The Postman (32 page)

The taciturn, three-earring Holnist shrugged. “So? Woman’s comin’ to tend him. Now move. General’s waitin’.”

On their way up the moonlit path they encountered a figure coming down the other way. The slope-shouldered drudge stepped aside and waited for the men to pass, eyes downcast to the tray of rolled bandages and unguents she held. None of the aloof guards seemed to notice her at all.

At the last moment, however, she looked up at Gordon. He recognized the same small woman with gray-streaked brown hair, the one who had taken and repaired his uniform some days back. He tried to smile at her as they passed, but it only seemed to unnerve her. She ducked her head and scuttled back into the shadows.

Saddened, Gordon continued up the path with his escort. She had reminded him a little of Abby. One of his worries had to do with his friends back in Pine View. The Holnist scouts who discovered his journal had come very close to the friendly little village. It wasn’t only the frail civilization in the Willamette that was in terrible danger.

Nobody anywhere was safe anymore, he knew—except, perhaps, George Powhatan, living safe atop Sugarloaf Mountain, tending his bees and beer while the rest of what was left of the world burned.

“I’m getting tired of your stalling, Krantz,” General Macklin told him when the guards had left the book-lined former ranger station.

“You put me in a hard position, General. I’m studying the book Colonel Bezoar lent me, trying to understand—”

“Cut the crap, will you?” Macklin approached until his face was two feet from Gordon’s. Even looking upward, the Holnist’s strangely contorted visage was intimidating. “I know men, Krantz. You’re strong all right, and you’d make a good vassal. But you’re all mucked up with guilt and other ‘civilized’ poisons. So much so that I’m beginning to think maybe you’ll be useless, after all.”

The implication was direct. Gordon forced himself not to show the weakness in his knees.

“You can be the Baron of Corvallis, Krantz. A senior lord in our new empire. You can even hold onto some of your quaint, old-fashioned sentiments, if you want … and if you’re strong enough to enforce them. You want to be
nice
to your own vassals? You want post offices?

“We might even find a use for that ‘Restored United States’ of yours.” Macklin gave Gordon a toothy, odorous smile. “That’s why only Charlie and I know about that little black journal of yours, until we can check the idea out.

“It’s not because I
like
you, understand. It’s because we’d benefit a little if you cooperated. You might rule those techs in Corvallis better than any of my boys could. We might even decide to keep that Cyclops machine going, if it paid its keep.”

So the Holnists hadn’t yet pierced the legend of the great computer. Not that it mattered much. They never had really cared about technology, except what was necessary to make war. Science benefitted everyone too much, especially the weak.

Macklin picked up the fireplace poker and slapped it into his left palm. “The alternative, of course, is that we’ll take Corvallis anyway, this spring. Only if we have to do it our way, it’ll
burn
. And there won’t be no post offices anywhere, boy. No smart-ass machines.”

With the poker Macklin reached out and touched a sheet of paper on the desk. A pen and ink pot lay next to it. Gordon well knew what the man expected of him.

If all he had to do was agree to the scheme, Gordon would have done so at once. He would have played along until he had a chance to make a break for it.

But Macklin was too canny. He wanted Gordon to write to the Council in Corvallis, convincing them to surrender several key towns as an act of good faith before he would be released.

Of course he had only the General’s say-so that he would be made “Baron of Corvallis” after that. He doubted Macklin’s word was any better than his own.

“Perhaps you don’t think we’re strong enough to take your pathetic ‘Army of the Willamette’ without your help?” Macklin laughed. He turned to the door.

“Shawn!”

Macklin’s burly bodyguard was in the room so swiftly and smoothly it seemed almost a blur. He closed the door and marched up to the General, snapping stiffly to attention.

“I’m going to let you in on something, Krantz. Shawn and I, and that mean cat who captured you, are the last of our kind.”

Macklin confided. “It was really hush-hush stuff, but you might have heard some of the rumors. The experiments led to some special fighting units, unlike any ever known before.”

Gordon blinked. Suddenly it all made sense, the General’s uncanny speed, the tracery of scars under his skin and his two aides’.

“Augments!”

Macklin nodded. “Smart boy. You paid attention good, for a college kid weakening his mind with
psychology
and
ethics
.”

“But we all thought they were only rumors! You mean they really took soldiers and modified them so—”

He stopped, looking at the strangely knotted muscles along Shawn’s bare arms. As impossible as it seemed, the story had to be true. There was no other rational explanation.

“They tried us out for the first time in Kenya. And the government did like the results in combat. But I guess they weren’t too happy with what happened after peace broke out and they brought us home.”

Gordon stared as Macklin held out the poker to his bodyguard, who took one end—not in his massive fist but between two
fingers
and a
thumb
. Macklin took the other end in a similar grip.

They pulled. Without even breathing hard, Macklin kept talking. “The experiment went on through the late
eighties and early nineties. Special Forces, mostly. They chose gung ho types like us. Naturals, in other words.”

The steel poker did not rock or shake. Almost totally rigid, it began to stretch.

“Oh we tore up those Cubans good,” Macklin chuckled, looking only at Gordon. “But the Army didn’t like how some of the vets acted when the action ended and we all went home.

“They were afraid of Nate Holn, you see, even then. He appealed to the strong, and they knew it. The augmentation program was cut off.”

The poker turned dull red in the middle. It had stretched to half again its former length when it began to neck and shred like pulled taffy. Gordon glanced quickly at Charles Bezoar, standing beyond the two augments. The Holnist colonel licked his lips nervously, unhappily. Gordon could tell what he was thinking.

Here was strength he could never hope for. The scientists and the hospitals where the work had been done were long gone. According to Bezoar’s religion, these men had to be his masters.

The tips of the torn poker separated with a loud report, giving off friction heat that could be felt some distance away. Neither of the enhanced soldiers even rocked.

“That’ll be all, Shawn.” Macklin threw the pieces into the fireplace as his aide swiveled smartly and marched out of the room. The General looked at Gordon archly.

“Do you doubt any longer we’ll be in Corvallis by May? With or without you? Any of the
unaugmented
boys in my army are equal to twenty of your fumblebum farmers—or your zany women soldiers.”

Gordon looked up quickly, but Macklin only talked on.

“But even if the sides were more equal, you still wouldn’t have a chance! You think we few augments couldn’t slip into any of your strong points and level them at will? We could tear your silly defenses to pieces with our bare hands. Don’t you hesitate to believe it for even a second.”

He pushed forward the writing paper and rolled the pen toward Gordon.

Gordon stared at the yellowed sheet. What did it matter? In the midst of all these revelations, he felt he knew where things stood. He met Macklin’s eyes.

“I’m impressed. Really. That was a convincing demonstration.

“Tell me though, General, if you’re so good, why aren’t you in Roseburg right now?”

As Macklin reddened, Gordon gave the Holnist chieftain a faint smile.

“And while we’re on the topic, who is it who’s chasing you out of your own domain? I should have guessed before why you’re pushing this war so hard and fast. Why your people are staging their serfs and worldly possessions to move north, en masse. Most barbarian invasions used to start that way, back in history, like dominoes toppled by other dominoes.

“Tell me, General. Who’s kicking your ass so bad you have to get out of the Rogue?”

Macklin’s face was a storm. His knotted hands flexed and made white-hard fists. At any moment Gordon expected to pay the ultimate price for his deeply satisfying outburst.

Barely in control, Macklin’s eyes never left Gordon. “Get him out of here!” he snapped at Bezoar.

Gordon shrugged and turned away from the seething augment.

“And when you get back I want to look into this, Bezoar! I want to find out who broke security!” Macklin’s voice pursued his intelligence chief out onto the steps, where the guards fell in behind them.

Bezoar’s hand on Gordon’s elbow shook all the way back to the jail pen.

“Who put this man here!” The Holnist Colonel shouted as he saw the dying prisoner on the straw tick between Johnny and the wide-eyed woman.

One guard blinked. “Isterman, I think. He just got in from the Salmon River front—”

 … the Salmon River front
 … Gordon recognized the name of a stream in northern California. “Shut up!” Bezoar nearly screamed. But Gordon had his confirmation. There was more to this war than they had known before this evening.

“Get him out of here! Then go bring Isterman to the big house at once!”

The guards moved quickly. “Hey, take it easy with him!” Johnny cried as they grabbed up the unconscious man like a potato sack. Bezoar favored him with a withering glare. The Holnist colonel took out his anger by kicking at the drudge woman, but her instincts were well-honed. She was out the door before he connected.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Bezoar told Gordon. “I think you’d better reconsider writing that letter to Corvallis in the meantime. What you did tonight wasn’t wise.”

Gordon looked casually through the man, as if he barely merited notice. “What passes between the General and myself is of no concern to you,” he told Bezoar. “Only peers have the right to exchange threats, or challenges.”

The quote from Nathan Holn seemed to rock Bezoar back as if he had been struck. He stared as Gordon sat down on the straw and put his arms behind his head, ignoring the former lawyer altogether.

Only after Bezoar had departed, when the gloomy shed had quieted again, did Gordon get up and hurry over to Johnny.

“Did the bear-flag soldier ever speak?”

Johnny shook his head. “He never regained consciousness, Gordon.”

“What about the woman? Did
she
say anything?”

Johnny looked left and right. The other prisoners were in their corners, facing the wall as they had for weeks.

“Not a word. But she did slip me this.”

Gordon took the tattered envelope. He recognized the papers as soon as he pulled them out.

It was Dena’s letter—the one he had received from George Powhatan’s hand, back on Sugarloaf Mountain. It must have been in his pants pocket when the woman took his clothes away to be cleaned. She must have kept it.

No wonder Macklin and Bezoar never mentioned it!

Gordon was determined the General would never get his hands on the letter. However crazy Dena and her friends were, they deserved their chance. He began tearing it up, prior to eating the pieces, but Johnny reached out and stopped him. “No, Gordon! She wrote something on the last page.”

“Who? Who wrote …” Gordon shifted the paper in the faint moonlight that slipped between the slats. At last he saw scrawled pencil scratchings, rude block letters that contrasted starkly under Dena’s flowing script.

Gordon sat for a long time looking at the sad, simple words. Everywhere his ghosts followed him, in spite of his newfound resignation. What George Powhatan had said about Dena’s motives still gnawed within him.

The Big Things would not let go.

He ate the letter slowly. He would not let Johnny share this particular meal, but made a penance, a sacrament, of every piece.

About an hour later there was a commotion outside—a ceremony of sorts. Out across the clearing, at the old Agness General Store, a double column of Holnist soldiers marched to the slow beat of muffled drums. In their midst walked a tall, blond man. Gordon recognized him as one of the camouflaged fighters who had dumped the dying prisoner into their midst earlier that day.

“Must be Isterman,” Johnny commented, fascinated.
“This’ll teach him not to come back without reporting in to G-2 first thing.”

Gordon noted that Johnny must have watched too many old World War Two movies, back at the video library in Corvallis.

At the end of the line of escorts he recognized Roger Septien. Even in the dark he could tell that the former mountain robber was trembling, barely able to hold on to his rifle.

Charles Bezoar’s barrister voice sounded nervous, too, as he read the charges. Isterman stood with his back to a large tree, his face impassive. His trophy string lay across his chest like a bandolier … like a sash of grisly merit badges.

Bezoar stood aside and General Macklin stepped up to speak to the condemned man. Macklin shook hands with Isterman, kissed him on both cheeks, then moved over beside his aide to watch the conclusion. A two-earringed sergeant snapped sharp orders. The executioners knelt, raised their rifles, and fired as one.

Except for Roger Septien. Who fainted dead away.

The tall blond Holnist officer now lay crumpled in a pool of blood at the foot of the tree. Gordon thought of the dying prisoner who had shared their captivity for so short a time, and who had told them so much without ever opening his eyes.

“Sleep well, Californian,” he whispered. “You’ve taken one more of them with you.

“The rest of us should only do so well.”

That night Gordon dreamed he was watching Benjamin Franklin play chess with a boxy iron stove.