The ceiling had been built high to make room for the passage overhead of flight platforms bearing ore. Because of that, the smoke from the fires, kept burning for light and heat at night, rose and made its way out through the titanium mesh vents without choking us. The light filtering in through those vents made it bright enough in the day that we didn’t need fires then.
Water was not a problem. An artesian well produced a stream of fresh, sweet water flowing right through the channel in the cave floor. It had been estimated by our Overlords’ engineers back before the Cloud that the well would last another decade for ore processing. But now, without it being wasted the way they’d done, it might just flow forever.
In a space that big, I’d been able to avoid Phil at night. At my suggestion, Aunt Mary and I had set up our space way over near the west wall. And I’d made sure that the wood-gathering groups I joined during the days also kept me as far as possible from him. I even tried to eat at a different time than him at the communal kitchen.
* * *
“Phil Tall Bear?” I said again.
“Yup,” Aunt Mary said. “My idea, but the Elders Council agrees.”
My heart sank at that. After the Cloud came, a few days had passed when no one knew what was happening elsewhere. No viddy screens, no flying machines, no word of any kind from anywhere. And then Aunt Mary had a second dream. In that dream she flew like an eagle across the whole continent. She saw that everywhere was like it was here. The time of our Overlords spanning the world with their minds and their machines was done. And she also saw chaos and terror. People fighting and killing each other. People struggling for power. And those gemod creatures that our Overlords had created for their vain amusement, roaming the land everywhere.
When she told people that dream, everyone believed her. And there was no panic, no struggle for power as a result. It was like we all went back two centuries in our minds and our hearts to a time when we all shared to survive. And the Elders Council was set up. A dozen men and women got together and came to a consensus of what to do that would help everyone. They didn’t have regular meetings. They just seemed to be able to get together when it was needed, as if their minds were connected. And no one questioned what they decided — which was never offered as orders, but as suggestions. Suggestions that we all knew we needed to heed.
Like the decisions that we would all eat together, form work parties to get firewood, set up shifts of people responsible for latrine duty or gardening or closing and watching the gates at night and opening them in the morning. Like the decision to take all the food and useful goods out of the company store before burning it to the ground with all of the beer and other alcoholic beverages still inside it.
Everyone had accepted those decisions.
Just as I had to accept the decision that I needed to go and find something that would make the lives of our people better. Just as I now also had to agree that my quest was going to be in the company of Phil Tall Bear.
And I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
CHAPTER TEN
I was choosing things to put into my pack. Soon I’d be meeting up with Phil Tall Bear. And what was I going to do or say then? I clasped my two big hands together so hard that if I’d had a lump of coal between them, I probably would have squeezed it down into a diamond.
Lenard cleared his throat. I’d forgotten that he was there.
“Mary,” he said. “Can you give me a minute alone with our Rose here?”
Without a word, my Aunt Mary left the tipi.
Lenard Crazy Dog looked over at me.
“You remember me, Little Girl?”
That was a strange question. I wondered if maybe the pain meds he’d been given were making him forgetful. It was only two days since we’d fought the firewolves together up on the hill. How could I forget that?
But Lenard nodded as if he knew what I was thinking. “Not just now,” he said. “I mean before, before . . .” — he waved a hand — “before all of this.”
I shook my head. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Know why I call you ‘Little Girl’?
That touched something in me. But the memory was not making itself visible, sort of like a deer you just know is there in the woods but haven’t seen yet.
Lenard smiled. Not a broad grin this time. A small smile, sort of regretful.
“You were only five or six,” he said. “I was your pa’s best friend back then, back before I took off and tried to fight them, being young and foolish.” He chuckled. “Not that I did all that bad a job of it. You ever see a transmission tower knocked down? That was something.”
The memory was almost showing itself now. “Wait,” I said, “Did I . . .” And then it came to me. “You were Uncle Lenard!”
The grin spread across his face like a sunrise coming over the plains. “Ah-yup,” he said. “That was me.” He touched his cheek and his nose. “Before all of this got redecorated and rearranged, courtesy of the powers that be, or rather that was.”
“You called me Little Girl then. And I sat on your horse in front of you as we rode all around.”
I was smiling, too. now. It was such a good memory, being with him, and my dad riding next to us. We were still just proles, just common workers, but we had the freedom of horses. Until they set that disease loose that killed them all.
“Your pa wouldn’t come with me. Said he had to think of you, and that your ma would just die without him.”
Lenard bit his lip as he said that, regretting his words. Seeing as how that was just what my mother did after my father died in the Deeps. But I didn’t blame him for speaking the truth. I was too glad of having that memory again, the kind of memory that you don’t just carry. The kind of memory that carries you.
I reached out and grasped his hand. “I’m really glad to see you again, Uncle Lenard.”
He held my hand lightly, not squeezing it, just resting it in mine the way that our people always do when we shake hands.
“Ah-yup,” he said. “Me too.”
We stayed like that for a while. Then Uncle Lenard let go of my hand.
“Bring me some of that paper over there on the desk and one of them pencils?”
I did as he asked. Then, with great care, he began to draw something. After just a few lines, I figured out what it was.
“You’re making a map,” I said.
“Ah-yup. Seeing as how I am the only one around here who has made such a trek lately, I am the one can tell you how to get there. Only a little over one hundred miles as the crow flies. Just a little skip and a jump from here in a slow flier. Half an hour’s journey back B.C. But seeing as how birds are the only ones with that sort of power now, you’ll be on foot following the roads. So that’ll make it more like one hundred fifty miles. A few days if you was to go at a steady trot day and night — which I would not recommend. Seeing as how you need to aim for safe shelters when it gets dark. And both you and Johnny Tall Bear’s boy need to keep your eyes out as you go. Never let your guard down.”
He began to make big Xs on his map. “And these are the places I know for sure you need to go around as best you can.”
I looked at all the Xs, so many that there was hardly a clear space without being within a few miles of one.
“Because there’s monsters there?” I asked.
“You said it, Little Girl.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Uncle Lenard — funny how easy it already was to think of him that way again — looked up from the map he’d just finished drawing and looked over my shoulder at someone.
“Hey,” he said. “Come on in. You two are just in time.”
You two? Jeez. That meant it had to be . . .
“Rose,” Aunt Mary said from behind me, “you know Phil Tall Bear.”
I turned around, and he was standing there in the doorway behind
Aunt Mary. From several feet away he looked to be my own height, even though I was two inches taller. Our eyes met for a moment. He smiled, and I quickly looked down, hoping the beating of my heart was not loud enough for him to hear it.
“Hi, Rose Eagle,” he said.
Rose Eagle. Of all the people at the Ridge, Phil was the only one who ever called me by my full name. Rose Eagle. I liked the way it sounded coming from his lips. But I didn’t tell him that. I was finding it hard to say anything.
“Hi,” I finally said, barely getting that one word out of my tight throat.
Then I didn’t know what else to say. The awkward silence in the tipi stretched out.
“Okay,” Phil said. Then he reached out his hand and took mine to shake it.
His hand was all calloused, and it felt as strong as he looked. It was warm, too, and it seemed as if I could feel my own hand getting warmer as I held his. I didn’t want to let go of his hand. But I did, just short of holding on to it for too long.
“Okay,” Phil said. “Partners?” he asked in a soft voice.
That voice of his made me want to throw my arms around him and hug him. He was just so nice. But I managed to control myself from saying or doing anything that would make matters worse.
“I guess so,” I replied, my own voice barely audible.
Uncle Lenard cleared his throat. I looked over just in time to see Aunt Mary let go of his hand.
“Okay, kids,” Uncle Lenard said. “You both come over here and take a look-see at this here map of mine.”
The description of our route of travel and the listing of the various sorts of danger along the route took a while and included Lenard Crazy Dog’s deciphering of the various cryptic notations he had added to the map since I first looked at it. Most of those notations were sort of shorthand explanations of just what kind of dangerous creatures we might encounter near each of those ominous Xs.
FW was the first one I figured out, the initials closest to the Ridge. Off to the south and west into the Badlands.
“Firewolves?” I said.
“Ah-yup,” Uncle Lenard said. “The main body of them. More than two dozen, I’d guess. Those we ran into on the hill must’ve split off from the main pack. Territory they were in . . .” — he pointed to the letters MB, which I also understood — “that would be the madbears. Now gemods usually stake out their own territory unless they get pushed out of their own. So probably a young male firewolf and his buddies tried to take over the alpha spot and they got run off by Old Three Paws. I call him that on account of he lost one of his front feet after someone — not naming any names — put an arrow through that paw and pinned him for a time to a tree, till he gnawed it off.”
“Wow,” Phil said. “Some shot.”
Uncle Lenard aimed a crooked smile at him and then shook his head. “Meant for his throat, son. Sometimes better to be lucky than good.”
I ran my finger along old Route 90 west, which had been pretty much deserted as a highway for years since the ore was shipped north not by land but by the huge lev-carriers.
A large LO was marked by the X where the road neared Rapid City.
“Little Ones,” Uncle Lenard said. “Just stay way away from them and their burrows. Way, way away. Things don’t always have to be big for them to be deadly.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thankfully, that first meeting with Phil Tall Bear was a brief one.
Uncle Lenard and Phil left together, giving me the rest of that day and the night to attempt to recover what little equanimity I had left. I was afraid that Aunt Mary was going to try to talk to me about Phil, about what a good young man he was and how it would all work out fine, our traveling together. But she didn’t. Instead she busied herself putting things together for me in what she called her emergency pack.
Such as a pair of scissors, needles, and strong thread.
“For sewing up clothes or . . . whatever,” she said. The fact that she added bandages and a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a container of her own special herbal salve right after that left me no doubt about what the “whatever” might be.
I had accepted — as much as I could accept it — the fact that I would be accompanied by the one person I most wanted to be with and was terrified about being with. So that night I had time to worry about other things. Things that were marked with big Xs on the map that Aunt Mary placed in a plastic wrapper and stuck in the top of the emergency kit.
A shiver of fear about all those monsters waiting for me ran down my spine. Then, at that very moment, a little jumping mouse stuck its head in through our open tipi door. It looked up at me, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“Hau, kola,” I said. That’s “Hello, my friend” in Lakota.
The mouse chirruped and came leaping over to me.
I sat down and held out my hand. It hopped into my palm. I lifted it up close to my face and it began to play with my long hair with its tiny handlike paws as it kept up its little chirping chatter. It almost sounded as if it was saying “Wash-tey, wash-tey, wash-tey,” which means “good, good, good” in Lakota.
Aunt Mary was watching, nodding with her lips pursed together. “Well,” she said, “you are not going to lack for friends out there, Rose, honey.”
* * *
I had always been the first to get up before the sun. But it was not so the next day. To my surprise, when Phil showed up the next morning, I was still asleep. I was wakened by my friend, Jumping Mouse, who had spent the night asleep next to me on my pillow. I felt her cool little paws pulling at my hair and heard her voice chirping in my right ear before I realized that someone was at the door of our lodge and my Aunt Mary was talking to him.
“Poor dear,” Aunt Mary was saying, “she was more tired than she let on. That’s just how my Rose is. She’ll push herself till she drops and never admit she needs to take care of herself.”
“I understand,” Phil said in that soft, deep voice of his.
I felt my cheeks burning.
“Aunt Mary,” I called out. And regretted that I had done so because I could hear how strained my voice sounded.
The talking outside the tipi stopped abruptly. My aunt stuck her head in through the door.
“Rose, honey,” she said in a calm, perfectly controlled voice, “Phil Tall Bear is here, and I’ve got your breakfast ready.”
Even though I don’t recall tasting it, I know that breakfast was a good one. Not the Dehy-Y-rations that we’d mostly be eating during our journey, but real food. Corn bread with a stew of beans and squash and deer meat sausage and porridge sweetened with honey. Our gardens had taken hold that spring and our summer harvests were already starting, along with the nearly inexhaustible mountain of Dehy-Y-rations that filled the huge storehouse at the back of Big Cave, there would be plenty of other food preserved and dried in the old-fashioned Lakota way to take us through the winter.
And as I thought of that, I wondered where I would be that winter. Back in Big Cave or just a pile of dry bones out on the prairie? My heart started to race again.
“Good-good-good,” Jumping Mouse chirped in my ear from her perch on my shoulder. I broke off a piece of corn bread and held it up to her. She took it, sat back, and began to eat, turning it in her paws.
“That is so sweet!” Phil said, pointing with his lips at Jumping Mouse. “Will your friend be traveling with us?”
I pretended I didn’t hear him as I shoved a piece of cornbread into my mouth, and he didn’t ask again.
* * *
It was a beautiful late summer day when we set out. I now had a sort of holster for the sawed-off shotgun, and it hung at my waist from a heavy belt. It was balanced on the other side by a long knife in a leather sheath.
Aunt Mary’s favorite knife. She’d made it herself years ago from a long file, ground it to razor sharpness, and then fastened a carefully shaped pi
ece of elk antler on for a handle.
“Good for cutting meat . . . or whatever,” she said as she gave it to me.
A bandolier of shotgun shells hung over my shoulder, and there were more shells in one of the three packs I carried. I wore a black formfitting top, the kind that athletes used to wear under their uniforms back when there were organized sports. It was made of material that was almost impossible to cut or tear, and it washed easily. I was worried that it made my muscles too obvious and that it was too tight across my chest, but Aunt Mary had nodded when I put it on.
“Good choice, Rose,” she said. “You look . . . good.” Then she handed me a second top, a green one, to put into the pack that held my few other clothes, as well as a brush and a comb and some extra ties for my long hair, which was the only part of me that I would ever think of as actually being beautiful.
I also wore a vest over the top, with pockets in it to stash things, and that did cover up things some.
The jeans I wore were also pretty tight, being of that same tough, stretchy stuff that had been made in some now undoubtedly defunct factory in Mexico. Black, of course. As were the nearly indestructible comfortable boots on my feet.
A considerable crowd of people gathered just outside Big Cave to wave good-bye. Uncle Lenard was among them, with his arm around Aunt Mary. That was understandable, seeing as how he could not stand on his own. Though there was no need for her to be holding his hand like that.
I looked over at Phil. His outfit was pretty much the same as mine. We looked like twins — fraternal, not identical, and me being the bigger and uglier one. But there were some differences in the way we were geared up. First of all, I did not have a big compound bow and a quiver of arrows over my shoulder like he did.
I knew where that bow and those arrows came from. They were a gift from Lenard Crazy Dog. Aunt Mary had told me about some of the conversation that Phil had with Uncle Lenard. How after Lenard had ascertained that Phil was pretty good with a bow and arrow, he’d told my traveling companion how to locate the stash where his spare weapons were hidden, which also included the big .45 revolver now holstered on Phil Tall Bear’s belt.
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