Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) (9 page)

“They’ll
leave,” Tom said. Clay snorted and the Port manager turned to stare. Grey
nodded at Clay.

“I
don’t know if I’m on Grey’s train of thought here, but let me run this by you,
Tom,” Clay drawled. “If the raiders can’t get in at you they’ll do a couple
things unless they’re stupid. They’ll burn out what’s left of the city around
you, just to do it. That probably won’t matter much. You’ve got a fair
firebreak of concrete and brick round the wall. What they’ll do after is the
portion that’ll hurt you. They’ll spread out and take the homesteads. You’ll
lose your customers and suppliers, and will be sitting alone in your castle
while the raiders take over everything around you. Even if they move on after
stripping the valley, you’ll still wind up boss of a dead town in six months.
That about it, Grey?”

Grey
nodded. Henry cleared his throat.

“My
dad is worried about something similar after he gave the whole thing some
thought. He said we could either fight them or hope they’d treat us fair, but
that no-one ever won a siege.”

Josie
hissed through her teeth and Grey raised an eyebrow.

“Well,
I don’t want to be devil’s advocate, but what chance do we really have to beat
these boys if we ride out to meet them? Grey, you prowled around and counted
guns, you talked to everybody you could this fall, what do you really think?”

“I
think it’s going to be hard. We can’t fight them straight on unless I saw all
there were, and I don’t think that’s likely. But there’s chokepoints we can
make work for us, and we can fool them into making some assumptions that’ll
hurt them, if we do it right and if they make it here.”

“If?”
Tom asked, looking confused.

“We
have to make it too costly, and too uncomfortable, for them to want to move on
us at all, if we can,” Grey said. “I’ve been pondering it over the winter. We
have to worry them.”

“How
do you propose we do that?” Tom asked. His smile was back.

“We
do, partly, what you want to do - we dig in at a few spots to make them work if
they get here. But we also hit them early and often and in spots they don’t
expect,” Grey said. “Most importantly, we do it first.”

“Do
you mean go south?” Josie asked.

“I
do, with a small group who I think can do the job.”

“You
have people in mind?” Doc asked, rocking back in his chair.

“Some,
but I want to ask each in private. I don’t want anyone going out of guilt, or
because they’re worried people will know they chose not to go. This won’t be a
camping trip for fun,” Grey said.

“I’ll
go,” Clay said, and finished his bourbon in a single long sip.

“Thanks,
I’d kinda figured on asking you,” Grey said, smiling a little.

“I’m
coming, too,” Doc said. Grey stopped smiling and glared at the old physician,
who waved a hand to cut him off. “Don’t even start. You’ll need me before
you’re done. I’m not planning on shooting anyone, but I expect there’ll be some
get hurt.”

“Doc,
that’s noble, but we need you for the community,” Tom said, spreading his
hands. “You can’t just run off on some secret mission.”

“I
don’t work for you, Tom,” Doc said, “and I know my job. You have half a dozen
good midwives, and the hills are full of amateur pharmacists that can handle
most things. Hell, get Three Bears from the Westbank Nation. He’s at least as
good as I am as a family practitioner. I’m a trauma surgeon, and this is what I
do. Did.”

Grey
didn’t look happy, nor did Tom, but Doc’s expression hinted that argument was a
waste of breath. Josie rolled her eyes and managed a smile.

“I
can’t shoot for beans, but I’m good at gathering gossip, so I’ll stay here. My
sister, though. You remember Georgia?” she asked, poking Grey with a boot under
the table.

“She
that short, snakey woman with the evil green eyes?” Grey asked.

“Yes,
my twin sister, you ass,” Josie said. “She’s living at the Dell, now. She has a
ranch and a bunch of horses, but she ran with some of the rough crowd for years
after our parents died. She says she’s bored. I’ll see if she’s available.”

“I’ll
take anyone who knows what the stakes are, you know that, Josie. Be sure she
understands what this will be like,” Grey said.

“You
never knew her very well. Trust me, she’ll enjoy this.”

“That’s
scary,” Clay said.

“
She’s
scary,” Josie replied.

“Then
I guess we want her in the tent pointed out,” Clay said, pouring himself
another drink.

“When
will you want to go?” Tom asked. Grey’s opinion of him rose a bit when the Port
manager didn’t bother making an excuse for not volunteering.

“Soon
as the snow’s gone and the mud’s not too bad,” Grey answered. “April, probably,
and keep it quiet, please. Let me do the asking, and keep what you’ve heard
here to yourselves. Your father will be all sorts of curious, Henry, so you
take him aside and tell him in private. Tell him I’ll be out your way next
week. We can talk more, then.”

“I’ll
keep working on the Port’s defenses,” Tom said. “I assume that’ll be in line
with keeping your plan quiet?”

Grey
nodded. “And it’s insurance, anyway. We’ve got to assume nothing will work
right, because it never does.”

The
cabin was hot as an oven with so many present, and Grey stepped outside
following more small-talk. Snow squeaked under his boots and the air was cold
enough to freeze the mucus in his nose with each breath. The horses whickered,
blowing clouds of steam, thick as cream in the moonlight.

The
winter silence stood between the ranks of trees with a weight and presence
accentuated by the small noises of the horses, the muffled murmur from inside
the cabin as people bedded down. The stars were bright and hard overhead and a
lone meteor trailed for a second before guttering. Grey liked the quiet, he
reflected, liked being alone. It was safe. Now he was going to have friends
involved. He shuddered and hunched his shoulders. He went back inside and went
to bed.

The
trail bent south, through a series of tiny towns burnt or at war, through
roving bands feeding off each other as the season ground slowly toward the
spring. No one knew then how long that first winter would be; how quiet the
spring after.

Grey
followed the track of the survivors. He had killed two the first night after
the murder of his family. The men hadn’t been wary, then, and he had cut one’s
throat as he slept, holding him down, smothering his choking gasps with his own
bedding. The second had awoken as Grey took the dead one’s shotgun. The boy
shot him in the face and retreated to the woods, his heartbeat jackhammering in
his ears. The blast had scattered the picketed horses and woken the camp. In
the confusion escape was easy enough. The killers had loosed their two dogs to
track him. He shot both a few hundred yards from the camp. Then he circled back
around. He managed to grab a single horse, a gray gelding with no tack other
than a rope halter, and led it away while the men yelled and thrashed in the
brush in the distance.

After
that night it had been a matter of keeping up. The survivors had moved quickly
for two days, slowing when they reached the populated areas along the Pend
Oreille River. They’d traded away booty from Grey’s family, swapping meat for
ammunition. Grey followed behind. Outside Newport, now lightless and
smoldering, he’d shot another in the belly from a vantage two hundred and fifty
yards off. The deer rifle had knocked the man out of his saddle and onto the
blacktop. The others scattered. Grey watched the wounded man writhe on the
ground, trying to crawl into the cover of an abandoned SUV. The others never
bothered to come back, and eventually the shot man bled out.

He
didn’t loot the body. Locals arrived before he had given up watching; six or
eight kids on bicycles. They took the man’s gun and knife, his boots and his
pack, but they ignored his horse since they couldn’t catch it. Grey caught it
later and let his own go. Having tack and saddle made riding easier.

Later
that day, Grey’s head began to swim and he had to lean over the saddle horn,
panting while black spots danced in his vision. He realized he couldn’t
remember when he had last eaten, and went through the saddlebags that the horse
carried. He found three cans of tomato juice and venison he’d helped smoke. He
ate and drank, and moved on. What thinking he did was mechanical; where could
he best catch the last three, how could he kill them all. He no longer thought
about why. That hurt too much. How was easier.

The
survivors rode fast for another two days, and Grey realized they were headed to
Spokane. He lost them there, on the edge of the city, amidst the chaos and
fires. In the six months Grey had been gone, his city had become a wasteland.
Corpses and bones were everywhere. What people remained roved in armed bands or
hid, coming out like roaches each night to steal from others equally miserable.

Amidst
the chaos were little stories without endings. He found a long line of green
military vehicles, trucks and tanks both, stalled in a line on the north-south
highway through Spokane’s heart. They’d either survived the initial EMP pulses,
or had been repaired, only to be fried by the later waves. There were bodies -
dry, nearly mummified - surrounding the convoy in drifts, riddled with bullet
holes, but he didn’t see any that looked like soldiers.

In
a section of the old downtown core someone had strung up corpses from the power
lines like malefic piñatas, each body decorated with ribbons and bright yarn
that waved in the reeking breeze. One of the bodies wore a nurse’s uniform. He
remembered the lipless grins on the hollow-eyed faces; the way their hair
jerked and waved in the wind.

One
long street of burnt-out cars had dozens, maybe hundreds of doll heads, each
glued to the hood of individual cars like Rolls Royce ornaments in hell. The
pink plastic heads with bright blue eyes were everywhere. He’d spurred his
horse out of that street quickly.

There
were too many eyes in the city, too many spots to hide and snipe, and within
eight or ten hours he’d been shot at once and warned off a dozen times by armed
men. Grey moved out, back to what had been the suburbs and farmland surrounding
the city. Raiding had damaged much of this as well, but as food supplies from
homes and farms dwindled the survivors had returned to the city to scavenge.
Half the houses and buildings were stripped or burned, the rest abandoned.
Spokane followed a pattern he found repeated over the years; a central rotten
core with too many people and no food, surrounded by a stripped no-man’s land,
surrounded, finally, by sparsely populated semi-wilderness with game and some
semblance of civilization. He wondered why people didn’t leave the city.

He
never stopped looking, but he never found the last three men.

Spring
finally came, and a short summer, then winter again, and hunger with it. Grey
found others like himself, riding the edges of the ruins, looking for food, for
ammunition. Grey took what he needed to live, killing where he had to. He
preyed on others with guns for the most part. He did it in part because they
had the best gear, and partly in hopes of finding the last of the men from the
cabin. More than once, when desperate for shelter or food, he took what he
needed from others. He killed an old man who drew an empty revolver on him in a
frozen field over a half-full plastic bag of wrinkled sugar beets.

The
cold weight in his gut could cover all sorts of things, he discovered.

March
was a bitch. The weather couldn’t decide what it wanted to do and sudden thaws
alternated with northern blasts of wind and temperatures plummeting far below
freezing. It was worse in the higher elevations, and Grey found his trap lines
hard to run. He kept at it until the thaws set in for real, bringing in a few
late-season pelts. He spent most of the month inside his cabin, reading, with
brief forays outside to get water or split more wood for his stove. In
mid-March he packed up and set out east, following the old route of highway 33.

The
woods were noisy now, the silent majesty of winter replaced by the crack of
trees shifting, the thump of snow cascading from the boughs. The sound of water
was everywhere. Streams carved dark channels through the remaining snow as they
broke free of the ice, leaving deep, shadowy gulfs full of slick black rocks.
Water grumbled endlessly around the stones before diving into sapphire-blue
tunnels beneath the snowpack to emerge a hundred yards away, foaming and
leaping.

Grey
took a pair of snowshoes and he wore them for a stretch of fifteen or twenty
miles across the highest part of his route, but in most places the crusty snow
supported his weight, or was shallow enough it didn’t matter.

Others
had passed that way already, and Grey read their tracks as he walked: A single
man with a horse or mule, a small party with dogs, one pair of ragged boots
coming down from the true high country that flanked the route and crossing it
to climb again into the uninhabited mountains. The tracks thinned and then
stopped for a stretch of a few miles, then began to reappear as he started the
descent into the Dell.