to stand on her hind legs and rake her claws down the side of the tower as chalky stucco, dry and brittle, disintegrated.

As if not to be outdone by her sister, another of the females began to dig at the base of the tower like she might for the making of a den. Now it would be a race. Who would get to the horse first? The Male would like that. He would reward whoever got in first. It was his way.

The sun was going down. It would be a long night.

Chapter Nine

HORSE HAD STOPPED trembling. He seemed resigned now to the tight space and had stopped threatening to fight present conditions. The Boy climbed atop Horse and reached for the high arched openings just below the roof. Leveraging himself upward, he was able to climb into them.

Below, the lions were instantly aware of him. Multiple pairs of glowing dark eyes watched him. By the barest of moonlight he could see them lying about while the one who had been digging at the base of the tower stopped.

If I had my crossbow I could pick her off.

Never mind what you don’t have, Boy. You better start thinking about a jailbreak, otherwise…

The Big Lion roared loudly, opening its mouth and showing its fangs as it turned its head, throwing the roar off into the hills. When the lion finished it stared straight at the Boy.

The Boy listened to the echo of the roar bounce off the far hills, its statement reminding him of the vastness of the high desert and how alone he was within it.

So that’s how it is, thought the Boy. All right then, no surrender.

One of the females suddenly ran forward, leapt, and almost caught the edge of the arched opening. The whole bell tower shook and Horse cried out in fear. The lion slid down as her claws raked the stucco off, revealing the dry wooden slats beneath.

This thing was not well constructed in the Before, and these hard years since haven’t improved it. You would tell me to stop and think, Sergeant.

He removed his tomahawk from his belt.

The feline turned and charged the tower again. The Boy waited and as it made its leap he slammed the tomahawk down into one paw. The beast screeched and threw itself away from the wall.

That should give me some time.

The Lioness watched the Boy for a moment, the contempt naked in its cool eyes, then lay down apart from the others, and began to lick the wound. The Boy could not tell how badly he might have hurt it.

He lowered himself down into the dark, finding Horse with his dangling feet. Then he gently let himself down onto Horse’s back. He sat there, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

I’ve got to do something about the digger next. If I can do something about her, maybe they’ll get the point that I’m not coming out. Maybe then they’ll go away.

You sure about that, Boy?

The only thing else I can think of is to strike at them as they come through the sand under the wall.

It seemed a thin plan, but looking at the four walls and Horse, what else could he do?

For the rest of the night he listened to the digger. Occasionally the lions would growl and he thought it best not to go up into the high arched openings.

If I remain invisible to them, then maybe “out of sight, out of mind” as you used to say, Sergeant?

Or …

If they can’t mind me, then I won’t matter to them.

And it was there in the dark that the Boy realized Sergeant Presley had been full of knowledge. Full of words and wisdom. Those things were a comfort to him in the times he and Sergeant Presley had been in danger.

I’m young. I haven’t had all the years it takes to acquire wisdom. Now death is closer than it has ever been.

Everyone dies, Boy, even me. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.

SOFT, PALE LIGHT shone the through arched windows above. The night had passed and though he had not slept much, the Boy felt as though he’d slept too much. As if some plan of action should have occurred to him in the hours of darkness. But none had and he cursed himself, not knowing what the coming day might bring.

He heard a roar, far off, then another one and another, almost on the heels of the echo of the first.

More lions?

Trouble always looks for company, Boy. Always.

Then I’ll be ready. Whatever it is, the best I can do is to be ready.

He climbed to the top of the bell tower and looked out from the arches. The Big Lion, the male, was on his feet and staring into the darkened west. A thin strip of red dawn cut the eastern desert in half like a hot knife. The Boy followed the Big Lion’s gaze into the dark, and saw three male lions, smaller—not by much, manes almost as big—pacing back and forth in the dark.

The females were drawing the cubs back from the Big Lion.

If there is going to be a fight, the newcomers might not know I’m here. If they win, then this could be good for me.

SHE LIMPED TOWARD her mate.

Had she ever been special to him?

She liked to think so. She liked to think there was something special between her and him that her sisters had never known. Would never know.

She’d seen him fight other males before. The desert was full of their kind. The mule deer and wild animals had been abundant in all the years she had known and the prides had grown large. And now, from some unknown pride much like her own, the young lions had come to find mates for themselves amongst her pride. Just as he had once found her.

Limping forward to stand behind him, she could at least do that for the love of her existence. She could at least do that. But when he turned, she saw the flash of anger in his eyes, warning her to get back, and maybe something she had never seen before. Fear.

He roared again. It was his way and his answer to the challengers. His roaring anger at the horse within the bell tower had most likely summoned these challengers out of the dark. She knew his roar, beautiful and safe to her, had cost them all.

She lay down in front of her sisters, between them and her mate—their mate—and watched.

When the battle started in earnest, it transformed from a storm to a whirlwind in the space of a moment. The newcomers, baiting the big male halfheartedly, as though they might leave at any moment, suddenly came at him at once, silent, focused, hopeful.

His great claws pinned the first and he sank his jaws into the back of his challenger’s neck. She heard the crunch of bones and knew that one was finished, though it continued to flail wildly, its claws drawing blood across her mate’s belly.

Another challenger circled wide and landed on her mate’s back after a great pounce. The challenger was unsure what to do next. The third came in hard at his flank and began to tear away great strips of fur and skin with claws that looked long and sharp.

Here was their leader, she thought. He had been smart enough to wait.

The Male shook the one in its mouth as he tried to draw his victim upward.

She cried out for him to be done with that one and to handle the other two, but her cries were drowned out by his as he roared and whirled on the leader. He batted at the flanker, who tumbled away and then turned the momentum into something to fling itself right back at the Male.

The challenger on his back held on for dear life and she could sense the fear in that one. That one didn’t have it in him to sink his fangs into her mate. He was the runt. He would never have a pride of his own.

The Male pinned the lion he’d cast off; it was his technique, she knew, to use his size to subdue and strangle his enemies. Enraged, he crushed the leader beneath him and tore out his throat.

Her paws, kneading the soft sand of the desert, relaxed. She knew he had won. He would be wounded, badly if the blood streaming down his belly was any indicator, but he had at least beaten these challengers. She was proud of both him for his strength and herself for her faith and love.

Thunder broke across the darkness like dry wood split sharply.

Thunder was what she’d thought the sound was, and for a moment she’d expected lightning. But the sudden white light that would illuminate the land never came. Instead she watched him roll off his foes in a great spray of blood.

The Back Biter rolled away, confused. For a moment the runt raised a paw as if he might step this way or that, flee or attack. Then another bolt of thunder erupted, and a fraction later the Back Biter’s head exploded.

In the wind she found a new horse and acrid smoke; a mule also.

Her sisters were fleeing into the night.

The young whimpered.

She turned back to him and crossed the short space to his body. Her eyes were on his mane and the face that had once expressed so many thoughts to her. So many thoughts that she knew she had never known him completely.

He was still.

Asleep.

Beautiful.

Noble.

Even when she heard the thunder erupt again, near and yet as if part of a dream she was only waking from, she watched his face.

The bullet struck her in the spine.

And she watched him.

She watched him.

She watched him.

Chapter Ten

“ALL MY SKINS is ruin’t!”

Early light had turned the night’s carnage golden. The Boy listened to the man below.

“This one, that one over there! Hell, Danitra, all of ’em.” Then, “Maybe ’cept this one.”

The Boy listened from the shadows of the bell tower.

You be careful now, Boy! There’s little good left in this world.

“Might as well come out!” thundered the voice. “Seein’ as how I saved ya and all such.”

He knows I’m here. And he has a gun. Not like the rusty “AK Forty-sevens” and broken “Nine mils” we would find sometimes. His gun is different, like a polished piece of thick wood. As though it were different and from some place long ago.

For all that Sergeant Presley had tried to explain about guns to the Boy, he’d never guessed one would’ve made such a sound, like the crack of distant thunder heard from under a blanket.

He patted Horse and climbed up into the high arched openings once more.

“There ya’re!” roared the man.

He was barrel-chested and squat. He wore dusty black leather and a beaten hat, hair dark and turning to gray. He stopped his cutting work to look up from one of the lions, holding a large knife in his bloody hand.

“These are mine,” he said and turned back to his business with the hide. “Any more in there besides you?”

The Boy said nothing.

“That means nope,” said the stranger.

“My horse.”

“Well you better get down and get him out of there.”

The Boy continued to watch the man as he skinned the lion, swearing and sweating while he made long, sawing cuts, then stood, wiped his knife and pulled back a great streak of hide.

“C’mon boy. I got work to do. No one else here but me and my horse and Danitra. She’s my mule.”

He set to work on the next lion.

“This one’s even worse than the last! That was a mess. Coulda done that better myself. What tribe you with, boy?”

The Boy said nothing and continued to watch.

“You with them tribes out in the desert?”

The Boy remained silent.

“Well pay it no mind. I’ve got to get these hides off and cut some meat. So if you don’t want to be a part of that then I’ll ask you to get your horse out of there and move along.” The man stood staring at the Boy, his bloody knife hanging halfway between forgotten and ready.

“My horse is injured.”

The man wiped the knife once again on the leather of his pants and spit.

“Well, get him out of there and let’s take a look. I know a thing or two about horses.”

The Boy climbed down the side of the bell tower using the wooden slats exposed after the attacks of the lions. At the bottom, he began to remove the debris blocking the entrance as the man returned to skinning the dead lions.

“It’s bad.” The man spit again as he ran his hands across Horse. For a moment Horse grew skittish, but the man talked to him in a friendly manner and Horse seemed to accept this as yet one more thing to be miserable about.

“Not the worst. Best we can do for him is get him up to the river, the other side of Reno. Good water there. We can clean the wound and get him ready for the fever that’s bound to be come. If he can survive that fever, then, well maybe. But fever it’ll be. Always is with them cats.”

I’m not ready to lose Horse, thought the Boy. It would be too much for me right now. First you, Sergeant, and now …

Ain’t nothin’ but a thang, Boy! You do what’s got to be done. Without Horse you’ll be finished in a week.

“Name’s Escondido. I’ll lead you up to the river—goin’ that way myself and I’ll show you the path through Reno. Now get to work and help me with these hides, then we’ll be movin’ on out of this forsaken planned community of the future.”

The Boy stared at the ground.

“That’s what you was holed up in when I found you,” said the man called Escondido as he pointed first to the bell tower and then the rotting timber. “Someone was building a neighborhood here on the last day. Never got finished. See all that rotten wood? Frames for houses. This bell tower was probably the fake entrance. Make it seem like something more’n it was. They would’ve called it some name like Sierra Verde or the Pines. Probably something to do with the bell tower. Bell Tower Heights! Yes siree, that’s what they woulda called it. Old Escondido knows the old people’s ways. I was one of ’em, you know. I lived in a house once. Can you believe that, boy? I lived in a house.”

I’ve got to do whatever it takes to save Horse.

“How far is this river?”

“Be there by nightfall. We don’t want to be in Reno after dark, that’s for sure.”

“Reno wasn’t nuked?” “Nuked” was a Sergeant Presley word.

“No. But it looks like a big battle was fought there out near the airport. So the city might as well have been nuked. Strange people live in them old casinos now. Had a partner used to call ’em the Night People, ’cause they get crazy and howl and cause all kinds of havoc at night. Last two or three years when I crossed over the Sierras I liked to avoid Reno. Got into a bad spot there one time about dusk. It was a bad time, even with my guns.

The Boy followed Escondido’s gaze to a bent and broken horse. Its hair was matted and lanky, and it cropped haphazardly at what little there was to be had, as if both tired and dizzy. In the worn leather saddle, the Boy saw two long rifles.

“That horse ain’t much to look at. But best part of him is he’s deaf, so when my breech loaders go off he don’t get scared and run off.”

The Boy worked for the rest of the morning scraping the hides of the lions as Escondido finished the skinning and then cut steaks from the female. He built a small smoky fire and the meat was soon spitted and roasting in the morning breeze.

“We got to eat these now. It’ll be a long day gettin’ through Reno. Then we still got to ride up into the hills to reach the river.”

Once the mule, Danitra, as Escondido called her, was saddled with hides, they sat down next to the fire and ate.

“How much water ya got?” asked Escondido through a mouthful of meat.

“Not much. I’ll save it for Horse.”

“There’s no water worth havin’ between here and the river, so keep that in mind. Don’t go gettin’ thirsty. I’ll trade you some for that old Army rucksack you got there on your horse.”

The Boy continued to chew, putting Escondido’s offer away until later, hoping the heat and dust would not force him to trade Sergeant Presley’s ruck for a mouthful of water.

THEY RODE OUT of the bloody camp. Escondido’s nag could do little more than trot and so the pace was slow. Escondido filled the silence of the hot afternoon with conversation and observations, all the while watching the crumbling remains of the world for shadows and salvage.

“Was tracking them lions for three days before they got onto your big one. I heard him roar and I knew I’d lost ’em. Couldn’t get a shot off on ’em all night. But I knew I had to find ’em before they got into that fight. Hides’ll be ruined and Chou’ll make his usual fuss ’bout it and all. Still I got ways and means. What tribe did you say you was with?”

When the Boy didn’t answer, Escondido continued on.

“My family came from out of the South. I had another name. Prospero, my mother used to call me. But, in the little refugee camp we started out in, they called me Escondido. That’s where my family had been before the bombs: a place called Escondido. Tried to ask my papa where that might be. All he said was that it was gone now. A fantasy place.”

And …

“I cross over the mountains beginning of summer every year. This year I got a late start. Mountains is gettin’ weirder every year. You know about the Valley? No, don’t make no difference, you don’t look like them people. Say, was you born that way or’d you get bust up when you was little?”

And …

“What was you doin’ out here? This part of the desert ain’t safe. Though for that matter, what part is?”

Don’t tell anything about ye’self, Boy.

“You don’t say much, do you? Is that your tribe’s way? Don’t say much?”

It was afternoon by the time they crossed onto the dusty streets of Reno. Buildings lay collapsed or shattered to little more than rusting frames that groaned in the sudden gusts that came in off the desert.

In the silence of late afternoon, shadows turned to blue and Escondido continued to talk in a low whisper though he would stop when they passed piles of rubble and twisted metal that lay across the wide thoroughfare leading into the heart of the darkened city.

“The people, the tribes, savages all up in the mountains, everywhere I’ve gone, they wear hides to show what mighty hunters they are. Now up at the trading post in Auburn, everybody wants hides so they can trade with them savages. Them lions, if’n they’d been perfect, woulda fetched a high price from old Chou. That’s a shame. A perfect shame.”

Ahead, each of them could see the rising pile of bleached casinos crumbling around a bridge that rose over the wide avenue they would follow. A bridge that connected two of the ancient palaces and seemed to loom over the road like the wingspan of some prehistoric dead bird.

Escondido withdrew one of the rifles from its saddle holster and rested the butt on his thigh as he gave a soft chick, chick to his nag.

Then he looked at the Boy and drew his finger to his lips.

Chapter Eleven

CITIES AIN’T GOT nothing left for you, Boy.

And yet, Sergeant, I’ve always wanted to go into them. To know what’s in them.

Places where you might have lived, Boy, had things been different.

Sergeant Presley’s voice seemed to ignore Escondido’s whispered commentary and remembrances as they led their horses through the dust and rubble.

I try to find myself in them, Sergeant Presley. I try to find who I might have been.

Why, Boy?

It might tell me who I am, Sergeant.

“I come through here must been something like five years ago with a partner. Dan was his name.” Escondido’s face looked gray and dusty in the last orange light of day. His mouth, full of crooked teeth, hung open, sucking at the dry desert air.

The Boy could hear Escondido’s heavy breathing.

They entered the long, crumpled stretch of casino row. Hollow-eyed windows gaped blindly down on them from along shell-dented walls.

“Said he might go in and jes’ take a look around. I tells him it’s jes’ not done, Dan. Jes’ not done.”

They passed a burned U.S. Army tank poking its melted barrel out from a storefront whose sign had long since been scoured to meaninglessness.

M-1 Abrams, thought the Boy.

“Toughest hour of my life was waitin’ for Dan to come out. I sat there holding that horse of his for the longest time. We’d had a good haul in lions that year. What was the point of going in?”

Ahead, a sweeping bridge spanned the gap between two casinos like a broken arm reaching out from the wreckage of a terrible accident to touch another victim.

“Worst part’s just ahead,” muttered Escondido.

Escondido cocked back the hammer on his long rife.

This is what I mean, Boy. Told you not to get caught up in things and here you are, caught up.

I could answer you, he thought to Sergeant Presley. But you would tell me I was crazy. You would tell me that you are dead and the problems of this life no longer concern you. Wouldn’t you?

“I waited an hour and he never come out,” whispered Escondido.

The laughing started.

One voice cackled, clear and very near at once.

Moments later two others responded, as if only politely and at a mediocre jest.

Then another burst out, hysterically almost.

Finally the rest were laughing uncontrollably.

Sniggering.

Guffawing.

Giggling.

Snickering.

Hooting.

Wailing.

Sobbing.

Moaning.

Crying.

Laughter careened across the broken casino walls.

Laughter was everywhere.

“Keep straight on!” yelled Escondido over the echoing din.

For a moment there were almost-shadows within the recessed gloom of the buildings high above. Not quite, but almost.

Leading Horse, the Boy pulled his tomahawk from his belt.

“They won’t come out. Never do. But you don’t want to go in after ’em all the same,” warned Escondido.

They crossed the shadow of the broken bridge and a sink crashed to the dusty pavement behind them.

Horses reared and snarled fearfully.

The Boy held him around the neck, whispering softly.

“I know. I know. I know,” he said over and over.

Once they were almost out from underneath the broken walkway, Escondido muttered, “I think that’s what all the silliness is about. Tryin’ to get us to come in and take a look.”

A scabbed face, pale and haunted, appeared for a moment behind dusty shards of broken glass three stories up. Whether it was a man or a woman, who could say.

They passed on and the laughter seemed to fade in quiet increments. Finally there is a single painful scream.

In the hours that passed between the ruins of Reno and the river, Horse began to favor his unhurt legs, limping with the left hind leg. The Boy knew a powerful infection had already set in.

“He can’t go much farther,” said the Boy.

“He’ll have to. Another few hours to the foot of the mountains and then the river. I won’t sleep down here tonight.”

They rode on, passing through lonely crumbling hills in the weak last light of day. When the sun finally fell behind the lowest of the Sierra Nevada, the land turned to purple and the smell of sage hung heavy in the shadows.

“Another hour and we’ll be alongside the river. Once we’re to it my hunting lodge won’t be much farther on. I won’t waste a bullet on your horse. Load ’em myself and there’s precious few left now. Understand?”

The Boy said nothing as darkness settled across the lonely spaces that surrounded them. They heard the river long before they saw it, babbling in the moonlight. Its wide curves followed an old broken highway off to one side. Long, flat swathes of calm river erupted, burbling, over stones, and beyond that, small waterfalls marked their climb up alongside the river’s fall.

Horse was badly limping when Escondido stopped. They were on a wide turn below a small pass. The river, off to their left, was little more than soft noise. Escondido seemed to rise for a moment off his horse’s back, smelling the wind. The Boy tasted the night air also and found charred wood.

When they came to the river crossing that led to Escondido’s lodge, the Boy could see the charred remains of wood and stone from across the rock-filled river.

On the other side Escondido said nothing and climbed down from his nag. He walked into the midst of the burnt timber and ash. “Still warm.” He laughed. “Thought they’d burn me out, they did.”

The Boy got down off Horse and began to inspect the wound again. When he touched it, Horse dances away from him. He removed his pack and led Horse down to the river. The water was cold, startlingly cold as he washed Horse’s wound. At first Horse wouldn’t stand for it, but as the cool water numbed the heat in the wound, the big horse tolerated the cleansing.

By the time the Boy led Horse back up to the clearing where once the lodge watched the creek and the highway beyond, Escondido had built a fire.

“I’m gonna tell you something you don’t want to hear,” said Escondido above the clatter of a pot he set on the fire. “I’m lit out at first light. I’m done with this side of the mountains. It ain’t safe and it’s gittin’ a lot more dangerous. Time was it was just me between here and the Hillmen. Now all them southern tribes is comin’ north, just itchin’ fer a fight with the Chinese. This is my last hunt. Tomorrow I ride for Auburn. After that, who knows? There’s a widow for me somewheres, I guess.”

They watch the fire. Escondido cuts branches from a sapling and roasts strips of lion meat.

“This part’s the part you ain’t gonna like. So here it is. That horse needs to rest and even if he does that, ain’t no guarantee he’s gonna make it. In two days or sooner we’ll have snow and if his infection is gonna come, it’ll kill him before we make it within the gates o’ the outpost.”

They were silent, each watching the meat and fire, the wood turning to ash, the orange coals beneath.

Escondido rose to turn the strips of lion and settled back down onto an old blanket.

“I come here twenty seasons musta been. Every summer I’d cross them mountains above us and come down here to hunt. First few days I got the place in order, then I had a whole operation to set up. Shoulda seen it. Hides tannin’, big porch I like to set on of an evenin’.”

“There was no trade in hides with the Hillmen ’fore the Chinese set up the outpost there in Auburn. Hillmen coulda cared less about lion hides. The whole bunch of ’em was different in every way. Lived out in the woods and only came together once a year when they’d get up a hunt or needed to fight one of the other tribes. I finally figured out why they called themselves the Hillmen when me and Danitra set up camp near the old school the year before it burned town. One night I was havin’ a look for anything useful and I saw that their old football team was called the Hillmen. Now they live alone out in the deep woods mostly, but they still think of themselves as some old football team from before the bombs . It was how they told the difference between them and strangers. Crazy, huh? But not really—makes more sense than some of the other tribes.”

The fire popped and the aroma of roasting meat caught the night’s breeze as sparks rose into the dark sky.

“Not much fat in lion,” noted Escondido.

Then …

“I’ll miss this place for the rest of my days.”

The mule honked at some ground squirrel. Escondido watched the forest for a long moment, his coal-black eyes wide in the dancing light of the fire.

“So, if you could ride with me, I don’t think you’d make it. Or more to the point, I don’t think yer horse’d make it. So I’m leavin’ you. Sorry. That’s the way it has to be.”

When the Boy failed to protest, his face calm, almost asleep in the firelight, Escondido said, “I’ll show you a few things in the morning, maybe even some bushes that’ll help with the healing. If you get to work on a shelter, you’ll be ready if them tribes come back lookin’ for me. Most likely they’ll take to you more than they ever did me. They’re tribal like you. Don’t like city people like me. Hate the Chinese, they do. Hate ’em. But you, you’ll be fine I suspect.”

They ate the lion and fell asleep near the fire. The night came on cold and the Boy dreamed of faces in windows. His last thought before he closed his eyes beneath the broken crystal of night was of faces. He remembered faces, though he did not remember who they belonged to. What was Sergeant Presley’s face like? He wondered and for a moment he could not remember its shape. But when he thought of the Sergeant’s rare smile, the face came back to him. And he was asleep.

Chapter Twelve

SNOW FELL AND had been falling since they first woke. Now it was coming down steadily. High above, white clouds had replaced the startling blue of morning. Escondido, on the far side of the river and rounding the curve of the old highway that wound its way up across the pass, did not turn to see the Boy one last time, and then he was gone.

The wind rushed through the pines and made the only sound of the place where once Escondido’s hunting lodge stood.

You got to prioritize, Boy!

And he did. The Boy knew he had to get moving. There were three things to do.

Make a shelter.

Gather healing herbs for Horse.

Find food.

But for a long moment he stood there. It was so quiet in between the thundering gusts of wind that shook all the pines at once that he could hear snowflakes landing on the ground all around him. Or so he thought.

Escondido left him with a simple knowledge of the area’s herbs and inhabitants. The lions wouldn’t come up this far and they didn’t like the cold anyway. There were some wolves. But wolves were wolves. There was a way to handle them. Then there was the bear: a mother brown bear, one of the worst kind. Two seasons ago, Escondido related, she had two cubs. This year he didn’t see the cubs. But the bear lived in a cave upriver at the top of a small conical hill. A small mountain even.

“You’d be wise to steer clear of her altogether. The brown are the worst. Man-eaters.”

Horse was on his side now. His large dark eyes were weak and milky. Often he would raise his head to make sure the Boy was near. But even that act seemed too much for him.

So what do you do first, Boy? Make a plan. Get moving. Get to work. Do something. Make a decision. If you don’t, circumstances will decide for you. The enemy loves to tell you what to do.

It was the voice of Sergeant Presley, heard over a thousand camps at morning, in the frosty nights of Michigan when they’d barely survived. Down South, crossing the big river, he’d heard the Sergeant plan and tell him to do the same.

It’s all you got now, Boy!

The Boy gathered herbs. He found most of them not far from the river. Most of them were dying as winter came on.

Will that affect their potency?

Don’t matter, Boy. It’s all you got right now.

He spent the rest of the morning mashing the herbs and slowly adding water until all became paste. He boiled the paste for a while, per Escondido’s instructions. He applied the hot paste after having taken Horse to the river to clean the wound once more in the icy water, in which Horse’s legs gave out for a moment and he stumbled, casting a look at the Boy as if they were both embarrassed to the point of death. After, when the paste was hot and goes on Horse’s wounded flank, after Horse lay down, his eyes resigned to the smoking fire, the Boy murmured, “I didn’t see that. Let’s just forget about that.” The Boy covered him with his only blanket.

Afternoon, thin and cold, settled across the little river. There was no warmth left in the big stones and a breeze could be seen in the pines atop the surrounding mountains.

The Boy began to hack at the burnt lumber of Escondido’s lodge, salvaging any useable beams for shelter. There weren’t many. Near the river, he found fallen trees and in dragging them, he was soon exhausted.

If I had Horse right now this would be easier.

When night fell, what he had was little more than a two-sided lean-to. The open side faced the mountain wall that rose above their camp. Moving Horse within the lean-to, the Boy built a fire. Later he gathered loose wood from the forest floor and brown grass for Horse.

It was night now and he didn’t mind the dark or the forest. He had known such places his whole life.

Chapter Thirteen

IN THE NIGHT, keeping the fire high, face burning hot, body and back cold, the Boy sat staring into the shifting flames. Occasionally he simply watched Horse. He tried to make a plan for the coming morning beyond this endless freezing night.

Fishing in the river.

Food.

Traps.

How to improve the shelter.

The snow was coming down thick and silent. It hissed as it fell into the fire.

Even with the fire, it was cold. But Horse slept and that was good. Or at least the Boy hoped it was good.

On nights like this, when it was too cold, Sergeant Presley would talk, telling him things, teaching him. Sometimes they would break camp and simply walk to keep warm. The Boy remembered walking in the freezing rain outside Detroit.

Later he remembered the heavy warmth of late summer when they finally reached the Capitol in Washington D.C..

Sergeant Presley’s Mission, he’d called it.

They’d come upon the old Capitol the day before, broken buildings overgrown by blankets of green. Cracked highways had fallen into swampy water thick with flies and insects.

“I got to go in there, Boy, and there ain’t no use you comin’ in with me,” said Sergeant Presley on that long-ago day.

It was hot and sticky in the late afternoon. Summer. It had been raining for much of the week.

“Let’s make camp and then I’ll go in and look for what I got to find—what I know won’t be there. But I’ll go in all the same.”

They’d been living well that year. They’d fought for Marshall and his men the spring before. A range war in Pennsylvania. When the war was over, they’d been granted permission to move on into Maryland. When they’d gone from the warlord Marshall and his expanded kingdom, they’d had good clothes and supplies. They’d found nothing but wild people after that—abandoned farms and shadows in the thick forest and overgrown towns. The small villages and loose power that men like Marshall had held over the interior lands between the ravaged cities would not be found along the devastated ruin of the eastern coast.

One morning, in the center of a town that had burned to the ground long before the Boy had been born, standing in the overgrown weed-choked outline of an intersection, Sergeant Presley said, “If there is anyone here, I’ll find them in the Capitol—or in the president’s bunker below the White House.” They were both looking at an old fire hydrant that had been knocked out into the road. The road was covered in hardened dirt that had once been muddy sludge.

“Who am I kidding?” Sergeant Presley had suddenly erupted into the silence of the place. “There ain’t anybody left. There wasn’t since it all went sideways and there hasn’t been since. I know that. I’ve known it all along!”

His shouted words fell into the thick forest turning to swamp. An unseen bird called out weirdly, as if in response.

“But orders are orders,” he’d said softly, his sudden rage gone. “And someone had to come and find out. Once I know, we’ll head back to the Army in Oakland. We got to cross the whole country. You up for that, Boy?”

Sergeant Presley had smiled at him then.

The Boy remembered, nodding to himself.

“Still, it’d be nice if someone was there. That’d be something,” Sergeant Presley had said.

But there hadn’t been.

Now, beside the fire in the mountains as the first big snow of winter came on, almost to the other side of the country, the Boy knew there hadn’t been anyone in the old Capitol or at the president’s bunker beneath the White House.

Sergeant Presley was gone all that next day.

In the morning the Sergeant had put on some special gear they’d found in a place called Fort. They’d spent two weeks looking through the place, scouring warehouses that had long since been looted, searching through ash and rubble. Finally, in a desk drawer they’d found the gear Sergeant Presley had been looking for.

“Some clerk probably got told to bring in his MOPP gear in case things went that way in those days. So he brings it in and his section sergeant checks it and then sends him off to do paperwork. And now I’m gonna wear it and hope the charcoal and other protectants are gonna hold out long enough to get me to the White House without getting radiation poisoning.”

When he’d left, wearing the dull green cloth and rubber shoes, fitting the gas mask and hood over his head, Sergeant Presley had looked like a monster.

He was gone all that day.

Sitting by the fire, the Boy couldn’t remember what he’d done after that. Probably exploring with Horse.

In the swarming-insect early evening, outside the Capitol in the swamp camp, it was misty. The gloomy ruins of the Capitol faded in the soft light of dusk. It looked like a dream. The Boy remembered that in the last moments of light, the Capitol, whatever it had once been, looked like a dream castle—like something that might have once had meaning for him. Like things that seem so important in a dream, but when you awake, those things seem of little value and you can’t imagine why they’d held such a place in the dream.

That was what the Capitol had looked like to the Boy in those last moments of daylight.

In the early evening of that long lost waiting-day, Sergeant Presley had finally come up the hill to their camp above the swamp. Threading his way through the tall grass, Sergeant Presley took off the bug-eyed gas mask. He dropped or threw the mask off into the sea of silent yellow grass. He tore off the suit, coughing. Crystal droplets of sweat stood out in his short curly hair.

The Boy gave him water from their bag, then some of the cakes they always made back then.

“Still hot in there.” Sergeant Presley coughed.

The Boy said nothing.

“Hot” meant forbidden. If sometimes they saw a city on the horizon, like the one by the big lake, its tall towers skeletal and bent, Sergeant Presley would simply say “still hot.” And sometimes he would add, ”When you’re an old man, if you live long enough, you can go in there. But I never will.”

Sergeant Presley drank more water and coughed.

“I woulda brought you somethin’, but it’s too hot in there. I swear I came right up on a bomb crater. Must’ve been low yield. But hell if it didn’t go up twenty degrees. I look around and everything is black ash. Even the marble on one of them old government buildings, the House I think it was called, had turned black.”

He coughed again.

He will never stop coughing, thought the Boy. That was when the coughing had started. That day everything changed, though at the time neither of them knew it.

Sergeant Presley knew it, he suspected. But he didn’t say anything.

Sergeant Presley coughed again.

“Made it all the way to the White House.”

He coughed and then drank, swallowing thickly.

“There was never anything there. It wasn’t a direct hit. See, back then our enemies were fighting unconventionally. Dirty-bomb strikes by remote-controlled aircraft launched within our borders. Terrorists. They went after Washington early on. We knew that. It wasn’t until later, when China got involved, that we didn’t know for sure what had really happened anywhere. After that it was just plain dark everywhere.”

He chewed numbly on the cake, staring at their wispy fire. The Boy watched him, saying nothing.

“The bunker was a deep hole. Must’ve used the Chinese equivalent of a J-Dam on it. I saw one of those take out the TransAmerica Building in Frisco. I’ll show you when we get there. Anyways, they must have used a ‘bunker buster’ on it. Then, whether before or after, there must have been a nuclear strike, probably an airburst. Whole place was cooked.”

He coughed, choking on the cake.

NOW THE BOY looked up at the night sky. It had stopped snowing. The stars were out, shimmering in the late night or early morning. His face was hot. He stood up and walked to the cliff wall.

He leaned against it, feeling the cold stone on his back.

You should sleep, Boy. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.

I wish, thought the Boy, that all of the days that had been were long days. I wish you were here.

He did not hear the voice of Sergeant Presley and wondered if he had ever heard it. Or if he would ever hear it again.

As he walked back to the fire, a pebble fell off the side of the cliff and the Boy turned, staring up into the heights. His shadow loomed large against the wall. He saw his powerful, strong right arm and when he moved the withered left arm, it looked little more than a thin branch.

He stared at the wall and its many shadows. For a moment he could almost see a man.

The man was sitting. Hunched over. Staring sightlessly out into the world. His hand was holding something up to his mouth.

A cake.

It was as though he was looking at Sergeant Presley on that hot, sweaty, and very long day outside the ruins of the Capitol.

Sergeant Presley, sitting, tired, sweating. Eating a cake. Alive.

He turned back to the fire after staring at the image for too long. But he wished it were true. He wished Sergeant Presley were here with him now, across the country. Almost to the Army. Alive.

He picked up a piece of burnt wood from Escondido’s lodge.

He turned back to the cliff wall.

And he began to draw that long lost day. Sergeant Presley at the end of his mission. At the end of his country. At the beginning of the end of his life.

Chapter Fourteen

AT FIRST LIGHT he checked the river. In a pool off the main channel he spotted three trout lying in the current, close to the bottom. He watched them for a long while, listening to the constant, steady crash of the river downstream.

The backs of the trout remind him of broken green glass bottles he’d once seen in a building where he and Sergeant Presley had slept for the night. “Wine bottles” Sergeant Presley muttered simply, as an epitaph over the heap of green glass. The Boy remembered holding a piece up, examining it in the wavering light of their fire. “Careful,” Sergeant Presley had warned him. “Don’t cut yourself, Boy.”

He found a long piece of driftwood waiting on the rocks by the river, left by the springtime flooding of that year. He returned to camp with the driftwood and after inspecting Horse’s wound, which looked bad and worse now in the bright light of morning, he dug out wet grass from underneath the snowfall and laid it near Horse’s head. Horse seemed not to notice.

He laid more wood on the fire, its wetness making white smoke erupt into the cold air.

The Boy sat down next to the smoking fire with the driftwood stick lying away from his body. Taking one end of the wood, he cut long peels of bark away from himself and soon the white flesh of the wood underneath lay exposed. He fed the soft peels of wood into the fire as he continued to bring the stick to a point. In the end, it became a sharp spear.

He returned to the pool and waited. There was no sign of the broken-wine-bottle-colored trout. He sat on his haunches watching the gentle current drift along the bottom of the rock-covered pool.

Later, one of the fish entered the pool. The Boy waited, watching it move first one way and then another. He got little flashes of white from off its belly as it turned. Finding the current, the emerald-colored trout settled into it. After a moment, when the Boy knew it would be sleeping, he raised up, leaning over the pool, the spear drawn back over his good shoulder, the point just above the surface of the water.

He waited.

He felt a breath enter his lungs and as he let the air go, when there was little left in him, he plunged the spear through the surface, catching the trout in the back, just behind its head. It bent to the left, sending up a splash of water with its wide tail, and the Boy hauled it from the pool, amazed at his prize. Its rainbow-colored flanks fell away from its wine-bottle back, the white belly pure and meaty. It was a creature of beauty.

When the catch was gutted and spitted over the smoking fire, the Boy made more herb paste and applied it to Horse’s wound, wiping away the oozing pus as best he could.

He’d tried to lead Horse to the water before doing this, but the animal wouldn’t even bother to raise his head, much less stand.

“Okay, rest then,” said the Boy and heard the croak in his voice against the deafening fall of water over rock.

When the fish was cooked, he walked while eating, back to the drawing of Sergeant Presley on the cliff wall. He’d worked on it late into the night, immune to the cold. When he’d returned to the fire, he’d felt frozen. The heat stung his skin as it warmed him. He’d thought the drawing had been complete, but now looking at it in the late-morning light he could see where features would need to be added—filled in and shaded.

In the afternoon he tried to improve the shelter, but other than laying green pine branches across the top, there was little that could be done.

You’ve got to find better shelter, Boy! If this lodge was here from before the war then chances are there are others like it.

The Boy had seen many buildings from Before built in clusters; the towns they had passed through and the cities he had wanted to visit. Clusters.

In the afternoon he walked upriver with his tomahawk and knife. His withered left side felt stiff, but he concentrated on its movements, controlling it, willing his leg to step over fallen logs instead of dragging as it would’ve liked to if he’d ridden Horse for days at a time.

He heard a loud twig snap underneath his feet.

Too loud, Boy! No go.

Everything Sergeant Presley had taught him had been graded. When the time had come for the Boy to perform a task, the standard for pass or fail was always “good to go” or “no go”. He’d hated when Sergeant Presley wrenched his mouth to the side and said, “No go.”

Upstream the river began to curve to the north, winding through a series of rapids. Off to the left he could see the steep, conical mountain Escondido had warned him of, where at the top a bear made its den.

It was winter now. Bears should be asleep.

There were no other lodges, or if there had been, what remained of them could not be found.

It was hard to imagine the world as a place where people could either live in cities or in the forest. What was so special about cities?

You always wanted to go there, Boy.

I did. I wanted to know what was in them.

And …

What would I have been like if I had lived in one?

Standing at the bend in the river, feeling his withered leg and arm stiffen in the late-afternoon cold as the sun fell behind tall peaks to the west, he thought of people he once knew and could not remember.

They had always lived in the cold plains. His first memory was of running. Of a woman screaming. Of seeing the sky, blue and cold in one moment, and the ground, yellow stubble, race by in the next.

Sergeant Presley had rarely mentioned “your people.”

Not like in tents, not like your people.

All gone over to animals, not like your people.

They don’t ride horses, like your people do.

THAT NIGHT THE temperature dropped and the snow came down in hard clumps without end. He lay next to Horse, who moved little and whose breathing was shallow. At one point, the Boy was so cold he thought he should surely die.

When he awoke in the morning everything was covered in snow.

THE BEST TIME to do something about a thing is to do it now, Boy!

We won’t last out here another night.

When Horse opened his eyes they fluttered.

You won’t make it out here like this, will you, Horse?

He laid his hand on Horse’s belly, feeling the heat both comforting and sickening at once.

He knew what he had to do. He had known it in the freezing night when the snow had stopped falling and the wind rushed through the pines, seeming to make things even colder than when the snow had fallen. Even the sound of the icy water falling along the rapids seemed to make the world colder.

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