Thayer, that it might not be. Have you seen any Germans around here since the blackout?”
“No,” she said, growing very still.
“Any German planes? Fighters—like black wasps, kinda? Low, fast, swept-back wings?”
“No, none. We saw a plane yesterday for the first time since the blackout, but it looked like one of the great big passenger liners.”
He nodded. “I saw it. It was an American plane, a C-6 Ajax Starlifter.”
She looked at him curiously. “Where were you? Where did you come from?”
He dropped his eyes. “My family lived—lives—in Elegy. You know where that is? Well, I went there to try to find them. They’re gone. My parents and grandparents. No sign of them. All of our horses are gone, and the houses have been broken into. But I thought they might have tried to get to Pensacola NAS, so that’s where I was headed, too.”
“But—I mean, where did you come from—out of nowhere, just when we needed you—” Victorine stammered.
“I saw you,” he said quietly. “You and Dancy. When you went to the Commissary last week. I didn’t want to—try—and talk to you because I knew about the gangs, and I figured you’d—do exactly what you did. Think I was just another one of them.”
Victorine shifted restlessly. “You’ve been following us?”
It was a long time before he answered. “Yes, ma’am.”
“But—you mean, you waited—while Dancy—we stayed in the Quay for three nights and two days—”
“Yes, ma’am. I—I—was holed up down on the eleventh floor.”
She stared at him with narrowed eyes as if she were trying to see inside his head, into his brain, and discern him. He met her gaze squarely.
Victorine dropped her eyes first. “I think, sir,” she said in a muffled, hesitant tone, “that I owe you a very great debt. Perhaps we aren’t so even after all.”
“I think so,” Con answered as casually as he could. “I was guarding you. But Miss Dancy, I think, was guarding me. Enough about debts already. One thing about anarchy. All your bills are canceled.” His voice was growing weaker, with the bone-weary tone that only the very ill and the gravely injured have.
“I’m going to give you something for the pain,” she said decisively. “It’ll make you sleep. I was afraid to give it to you before, but now I think it’ll be all right.” She gave him a tiny white pill and more water, and he drank more thirstily this time.
He settled back, and Victorine sat back down in the chair. She began reading again, and he seemed to have drifted off to sleep.
But after a while Con asked in a dreamy tone, “You have a place to sleep?” He’d seen Dancy, a shapeless lump under a mound of covers on the nearby sofa. Con, to his bemusement, realized he was on a fold-up Murphy bed and vaguely wondered who Mr. Murphy was.
“Yes, upstairs,” Victorine was saying. “But I usually prefer to stay up late and read and then sleep late. No sense in getting up early if you travel at night.”
“Hmm,” he said pleasantly. Either the drug was already taking effect, or the final stages of exhaustion—a nice numbness—were setting in. “What are you reading, ma’am?”
“Call me Victorine,” she said as if it embarrassed her.
“Whatcha readin’, Victorine?”
She leaned closely to look at him and suddenly was conscious that he turned a little and was inhaling deeply of her hair as it fell over her shoulder and swung against his face. Acutely embarrassed, she sat back with a jerk. “Richard Lovelace,” she replied a little curtly. “You’ve probably never heard of him.”
“Sure have,” he said lazily. “Seventeenth century, huh? ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage . . .’”
Victorine was astounded. “Why, yes—that’s from ‘To Althea, From Prison.’ How—”
“Tell you everything ’bout my life later,” he whispered. “Read me one, Victorine. Please?”
Slowly Victorine turned a few pages, settled back, and said, “I will read you ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.’”
“To Lucasta . . . ,” he echoed sleepily. “To Victorine . . .”
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Lov’d I not honour more.
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Beneath the West Wing of the White House was a labyrinth of decrepit glass cubicle offices, dank storage rooms, dusty closets, forgotten maintenance passages, odd angles and corners. Only very junior staffers and bug-eyed interns were relegated to the Stygian maze where they got lost with tiresome regularity.
In the last weeks, First Commissar Alia Silverthorne had wandered the much-painted concrete floors countless times. Though she was ghostlike because her only light was a weak flashlight, she didn’t look like a wraith. She was still sturdily built, strong looking, since they had plenty of food in the White House. They’d been short of water, so she wasn’t groomed to a knifelike perfection as she usually was. Yet she was a militarily neat woman, her figure, though short, of perfect symmetry with no fat, her short hair still combed neatly with the commissar’s queue bound with silver, her hazel eyes clear. Somehow her skin was still healthy looking, with a light tan.
But her mind was not perhaps as sharp as her looks. Her mission in wandering the maze was to figure out the best strategic place for a last stand. Miraculously, considering the irrational layout of the enormous basement, and Alia’s battle fatigue, she had formulated a plan.
Exhausted, she reflected, It might not even be a last stand. We might just make it . . . if I can stay sane and conscious long enough . . . Now all I need is some bread crumbs to mark the path . . .
It was a certain indication of Alia’s state of mind that she found this uproariously funny.
FOUR
THE SHARP AROMATIC smell of evergreens came to David Mitchell, then other odors that brought memories swept in and trooped through his mind. Mostly it was the smell of loam, and as he came out of a deep sleep, he felt the soft pressure of the earth beneath him, cushioned by the boughs out of which he had constructed a bed. Emerging quickly from his dreamy state, he remembered that he was in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, the Ouachitas. Not far from where he’d camped, a German helicopter, with its two dead pilots buried near it, was hidden, perhaps for him to return and fly back west.
The thought of his friend Deacon Fong, and the memory of his gut-wrenching flight and landing in the strange helicopter, made David feel bone chilled. I’m no flier like Deac . . . was. It was just by the grace of God that I got that bird down in one piece . . . and me in one piece.
He tried to recall the landing in the high field with the tall, slender grasses and yellow flowers. He couldn’t recall any part of it, only watching the ground come closer and the helo shifting, wavering, then settling like a live animal making its bed for the night. With an effort he dismissed the unsettling vision.
Cold never bothered him a great deal, and now he felt pleasure as it stung his face. For a while he lay totally still in his sleeping bag, warm and content. Finally he opened his eyes into mere slits and saw that dawn had come. By turning his head slightly, he could see the apple red color over in the east. It was that time of day he had always called the cobwebby hours, and he luxuriated in the warmth and the looseness of his body and the faint sound of the woodpecker far away. Rat tat tat tat tat! It was a comforting sound, one that brought back old remembrances. Suddenly, as if in a vision, he saw himself walking through the woods beside a small man with a sweeping cavalry mustache, carrying a single-barrel shotgun u
nder his arm.
With little effort he focused on the face of the boy and knew that it was he when he was only eight or nine and the man was Jesse Mitchell, his grandfather. David was born in Albuquerque, but because his parents lived the kind of life they did, David spent most of the summers of his youth with his grandparents. Several summers they had returned here to visit with Uncle Jonathan, Jesse’s brother. He and Jesse had been the last of a family of twelve children. Jonathan had died when David was—eleven? Twelve, maybe? Attending his funeral in these old hills had been the last time David had been here.
The memories reminded him of Deac again. It was hard for him to leave the warm cocoon of his sleeping bag. He knew that as soon as he got up, he would have to face whatever lay before him, whether it was enemy aircraft overhead, snipers, or looters. The only thing he was relatively sure of was that life would be difficult.
But David, being the kind of man he was, pushed away all depressing memories and got up. He didn’t stop to make coffee. He made a quick powdered juice drink with fresh springwater he’d found the day before and halfheartedly ate some crackers. He was anxious to get into Hot Springs, for he suspected he might have some trouble finding his grandparents. Their letter to him was short and peculiar. They were leaving and going back to the hills in Arkansas, close to Jesse’s old home. With an exasperated shake of his head, David thought that as eloquent as his grandfather was, his letters always left much to be desired.
As he walked along steadily, his eyes swept the trail, except for those times when he automatically—continually—raised them to search the sky for aircraft. He saw nothing overhead, and it was startling to realize how much the threat of the deadly Tornadoes and Daggers had ruled his life lately. Also, David was shocked at how many wolf prints he saw. Always a few wolves around the hills here—but I never realized there were this many . . .
Impatience was in him now, for he felt that he was at the end of his journey. He had not formalized it, but somehow he thought, If I can get back to Hot Springs, I can put things together. He hurried on, making good time, even though he’d decided to walk in a straight line through the national forest instead of following the rather winding southern highway. He climbed the south side of the Ouachitas, which curved around the city, holding it as if in a tight embrace. Walking through these fragrant woods and gentle hills seemed like a vacation to David after scrabbling through the merciless desert.
Redoubling his pace, he reached the last hill. His feet scrambled over the slate that girdled the mountain, and then with one surge he pulled himself up and stared down, anxious for his first glimpse of the city that had played such a prominent part in his youth. It had always been a special place to him, a place of sweet, clean memories of him and his grandfather and simpler days. David had always thought about coming back to these hills when he was out of the army.
Now his sensitive nostrils were assailed by a terrible stench. Nearing the crest, he slowed considerably. At the very top, an overlook of the old heart of the city, he stopped dead still, and his face seemed to freeze.
It was to David much the same as if he had been a lover who had come to the bed of his sweetheart—as he had approached the bed where she lay under a filmy curtain with his heart filled with expectation and bursting with love. Then, as if he had drawn back the curtain and she had turned to him, he saw that instead of a beauty, she had become a leper with flesh eaten away, with holes for eyes, and with skin rotting and falling from the bone.
“Oh, dear God!” David gasped, a prayer, not an oath.
A pall of sickly yellow smoke hung over the city, an ugly exhalation, fed by what seemed to be thousands of small spirals of stinking fires, burning something loathsome. Buildings that had been alabaster white or creamy beige were now a leprous gray. The Arlington Hotel, for decades a symbol of the city’s pride and old-world elegance, was a shell. He stood staring with disbelief at the windows, thinking that they looked like burned-out eyes. It was a ghost of a building, and he thought, as his eyes went over the rest of the city, of the black-and-white photographs of the Last Great War. He thought particularly of Dresden, Germany, which had been firebombed beyond all beauty until it was nothing but an obscenity.
Taking a deep, choking breath, he tightly gripped his grandfather’s 20-gauge Remington shotgun. As he made his way down the mountain, the stench grew more pronounced until it seemed to be tangible, a thick slime in the back of David’s throat. He kept hawking and spitting, trying to cleanse himself, but without success. When he entered the city, he could pick out its ingredients, garbage and raw sewage mixed with a rank smell of old fires and thick smoke—and the sickening odor of the dead. David knew that smell now, all too well, but somehow this was worse. The men and women and even the children at Fort Carson had died fairly quickly and cleanly. The dead here had not found such mercy; the smell was of disease and rot. David had to stop for a moment and command his body to stay under control, for he thought he would vomit. He conquered it—barely—and moved toward the center of town.
Gangs roved throughout the city, apparently without fear or conscience. They traveled like schools of predator fish, shouting, cursing, pushing, or harassing anyone who was foolish enough to be within arm’s reach. Most of them, he saw, were drunk and wild-eyed from drugs. As he went down Magnolia Street and turned the corner, he saw a group of them. They’d gotten some fire axes and were smashing the wire-netted windows of an old dusty and dim pawnshop. David paused, considering the scene and his vague impulse to try to restore some order, when they caught sight of him. One man, with an ugly, oozing cut on his jaw, shouted, “Hey, look, he’s got a shotgun! Whaddya think, boys and girls?”
They were all sky-high, for their eyes were bright with a false incandescence. David lifted his weapon barrel-up, pulled the trigger, and watched the aftermath of the explosion. They all stopped. Slinking, muttering obscenities, they turned back to their work. The man with the cut face watched David out of the corners of his wild eyes to see if he would stop them. Grimly holding the shotgun at a ready position, David backed across the street, then kept walking. There were too many of them, too many axes, and too many windows to break. He didn’t have a chance of stopping all the madmen in this nightmare.
Confusion was everywhere. The cold gripped the city, and people were bundled up in all the clothes they could gather. Most of them, seeing David’s gun, kept far away from him. One woman was sitting on the curb, her legs sprawled, and she was holding a baby to her breast. Her eyes were closed, and she was rocking back and forth, singing a little tuneless song.
David hesitated, thinking he should at least try to help the poor woman. Finally he drew close and said, “Ma’am, could I help you find a safe place for you and the baby?”
The woman did not hear him until he spoke to her again.
When she turned to him, her eyes had the blankest despair he had ever seen in a human being. “She’s dead! My angel’s dead!” she whispered.
David’s flesh crawled, for the woman hugged the dead child back to her breast and sang again. He tried desperately to think of some way to help, but he only had to look around to see that he was far outnumbered by the tragedies. Small children, dressed in every pitiful rag they could find, some barefoot, were roaming in and out of the wrecks of buildings. Everywhere could be heard the wails and screams of women, though most of them were unseen. Men were thin, hollow-eyed, stumbling and wandering, helpless and hungry and lost. It was hopeless.
A man with a thin, pale face and staring eyes appeared. He was dressed in filthy jeans and a ratty-looking blue sweater. He came warily, like an animal afraid of meeting with a whip, but he approached David with desperate determination.
“You—you got any whiskey, soldier?”
David shook his head. “You need food worse, mister.”
“Food!” The mouth opened in a soundless laugh. “Food! What food? I got some bacon from an old storehouse three days ago. Everybody was taking what he wanted, and I had to fight
for it, but I got it, the last bit. But that meat was bad. It killed some, and I nearly died. Now even the bad meat’s gone, soldier. You—you sure you don’t have any whiskey?”
“No. No whiskey.”
David watched as the man staggered off on rubbery legs, and he thought, The fountain! There’ll be fresh water in it at least. He made his way warily down the rotting shell of Central Avenue.
“At least there is water,” he murmured to himself, “and even some kind of order . . .”
Two lines had been formed, and the people standing in them held containers. Most of them had white Ty-plastic five-gallon jugs that Proto-Syn milk came in. Moving closer, David studied the people who seemed to be in charge—two men and a woman—commissars, he observed with mixed emotions. None of them had rifles, but all had pistols on their hips. They carried their batons, slapping their open palms, and walked slowly up and down the lines, their faces stern. At least they were keeping the crowd under control.
As David watched, he discerned that the woman seemed to be the authority. Observing this scene—the only shred of sanity that seemed to remain in this place—he decided to talk to the woman commissar. Perhaps there was some central authority left in the Commissary.
He moved closer, cautiously putting the safety back on his gun and cradling it barrel-down in the crook of his elbow as Jesse had taught him. She had her back to him, walking slowly down the line. But someone said something to her, and she turned to stare suspiciously at him, her hand going down to unsnap the leather holster flap at her side.
David, at first, as fighters will, eyed the holster. But then his eyes rose, returning to look closer at her beret. Instead of the holographic image of a jaguar that all commissars wore, it was something else, something familiar . . .
He took two long steps, and he was right on her. Her eyes widened and she half-lifted the baton, but she wasn’t as quick as David. He grabbed her by the arm and shook her like a small terrier. “Where did you get that?”
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