Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) (17 page)

“Pretty
much. I worked it out while I was dancing, in fact. Your old partner is probably
going to leave here with his top advisors, a corps of gunmen he thinks he can
trust, and all the loot that’s portable. He doesn’t give a shit about the men
he leaves behind,” Georgia said. “He’ll leave them this territory while he goes
off on his own.”

Clay
nodded and tipped his hat to Georgia. “Ma’am, you are both lovely, wise and a
good dancer. If you can shoot, too, I’ll have to marry you.”

Georgia
cocked an eyebrow and ran her palm over the pale stippling of scars on her
cheek.

“The
last man that asked me to marry him tried to get a shotgun divorce later on,”
she said. “He couldn’t shoot any better than he screwed, luckily.”

“There’s
no accounting for fools,” Clay said, frowning majestically. “I suppose that I
will need to seek your favor by showing some familiarity with both of those
skills?”

Grey
ignored the banter, which continued, growing gradually more lewd and finally
making Ronald blush and walk his horse ahead, out of earshot. Grey thought he
was missing his new blonde friend.

If
Georgia was right, he reflected as they rode back to camp, and Creedy moved
with a smaller force, pulling the head and heart out of his organization
instead of taking it wholesale, that opened up possibilities. A smaller group
with fewer men could be split, driven, worked on over time and miles. There
were still questions - too many of them to make any plans - but there were
possibilities.

Maybe
they could do this.

The
Colonel and his aide stood at the window of the old Billings Hotel and watched
a horse drawn plow rattle past, clearing the roadway of wet April snow. The
aide, a young man with blonde hair cropped short, read through a series of
reports: Ammunition, animals, men healthy, men ill, fuel stocks, fodder. They
moved to a dark oak desk against the wall. The older man signed the papers with
a silver fountain pen.

“I
want them all ready to start moving in a month, Purvis,” he said as he approved
a requisition for sulfa powder for the medical corps, then lay the pen aside
and straightened his narrow tie.

“Sir?
Not this fall?”

“No.
We’ve received information that makes an early arrival in central Washington
important,” the Colonel said. His accent was Bostonian, with broad vowels and a
lazy sound that contrasted with his stiff, perfect posture.

“We
may not have rail support then, sir. The engineers say they need to fix
sections of track west of here, and the scouts haven’t checked all the bridges
through Idaho yet.” Purvis fussed with his stack of papers. He hated surprises.

“We’ll
make do,” the Colonel said. “If we have to rely on cavalry and infantry, we’ll
still have the force we need. Just let the corps commanders know. Today. We
move out May first.”

“Yes
sir.” Purvis saluted and hurried from the suite. The Colonel returned to the window,
staring down as a squad marched past, each man in mottled olive, each shoulder
bearing the shield and eagle of the CDF. They were a fresh unit, raised here in
Montana, and a few had trouble keeping time. Somewhere in the distance a diesel
engine blatted into rumbling life for a few moments, and the heavy sound
rattled the window glass.

It
was eight hundred miles to the Larson Homeland Security Center. At a steady
march without the railway to speed progress, that was six weeks travel time,
the Colonel mused. That would put his forces on the spot in mid-June, with good
weather. With luck, they’d be able to pull some of the tankers across the
mountains, and that would allow for the vehicles to lend support.

He
moved to the faded green couch that faced a long-dead wall mount TV and sat
down, careful to fold his uniform jacket over the couch arm first. On the
glass-topped coffee table facing the couch sat a Bakelite box as big as a
suitcase. He thumbed the combination into the wheeled lock on its front and
lifted the cover free, exposing a nest of copper wire and vacuum tubes. Four
large paper-wrapped dry cells occupied fully half the space in the case. A
folded headset and key rested atop the components, and a brown-backed notebook.
The colonel picked up the notebook and opened it.

A
series of scrambled numbers and letters was written in his own hand, and below
it:

Creedy
moving by July, taking part of garrison. Plan head into Canada, probably
Okanagan. Unknown if Creedy aware of materials.

“And
now it’s a race,” Rastowich said, closing the book.

Georgia
lay in thick sagebrush on a hillock overlooking a stretch of crumbled road.
Three hundred yards from her position a Shell station crouched, the yellow
clamshell sign speckled with bullet holes and faded to a powdery gold. The
building sat where the old secondary highway crossed a smaller road. It was a
big one with four pump islands and an attached repair bay; an old truckstop
sitting in the midst of a vast asphalt patch. Six horses were tied to the pumps
under the building’s peeling canopy. Much of the tin and ply roofing had been
torn away by windstorms and the canopy was now just a scaffolding of rusty
steel that cast a dappled web of shadows. The station itself was of
cinderblock, and still in fair shape. The windows were long gone, but someone
had nailed corrugated steel over the larger gaps. One man was visible. He wore
a coyote-hide jacket and green pants and had a squashed green safari cap on his
head. He carried a shotgun slung on a rope over his shoulder. Georgia watched
him through her rifle’s scope. She could see him clearly, and could read the
boredom and annoyance on his face. For no reason she could see he paused and
swatted one of the horses, making it shuffle a step sideways.

It
had taken a week to find out about this little garrison, which locals just
called The Shell, and it was to supply the first key they needed to open the
doors of the Castle.

The
area around the station was agricultural, with fields and solitary houses, each
marked by the smoke of fires. There was little livestock other than chickens
and a few sheep. The station itself sat amongst the ruins that clustered at the
junction. None of the closest buildings were inhabited or inhabitable. Fire had
swept through them at some point, and most were roofless jumbles of warped,
rotting two-by-fours and disintegrating particle board, or gaping basements;
pits full of brambles and broken glass. Georgia saw movement, and tracked the
rifle to it.

Harmon,
dressed in ragged bib overalls, was moving up the intersecting road, pushing a
pair of heavily-loaded bags draped across a bicycle. The bike’s tires were long
gone, and Georgia could imagine the sound the rims made on the broken asphalt.
She monitored her breathing and balanced tautness in her stomach with smooth, cool
thoughts. It was all math, she reminded herself.

The
man in the coyote furs spotted Harmon, and unslung his shotgun, cradling it in
the crook of his right arm as he moved to meet him. Harmon stopped pushing and
wiped his face with his sleeve. He smiled in a goofy way that made him look
light on brains, and waited for the guard to reach him. Behind the guard, Grey,
Mal and Clay left the cover of the weeds and trotted across the parking lot to
the near wall of the station. Grey leaned his head around the corner to make
sure Harmon had seen, and waved a hand. Clay and mal started around the rear of
the building.

Harmon
talked for a few more seconds, then gestured at the bike, and reached into the
far sack’s open top. Georgia watched as he withdrew something, unhurriedly, and
turned back to the guard who stumbled backward and fell. The sound of the shot
reached her a split-second later, followed by another as Harmon shifted the gun
to a two-handed grip and finished the fallen man. He was off and running, then,
reaching a hiding spot in the nearest ruins before the fallen bicycle’s wheels
came to rest.

Within
seconds men were boiling out of the station, each one armed with pistols or
shotguns. Four sprinted toward their fallen friend, while the other stopped
near the horses, peering around in confusion. Grey stepped around the corner
with his rifle shouldered and shot him as he turned to the movement, then
stepped back as the four in the road returned fire. Three charged toward the
corner Grey had ducked behind, while one dashed for the remains of a ruined
house not far from where Harmon had hidden. Georgia tracked him, hyper-alert,
and squeezed off a single shot. She led for his motion and the distance without
conscious thought. He fell and did not move. She felt a brief pulse of cool
satisfaction and released the breath she had held.

The
survivors heard the crack of the rifle and crouched against the front wall of
the building, staring wildly about. Clay and Mal stepped around the front
corner of the station, and there was a brief burst of pistol fire. Mal walked
forward, checking the open doorway as he darted across, and stood looking at
the three where they had fallen in a heap. Georgia saw him shoot one of the men
as he lay. Grey joined them and he and Mal moved inside, while Clay took up a
position near the horses. Harmon reappeared, with Ronald and Sowter, from where
they had been ready in the ruins, and joined him. It was over, and Georgia’s
one empty was still hot when she picked it up.

Georgia
watched while the shell case cooled in her hand but saw nothing moving. The
brief moment of satisfaction had passed, and she sighed as she slung the big
rifle and went to fetch the horses.

The
inside of the station was filthy and stank of body odor, pot, spoiled food and
urine. The shelving had been shifted to barricade the windows behind the layers
of sheet steel and the dead men had ranged a circle of chairs around a stained
table in the room’s center. Cards and earthenware bottles exuding a sour yeast
stink lay scattered on it. In the old stockroom, they found the bedrolls of the
little garrison. In one of the bathrooms they found a girl, probably fourteen
or fifteen, chained to a sink and crouched in her own filth. She wouldn’t
speak, but sat unmoving as Clay, with a file found in the junk-filled repair
bay, sawed through the padlock anchoring the chain around her throat. She
remained silent and still when Doc later examined her. Ronald found as clean a
blanket as he could and draped it around her shoulders. He went outside and
threw up, afterward. Mal patted him on the back as he came back in, but said
nothing.

Clay
and Sowter found three rusty steel cases, each with a padlock, stacked behind
the counter that had held the till. They called Grey over.

“That’s
them,” he agreed. “Let’s get those loaded. Go ahead and use some of their
horses.”

Doc
emerged from the back room.

“Grey,
we need to talk,” he said. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and
sighed.

“Talk
quick, we need to get loaded and get out of here.”

“The
girl. She’s catatonic, or close to it. I can’t leave her.”

“You
can’t stay,” Grey almost shouted. “Sorry. You knew what this would be like.
What do you want me to do about her?”

“We
have to take her along, just until I can find someone to take care of her.”

Ronald
was pale but listening. He nodded. “I can watch her, Grey.”

“I’d
argue but there’s no goddamn time. You two get her on a horse, I don’t care
how. We need to get out of here before anyone gets too curious. The locals will
be scared off by all the shooting, but only for a while.”

Sowter,
Harmon and Georgia watched while the horses were loaded and the blanket-wrapped
girl was manhandled onto a quiet horse. They were away less than half an hour
after the first shot, and saw no one.

“You’d
have thought there would be one or two come down to see what the noise was
about,” Sowter grunted as they made their way around the base of the hill and
back into the scabland beyond.

Grey
nodded, eyes sweeping across the nearest farmhouses where they hid in their
clumps of shade trees. “How scared does that make them? That not one came down
to see?”

They
camped that night on a ridge ten miles west of the Shell station. It was the
first night in a long time that they had seen the meteors so thick, and a
dazzling spray of them waxed and waned throughout the night. All were short
sparks of fire, with none of the lumbering trails of thunder that had been
common a decade before. Grey watched them for a while before falling asleep. He
wondered if anyone wished on them anymore.

Sometime
during the night or early morning, the girl crawled away, avoiding whichever of
them had been on watch at the time. She had left a heap of blankets to
counterfeit a body in her bedroll and she wasn’t missed until dawn. When it got
light enough to follow her trail, they tracked her through thorny bushes to a
precipice overlooking a tumbled mass of jagged basalt. Her body, thin and pale,
lay among them. The ground was hard and rocky, so they built a cairn over her
where she lay.

Doc
said a few words. Ronald said nothing, but he was the last to leave the grave.

Grey
wondered if she’d known the cliff was there.