Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) (26 page)

Georgia
was on watch.

“Quick,
take a look, they’re coming,” she said. The others left their bedrolls and
peered at the Castle, rubbing their eyes.

One
of the huge steel doors set belowground gaped open, and a string of riders was
exiting, milling as they formed up in the shadow of the building. Grey tried to
count heads, but gave up as they roiled and circled, waiting as two wagons,
both made of ancient camp-trailers, crept up the ramps, pulled by teams of four
horses. The faint barking of dogs reached them.

“That’ll
be him,” Grey said as the riders formed up around the wagons and started north.
They followed the flat land that led between the rocky-topped hills, and would
pass to the watchers’ left, if they held their course.

Mal
lay fully concealed behind two boulders, peering down a battered telescope.
After a moment he sat back, collapsed the brass tube and tucked it into his
jacket.

“I
wonder what he has in those Winnebagos?” he asked.

“My
retirement fund,” Georgia said.

“We’ll
give them a day to get clear of the local area,” Grey said. “The wagons make
them slow, and we can afford to wait until they’re out of reach of their
friends.”

The
watchers packed up, then ate before setting out, allowing the caravan to make
its way out of sight between the bluffs to the north before mounting and
following.

The
day was clear and hot, and before long Grey and his riders were soaked with
sweat. They rode at a slow walk, afraid of catching the caravan; too slow for
their motion to provide a cooling breeze. In the afternoon they paused and Grey
went ahead to scout. He returned two hours later.

“There’s
a shallow creek up ahead - we’ll water the horses,” he reported. “Creedy and
his men crossed an hour or so back. He left a pair to watch his back trail, so
I stayed hid until they left.”

Mal
nodded. Clay gigged his horse until he sat beside Georgia and leaned over to
whisper to her. She snickered. Grey turned his horse and led the way to the
ford.

Clay
dismounted, cursing as his feet slipped in the churned clay of the creek’s
bank. He slogged off to Georgia, who had dismounted farther up the hill.

Mal
remained in the saddle while his horse drank, staring northward.

“Tomorrow?”
he asked in a low voice, pitched for Grey alone.

Grey
nodded. “Tomorrow. At the bridge by Brewster.”

  “Et ne nous
soumets pas à la tentation,” Mal said, his eyes on the ridgeline to the north.
“Mais délivre-nous du mal. Amen.” He grinned.

They rode hard, the
horses grateful for the exercise after a slow day, swinging in a great loop
east through the scablands. They passed scattered farmhouses, with lights in
some of the windows, and startled small herds of cattle that rumbled away in
the dark. There were no garrison posts to avoid on the route Creedy had taken.
They made fifteen miles, and crossed the flat concrete span of the old Brewster
bridge in purple predawn light.

Brewster lay east
and north of the usual trade route through Wenatchee. The ruined town had an
unhappy reputation, and had never been resettled after the Fall. The
inhabitants had fallen prey to one of the sicknesses that killed millions, and
survivors had fled, some taking the plague to settlements that took them in. In
the end, people had written Brewster off as somewhere to avoid, and years later
it stood stripped and empty, a few dozen buildings crumbling slowly back into
the ground. The bridge remained, though, firm on massive piers while the
Columbia rolled endlessly on beneath it, blue-green and deep and powerful. It
had a muddy, vital smell.

Clay and Mal found
cover in the ruins at the bridge’s northern end, in the mazes left by toppled
walls and rusted cars. They would stay hidden and engage Creedy’s men from the
rear if they crossed. Georgia and Grey settled in on a brushy hillside north
and west of the bridge, where they had a view of its entire length.

The waiting began.

The
town had clustered around the two ends of the bridge, with the body of it on
the northern bank. A narrow mercantile strip of brick and cinderblock ran
east-west along the old highway route, paralleling the rusted rails of a spur
line. The north end of the bridge entered what had been the southern
residential section, far away from the few still-standing warehouses.

Brewster
lay silent and ruinous, acacias, sycamores and twisted pines softening the
rubble and slowly reclaiming the streets. It was a dead place, a bad pace. In
an area where settlements were steadily growing, no one built near it. Feral
cats were rare, and dogs were wholly absent. Outside the ducks and geese on the
river, they saw no birds.

Afterward,
Grey blamed himself for failing to ask why.

Rat
was blind in one eye, but his hearing was the sharpest among all his brothers.
He lay curled in the infested rags that were his bed, listening as the distant
sound of hooves stopped. He rolled over, careful not to bump his head on the
cobwebbed timbers of the crawlspace. The family had moved under the old school
after its roof had collapsed, and had dug a series of shallow burrows in the
clay beneath the foundations. He crawled through the fetid dark on knees
scabbed and calloused, pausing to poke and hiss at Cutter and Bugs where they
lay curled in their own nests.

“There’s
someone here,” he lisped, his crooked teeth yellow as butter. What little light
there was seeped through the ground-glass windows set in the foundation. “Tell
Ma, and get everyone ready.”

Rat
was hungry. Lately the family’s diet had consisted of ground squirrels and the
little striped snakes that were common in the weeds near the river. It had been
a long time since anyone had stopped in Brewster. He drooled a little, wiping
it on the wrinkled leather vest he wore.

Cutter
scrabbled away, moving with spidery agility, and Bugs followed, chanting
nonsense under his breath. Coughs and whispers multiplied in the rank shadows
as the others woke.

Rat
was excited. Mama would be proud of him for hearing the newcomers.

And
maybe she’d quit looking at him so hungry.

Creedy,
flanked by Hollis and Gregor, paused on the ridge above the Columbia, eyeing
the long bridge below, narrow and dark against the reflected glare of the
river.

The
caravan waited while Creedy scanned the far shore with binoculars. It was fully
ten minutes before he dropped them to swing from their strap about his neck,
and gestured with his right hand. The caravan started toward the river, riders
both before and behind the wagons, which wallowed on suspensions long-since
gone soft.

“If
there’s anyone there, it’s only a few, and well hidden,” Creedy said. He wore
his inevitable neat khakis, still clean despite the days of travel. He’d
managed to shave, as well.

“Do
you have any idea who has been hitting us? Why Potter’s Creek? Why Mattawa?”
Hollis asked when the troopers were out of range.

Creedy
shook his head. Gregor, his size dwarfing the quarterhorse he rode, eyed the
bridge and frowned.

“If
they want the Castle, they can have it, now,” Creedy said. “If they want us,
then this bridge is a great spot to try.”

Hollis
pointedly avoided looking back at the brushy slope behind the column, where six
sharpshooters lay hidden. She sucked air through her teeth, looking at the
width of the river, instead.

“We’re
not going to have accurate cover fire if anything happens. It’s too far,” she
said.

“True,
but having bullets whiz past should make them keep their heads down,” Creedy
said. “We’re going to have to treat each bridge this way, and we have many more
to come.”

“I
know. Let’s get it over with,” Hollis said, spurring her horse forward.

Georgia
had settled behind a low concrete wall screened by the hanging branches of a
willow tree. She watched Creedy’s men as they began descending to the bridge’s
far end, studying them through her rifle’s scope. The bridge was a long one,
and the riders who led the group were still the better part of a mile off as
they mounted the span.

“When
the last of them gets in range, you start at the back. Hopefully that’ll run
the leaders across,” Grey said, watching over her shoulder.

Georgia
counted heads.

“There’s
a lot of them. Are you sure you want them coming this way?”

Grey
grunted and shrugged. “There’s less than I’d expected. If they don’t panic and
split up, then we pull back and try again later. We just need to thin them down
and worry them.”

Georgia
tracked the rifle slowly. The Castle’s men were clad in a mix of old jackets
and rough leather garb, and most wore hats or bandanas to ward off the
increasing heat of the day. As they came closer she could see that they were
almost all armed. Perhaps a third carried rifles; the rest had shotguns or
pistols. Creedy had brought his best. The wagons reached the south end of the
bridge and waited there. She didn’t expect they would try to cross until a
signal was given. There would be no way to turn the teams around on the bridge.
The rear of the column was at the midpoint of the bridge and the lead riders
were within the limits of her range, she thought.

“You
should get ready,” she said. “It won’t be long.” She tilted her head, feeling
the stippled plastic of the stock sticky against her cheek.

Grey
moved in a doubled-over shuffle, taking a position a hundred yards to Georgia’s
left, behind a forked tree that was nearer the northern end of the bridge, and
which overlooked the tangle of rubble where Mal and Clay hid.

The
fork was at shoulder level, and Grey stood, leaning against the trunk, resting
his rifle across the crotch of the tree.

The
riders were cautious, moving in slow advances. They kept close to the staggered
string of rusted vehicles that had died on the bridge, screening themselves as
cover allowed. Near the column’s far end, Grey caught a brief glimpse of a
figure in beige, sandy-haired and erect. It was strange to see Kingsnake
without his bandana, Grey thought, but his posture was unmistakable. He shuddered;
a mix of emotion rising into a knot in his chest. There was hate there, and
self-loathing, and an odd sadness. He shook himself and raised his head from
his rifle. The column’s head was two hundred yards off, now, the trailing end
where Creedy rode perhaps six hundred. He glanced to his left, to the warrens
where Mal and Clay would be hidden.

Something,
mottled brown and white, moved on the road to the bridge, darting behind the
rusted hulk of a pickup. Grey shifted, swinging the rifle and peering through
the scope.

Clay
rested with his back against a sun-warmed section of brick wall in a ruined
house forty yards from the bridge. He fought the urge to peek at the span and
the approaching men, and slowly rolled the cylinder of his revolver with the
fingers of his left hand, listening to the click of the pawl as each chamber
rolled under the barrel. He had folded his heavier coat away, and wore a light
denim jacket. Its right pocket was heavy with several speed loaders, each
filled with fat yellow cartridges. A handful of loose shells counterweighted
the left.

Stay
quiet, let us pull them,
Grey had said.
When they’re all
across, hit their rear quick and hard and then get out of there. No heroics. We
do what we can, then fall back. If we get separated, meet up tomorrow where we
camped yesterday.

“Simple
as pie,” Clay whispered to himself, adjusting his hat. He wondered what Georgia
was doing. He wondered if Doc and Sowter were all right, and if they’d gotten
Ronald home, yet.

Some
sound or flicker of shadow made him turn his head to the left, and Clay gaped,
his eyes going round.

Something
with matted, filthy hair was sprinting at him, low to the ground and silent.
Its feet were bare and made almost no noise as it rushed through the debris.
Its face was hidden by the tangled locks and stained beard that blew back with
its speed, and eyes surrounded by a circle of white sclera stared madly from
the darkness under the brows.

For
a split second Clay thought it was nude and had some terrible skin disease that
made its hide sag in dusky wattles. Then he realized the apparition was wearing
the badly tanned skin of another man, crudely altered into a jacket and
trousers, held in place with thongs of hide. The crotch of the pants was
adorned with the shriveled penis of the former owner, jouncing stiffly as the
creature sprinted.

Clay
froze while much of his mind gibbered and refused to process what he was
seeing. A tiny corner of rationality screamed at him to move, but without
effect. He would have been crouching, gun drooping from nerveless fingers,
while the thing cut his throat with its knife, but it jerked upright just a
pace away. A half-second later the boom of a gunshot rolled across Brewster.
The creature stumbled, muttered something that sounded like “nana”, and fell
forward. Clay could see the raw red hole in its back where the bullet had
exited, toothed with white bone fragments.