Dies the Fire (39 page)

“You do, Eddie,” Mac said. “But this place gives me the creeps—all those stiffs. We've been eating pretty good out of town since things Changed. A lot of places are growing stuff, too, so we can get that when it's ready. Or maybe we could go east, I hear there are plenty of cows there and not many people. So I was just asking, are you sure about this?”

Eddie Liu shrugged at the question. “No, I'm not sure. But I
am
sure wandering around the boonies looking for food isn't a good idea anymore. People are getting too organized for the two of us to just take what we need.”

Too many of the little towns had gotten their shit together, with committees and local strongmen and those goddamned
Witches,
of all crazy things. He could see the thoughts slowly grinding through behind Mack's heavy-featured olive face, and then he nodded.

“We have to hook up with somebody,” Eddie finished.
And Portland is where the organization is,
he thought—or at least, that was what the rumors said.

He was betting that in a big city, or what was left of it, there would be less of the no-strangers-wanted thing they'd been running into among the small towns and farms farther south.

They trudged through endless suburbs; mostly smoldering burnt-out wreckage smelling of wet ash, wholly abandoned to an eerie silence broken only by the fat, insolent rats and packs of abandoned dogs that skulked off at the edge of sight. In the unburned patches there were spots where tendrils of green vine had already grown halfway across the street, climbing over the tops of the abandoned cars.

On the roof of one SUV a coyote raised its head and watched as he went by, alert but unafraid. Half a mile later they both yelled as a great tawny-bodied cat flashed by, too fast to see details—except that it was bigger than a cougar, nearly the size of a bear.

The beast was across the street and into an empty window in three huge bounds.

“Mother of God, I don't like the idea of going to sleep with something like
that
running around loose!” Eddie said. “I know what it's been eating, too. We'd better find a place with a good strong door and a lock before we camp.”

Farther east they began to reach flatter stretches where the burnt-out rubble was only patches; this road in the area north of Burnside was flanked with old warehouses and brick buildings. Some of them looked grimy and run-down, others fancied up into loft apartments and stores and coffee shops and offices, with medium-height buildings on either side, but still there was no sign of human life.

There was one encouraging sign. Someone had pushed all the cars and trucks to the sides, so that there was a clear path down the street. That had to have been done since the Change.

No, make that
two
encouraging signs,
Eddie thought.

There weren't many bodies around, or much of the faint lingering sweetish smell he'd become used to, either; anywhere near the main roads or most of the cities they'd passed through you couldn't escape it, and the whole area just south of Portland had been like an open mass grave. It gave him the willies—not because he cared about bodies themselves, but because he knew they bred disease. And because they were an unfortunate reminder of how easy it was to join the majority of nonsurvivors.

He doubted that one in three of the people who'd been around before the Change still were.

Food I can count on getting, as long as anyone does,
he thought.
But those fevers . . . man, you can't shiv a germ.

“Maybe we should have kept the bitches,” Mack said.

They trudged along the middle of the road—it was the safest place to be, now that guns didn't work anymore and it wasn't so easy to hurt someone out of arm's reach.

“Sandy was real pretty and she'd stopped crying all the time,” the big man concluded mournfully.

“We couldn't keep 'em unless you were planning on eating 'em. Which, except as what we people who read books call a metaphor, we weren't—”

He stopped, holding up a hand for silence before he went on: “I hear something. Up that next road on the left.”

The big man beside him wheeled; he was wearing a football helmet, and carrying a sledgehammer with an eight-pound head over one shoulder. His jacket had slabs they'd cut from steel-belted tires fastened over most of it, too.

Eddie had added a Home Depot machete slung over his shoulder in an improvised harness, but hadn't tried to add much protection to his pre-Change outfit—he disliked anything that restricted his speed. They both wore back-packs; Mac's held their most precious possession, what was left of a twenty-pound sack of beef jerky. He
hoped
it was beef, at least—it was what they'd traded the girls for, that and two cartons of Saltines, some peanuts and a precious surviving six-pack of Miller.

He'd considered staying with that gang, but he'd gotten a bad vibe from them all, the way they looked at him, and especially at Mac, like they were noting how much meat he had on his bones.

I'm not really sure they wanted the bitches just to fuck 'em, either,
he thought.
Ass is cheap these days if you've got food. And they didn't look very hungry. Sorta suspicious.

“Someone's coming,” Mack said.

“Yeah. That's why we're
here,
” Eddie said reasonably. “To meet someone. Now shut up and let me think.”

There were a
lot
of people coming, from the sound of it. They stepped back towards the curb, between two trucks. The young man's eyes went wide, then narrowed appraisingly.

The first men to turn the corner were armed—a dozen with crossbows, which gave Eddie a case of pure sea-green envy; he was still kicking himself for not getting one of those right after the Change, when the sporting-goods stores and outfitters hadn't all been stripped. The other twenty or so carried polearms; murderous-looking stabbing spears seven feet long. He'd seen the like elsewhere. What really interested him was their other gear.

They all wore armor; sleeveless tunics covered in overlapping rows of U-shaped scales punched out of sheet metal somehow; they had conical steel helmets with strips at the front to protect their noses, and kite-shaped shields of plywood covered in sheet metal, painted black with a red eye in the center.

Behind them came more people; not armed, but looking businesslike, many carrying tools—sledgehammers, pry bars, saws, and dragging dollies. Behind
them
came flatbeds and improvised wagons of half a dozen types. The people drawing the vehicles were handcuffed to them, and looked a lot thinner and more ragged than the others. One of the wagons, the last, bore bodies—some fresh, many the wasted skeletons held together by gristle that littered the ground around cities elsewhere. Now he saw why the city itself was less rancid; someone was cleaning house, doing the rounds of buildings where people had dragged themselves to die.

And I sort of suspect that these guys just pushed people out of town to get rid of them, now,
he thought.
Pushed 'em out before the food was all gone. That's why the dead're so thick south of town. Clever.

And there was a honcho, in a rickshaw-like arrangement, sort of a giant tricycle, pedaled by another of the thin-looking men; men who worked like machines with their eyes cast permanently down. The passenger was black and solidly built and wearing a dashiki and little beaded flowerpot hat; one hand held a fly whisk, the other a clipboard.

The . . .
soldiers, I suppose; unless they're the only racially integrated street gang outside a movie . . .
stopped and leveled their weapons.

Eddie smiled broadly, raising his hands palm-out. “Hey, no problem. You guys the law around here?”

“We are the law and the prophets,” the black man said, in a deep rich voice. “We are the nobody-fucks-with-us Portland Protective Association, and you'd better believe it.”

“Where do we join?” Eddie asked.

Several of the spearmen looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes and grinned, not a pleasant expression. The man in the pedicab waved his fly whisk eastward.

“That way. Here.”

He handed over two disks on strings; squinting at his, Eddie saw “Probationary Applicant” printed on it.

“Being an Associate of the PPA isn't all that easy, but you can try—and they'll find you something to do. Those let you go straight through to headquarters, and man, you do
not
want to be caught wandering about.”

He made a lordly gesture with the fly whisk, and the two wanderers headed east. Signs of order increased; traffic on foot and on bicycles and in weird tandem arrangements hauling cargo, an occasional group of marching armored troops . . . and at what had been the green lawns of Couch Park, a huge pit.

Thick acrid black smoke poured out of it; a gas tanker stood nearby, feeding lines that spurted burning gasoline over the deep hole. Eddie watched a handcart pulled through a gap in the raw earth berm around the fire pit; it was heaped with skeletal bodies, some no more than bones held together by rotting gristle, some nauseatingly fresh and juicy, swarming with maggots or tunneled by exploring rats. Even now he gagged a little at the smell of the smoke, and of the carts lined up to feed it. He supposed the gasoline kept the fires hot enough that flesh and bone themselves would burn.

“Why're they doing that, Eddie?” Mack asked.

“Not enough room or time to bury them all,” Eddie said.
This bunch doesn't fuck around,
he added silently to himself. “Rotting bodies make people sick, Mack.”

The big man nodded, looking nervous. You could fight to take food or anything else you wanted, or to fend off a band after your own goods or the meat on your bones. But you couldn't fight typhus, or cholera, or the nameless fevers that had taken off nearly as many people as the great hunger, or the new sickness people whispered about, the black plague.

They went past the line of dead-carts; the guards keeping the workers to their tasks on that detail wore scarves over their mouths, and stood well back. Another civilian overseer—this time a fussy-looking middle-aged white accountant type—intercepted them. Besides his clipboard, he wore a suit and tie, the first one Eddie had seen since right after the Change.

“Doesn't anyone
listen
?” he half shrieked, looking at the disks around their necks. “South from here! See that building?”

He pointed to a tall glass-sheathed tower with beveled edges. As Eddie followed the finger, he saw a rhythmic blink of light from the roof; some sort of coded signal, worked with lights.

“That's the Fox Tower. Stop two blocks west of it and then turn south. Straight south to the Park Blocks; that's where the sorting is today. And you'd better be careful; the Protector himself is there this time!”

“The Protector?” Eddie asked. “He the man, here?”

The clerk's lips went tight. “You'll see. And you'd better be respectful.”

Eddie looked at the line of spears, and the burning ground. Several other pillars of black smoke rose from the city, and now that he knew what they were he could easily tell them from the ordinary plumes from random fires.

“Oh, yeah,
duibuqi,
so sorry,
no
disrespecting, man. None at
all.
”

The streets were mostly empty; the long rectangle of park swarmed. Several of the big grassy areas had been fenced off; some held horses, others men learning to
ride
horses; one fell off and staggered to his feet clutching an arm as Eddie watched.

Much of the rest of the park had been converted to vegetable gardens; a whiff told him where the fertilizer had come from. And another line of spearmen was prodding several score men with disks around their necks towards a small baseball park with bleachers, the kind neighborhood kids would have used back before the Change. Another man with a clipboard waited there; he had a belt with tools around his waist; beside him cooks were boiling something in big pots over wood fires. It smelled like porridge of some sort, and Eddie could hear Mack's stomach rumbling.

The man with the tools shouted for silence.

“All right,” he said, when the newcomers had damped down the rumble of their talk. “First thing, anyone lies to us is
really
going to regret it—but not for long. Understand?”

Eddie preempted Mack's question: “He means if you lie and they find out, they'll off you.”

“Oh,” Mack said, nodding thoughtfully.

“We need skilled workers,” Mr. Handyman went on. “Any blacksmiths first and foremost. Farriers too.”

“Well, that lets us out,
” Eddie murmured; the closest he'd come to blacksmithing was a few hours of shop in high school, and he didn't even recognize the name for the other trade.

“Plumbers, fitters, machinists, bricklayers, carpenters,” the man went on. “Doctors, dentists. Gardeners and farmers too. Line up over there at the desks and give the details. And people, do
not
lie. General laborers over here.”

Over here
had another bunch of tough guards, and a bin full of metal collars.

No, not my thing,
Eddie thought.

There was a scattering of men and women sitting in the bleachers around the baseball field, mostly close up by home base. There were also racks of weapons near the entrance—spears and shields—and an alert-looking squad with crossbows.

Eddie nodded, unsurprised.
Yeah. An elimination event.

Also there was a big horse-drawn carriage, the type they'd used to show tourists around town before the Change; it had four glossy black horses hitched to it, and another couple standing saddled nearby, with collared servants holding them. Plus six or seven big armored men, standing by their mounts. Eddie's status-antennae fingered them for muscle.