Outland Exile: Book One of Old Men and Infidels

by W. Clark Boutwell

  Malila sat, her heart racing and her skin sheened with terror. A sensation of wetness spread along her thighs, and she rose with a start, wondering if the fear had made her incontinent. She threw off her sleeping skins to find blood fouling her legs and bedding. She screamed.

  Jesse leaped up in alarm. The sky was yet dark, but dawn was beginning to overpower the fainter stars in the east. Malila looked to the old man’s face for explanation and reassurance. His expression flitted from alarm at her scream, to reassurance, to anger at her waking him, and then the mask of professional concern clicked into place.

  “It is all right, lass. Nothing bad is happening. I know it looks bad, but nothing bad is happening.”

  “There’s all this blood. How can this be all right? What is happening to me?”

  “Did your mother never talk to you about this when it first happened?”

  “Don’t be absurd. When would I have met my fecking mother? It hasn’t happened before! Look at all the blood!”

  The old man paused and lapsed into quiet efficiency, leading her away from the sleeping skins and toward the dark ribbon of the stream, his calm lessening the watery sensation of her fear.

  Jesse said in a quiet monotone as he helped her bathe, “The bleeding is going to go on for probably a week the first time, lass. You aren’t sick. This is what most women go through. You are going to be fine. You’ve just started monthly bleeding cycles, is all. Most girls begin when they reach puberty. I’m guessing your implant stopped you until now. Women’s bodies are ready to get pregnant for much of their lives, lass.”

  “You’re telling me I’m a breeder?” said Malila. “That’s fecking crazy. I haven’t been Sapped. I didn’t do anything wrong. What have you done to me?”

  “Believe me, lass: you have done nothing wrong. Since you were ten or eleven, you’ve been a breeder. I don’t know what your keepers have done to you or why, but this is what most women are. It’s really pretty amazing,” he finished with a smile that encouraged Malila to return one.

  Malila lapsed into shivering silence and let the old man dry her before draping his own dry skins around her and leading her back to the cold fire ring.

  He roused a blaze from the ashes. Malila’s shivers subsided as Jesse went on to outline the peculiarities of human reproduction, explaining her biology in alarming detail.

  “Every month! How can that be efficient? I waste that much blood every month for nothing?” she asked.

  “I dunno, lass. God has no’ asked my opinion of late,” he replied as if Malila might think it amusing.

  She did not. It was not credible that half of humankind was required to watch the calendar with more than idle interest.

  Jesse washed and dried her sleeping furs, arraying them around the flames on a framework he contrived from branches and vines. Despite the fire, Malila shivered. Her body had betrayed her. She would now be shadowing the phases of the moon with the rhythms of her body, a captive to the mechanism of her own flesh. If she believed what the old man said, this bloody cycle would stop eventually. By then she would be a Sisi and no longer worthy of her own consideration. She shivered again.

  Returning from gathering wood, Jesse also brought along an armful of tawny yellow lichen. By the time she was warm and dry, he had fashioned a lichen-and-doeskin pad to protect her clothes. Jesse promised that the next bleeding would start in about four weeks and not last as long. It annoyed Malila that this old primitive should be giving appointments to her body to keep.

  They did not travel that day, Jesse using the time to jerk the rest of the bison meat. By the following day, both packs bulging, they retraced the route to the site of the kill. There was little more to harvest as far as Malila could see. Animals had already stripped the carcass, the ribs shining as white as a gruesome picket fence. Jesse, however, grabbed up the massive head by the horns with a grunt of satisfaction. Again stripping off his shirt, he began to bash the skull with his ax. Finally breaching the skull, the old man scooped out the brain and added it to the noxious concoction in the plastic satchel.

  Malila stood upwind.

  As the weather grew colder, their appetites grew ravenous. They stopped less frequently now. The food was monotonous, bison jerky at every meal and every stop. Jesse still made her drink his bitter tea, although he no longer could stomach it himself. Adding a new ritual, most nights, Jesse worked on the buffalo hide, scraping the dried flesh off the underside, stretching it to shave the thickness of the skin and then working the reeking brain-mixture into the hide. After a couple of weeks’ work, Jesse built a small and uncharacteristically smoky fire before wrapping the now-supple hide around it. After a few hours, he pronounced the hide cured and ready for use. He never told her from what condition it had recovered.

  Jesse’s evening orations increased with the lengthening nights. After a vehement recitation about some ancient battle’s “volley and thunder,” in the quiet before sleep, she finally asked, “Why are you saying all those things, Jesse? Are you getting senile?”

  Malila expected no answer whatever and was startled when she sensed the furs quiver in what she took to be outrage. It was some time before she grasped that the old man was shaking with laughter.

  “You are most likely right, lass. But it pleases me. I like the sound of the words. Don’t any of them move you?”

  “Move me?”

  “Do they affect your emotions at all? The words have a rhythm but a meaning as well.”

  The old man’s voice lilted softly into her ear:

  And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,

  When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

  When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

  A highwayman comes riding—

  Riding—riding—

  A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.7

  Malila suppressed the involuntary shiver traveling her spine. “I don’t understand it. It’s old-fashioned. Why should I try to understand it?”

  He sighed. “Why indeed, lass? Go to sleep.”

  A few minutes later, she heard his steady breathing. Two stars in the east caught her attention as they climbed the sky. One was a brilliant blue-white that flickered as if it were a mere spark while the other, fainter one, keeping pace, burned with a constant ruddy gleam.

  Why had she lied? Why had she dismissed it all because of its age? The old man had shown her something, and only her body had understood.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE UNDERPASS

  Crossing of US 41 and Interstate 74, western Indiana Territory

  November 11, 2128

  Off the road and near a small huddle of hemlocks, under the thin gray sky, Malila sat. The temperature had plummeted since sunup, and the wind had backed into the northwest. Before noon, low clouds had obscured the sky. She could barely swallow enough of the frigid slurried water to satisfy Jesse’s watchful supervision. Within the last hour, the old man had spotted a road to the south, calling it Old 41, telling her it ran under the highway they were following, Eye 74, one more of the roads that stretched across the prairie from horizon to horizon. The savage names were always so picturesque.

  Jesse, after giving her their cache of food, left her in the lee of the evergreens.

  “If I am tardy now, lass, let’s say past sundown, walk back west and take the last road we passed going north, on your right.”

  “I know which way is north, old man. But I guess, since I have the food, you will find me.”

  “My thinking precisely, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend!”

  He took the pulse rifle with him.

  Malila ducked her face into her jacket, breathing her warmth back into herself, glad for the weight and warmth of her backpack shielding her from the wind. Her O-A hummed painlessly in the backgroun
d, the annoying mental irritation she had noted during the first week now gone.

  They had met no travelers. She’d seen no smoke, no tracks other than animals, and smelled nothing but the coming winter. All the rivers they had crossed flowed west or south. Unity maps showed the outlands as a narrow belt of Scorched and waterless land between the Rampart and the western republics, in most places no more than 150 klicks wide. However, Malila reasoned there must be a great river between the highlands near the Rampart and the highlands out west. Jesse called it the Mississippi River, a name too grotesque to take seriously.

  Malila jumped as Jesse joggled her out of her doze.

  “Nice to see my absence has not made you overanxious, lass.”

  Malila grimaced at him, staggering to her feet as the old man repacked his pack and hoisted it with his usual grunt. She followed him down the long, oblique slope to the underpass, then through it to the opposite side, the dim light slipping into the space like a beggar. When they had reached the north side of the underpass, Jesse motioned for her to stop as he continued farther north, up the side, and out of sight.

  In a few minutes, he was back, beaming. “No one home. It looks like we have a place out of the storm.”

  “How long do you think it will rain?” she asked, hoping for a day of rest, snug out of the wind.

  “I don’t think it will rain at all! Have you never seen it snow?”

  “Of course, I go to VerMon all the time to train.”

  “Big difference between a noun and a verb, lass!”

  “Even so,” he continued, “it is early in the season. It shouldn’t last for long. If we had skis, we could make some real time, but as ’tis, we are stuck here for at least a day. I’ll get wood enough to last us a while.”

  The old man emptied their jerky into the small cook pot before taking the remainder of it with him, hoisting the meagre remains of their food cache into a tree while Malila went to start the fire.

  By the time Jesse returned, the first flakes were drifting down. The fire, stoked with the new fuel and illuminating graffiti of obscure provenance on the crumbling walls, did little to warm Malila as she shivered in the cave-like corner of the underpass. She wrapped her clothes around her, even grabbing some of the sleeping furs as she watched the fire.

  Jesse set about cooking her share of a meager meal, a stew of sorts in the single small pot he carried. Malila’s stomach grumbled as the last of the jerky, scraps of trail bread, and some roots that Jesse had dug up that day bubbled in the pot.

  “What do you call this, old man?”

  “Specialité de la maison, ragout avec de bison et detritus, mademoiselle.”

  “Sounds appetizing,” she said as she made a face at him.

  “If we can’t move and run out of food, what are we going to eat?” she asked between bites.

  Jesse grimaced but answered, “While it snows, not much. I can scrape some tree bark, and there is a stream to the north with cattails. Dig the roots and bake ’em. Maybe dip the stream for fish.”

  Malila ignored the look and the comment and returned to eating. It was horrid. She forced herself to swallow, knowing that she needed the energy just to be warm enough to sleep. When she finished, Jesse set about cooking another batch in the small pot for himself.

  Malila watched the fire, warm, with a full belly, wrapped in the obscurity of the swirling snow. Every day’s trek had exhausted her, but today was worse. The cold wind eroded her well-being, and the noise in her head, even dulled to a barely perceptible hum, still bore upon her. Whether it was the cold or their dwindling supplies, Malila felt used up. Orange tongues of flame licked along a small branch, building and adding their glow to the whole fire. The heat, splashing across her face and hands, settled her. Jesse stirred his own meal without comment.

  Malila awoke with a start. A dribble of drool chilled her chin. The fire was still burning, but the branch she had been watching was now just a few disconnected gray coals. Newly added branches sent sparks drifting up into the dark beams raftering their camp. Wavering shadows showed a drag in the shin-deep snow along the lowest point of the underpass to the north—no sign of a footprint. The small pot, already clean, was upended near the fire. No doubt the old man had gone to get firewood.

  She looked down. Jesse’s odd short knife was out of its sheath and on the ground in front of her: it was a round-backed, drop-point blade with a small back bar for fine work and finger rings in the handle. The old man never left his blades unsheathed, except when he was using them. The blade, looking molten in the firelight, pointed at her. He had not woken her as he’d left. Malila tried to control a shiver as she scooped up the knife, sheathed it, and wedged it into the waistband in the small of her back.

  There must have been a noise; Malila looked into the swirling snow to the south side of the underpass. Outside the cone of the fire’s light, the white flakes were a chaos of motion. She stared into the maelstrom, still muzzy from her nap and annoyed at the old man for leaving her.

  It was then she saw the hunched darkness against the black. It shuffled, turning from side to side as if smelling the trail. There was no head, just a huddle of shapes, ill-defined and ominous. As it drew nearer, Malila could make out the shaggy coat. A pair of lifeless eyes rested on the top of the heap of fur. The form lumbered into the light.

  CHAPTER 24

  BEAR

  The man was of average height, but there was an adamant solidity to him, Malila thought. He wore the skin of a large bear, the muzzle fur skinned out and tanned, making a gruesome hood, with the eyeless eyes perched on the man’s head. His hair was as black as the bearskin and hung cowl-like around his face. Dark eyes lurked under bushy eyebrows almost hidden in the grotesque hood.

  As the figure moved nearer her fire, the man’s large hands shucked off the leather shooter’s mittens and spread open to grasp the heat of the blaze.

  “Good evening, Miss. I was hoping to share your fire. The name is Edward Phillips, but most people around here call me Bear.”

  He looked sideways at her. It was several seconds before he smiled.

  Malila had no idea how to respond. All people of the outlands had reverted to savagery, she knew. The old man showed that much to be true. She understood her choices here: take this unknown man into her confidence or remain in captivity with Jesse. The might and wealth of the Unity should buy her a welcome almost anywhere. Fear and greed were durable motives. Her choice was obvious. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, she thought.

  Just before she spoke, however, another saying resonated inside her head: Better the enemy you know than the one you do not know. In the moments she had to choose, the man’s fetid smell decided for her.

  “I’m Jane. My friends are coming back in a minute,” she said perhaps a little too late.

  This greasy man looked around the campsite, hesitant and uneasy at first. Without invitation, he sat on his heels near the fire, the flames glinting from his eyes. He rocked on his heels and again spread his raw-boned hands over the warmth. He licked his lips as he looked into the flames and started questioning her.

  “Where did you say you were coming from, Miss?”

  “I didn’t. We are coming from Wiscomsin and going to Kentucky.”

  It did not sound quite right. She looked at the man without blinking. It was always good to keep as much truth in a lie as convenient, she knew.

  “And your man, where is he? Seems he took his pack with him when he left.”

  “He is coming back soon. I’m not sure you ought to be here when he comes back. He mightn’t like it.”

  Malila had missed the fact that Jesse had taken his pack, a clear indication he was abandoning her. Her face froze as she tried to act nonchalant. She had been foolish to brandish the possibility of returning companions.

  “That isn’t very hospitable, Miss. The night is cold, and the weather’s ugly. No
one should be denied shelter on a night like this,” Bear said with a reasonable smile.

  Malila had no idea what constituted outland hospitality. By no means should she let this man get too close to her. She ought to make an escape herself. Jesse had said the snow would not last.

  Stringing together phrases that she hoped sounded like Jesse, she said, “Okay, I guess you can bed down over there. We are out of food. I cannot offer you anything. But you can have some coals and dry wood to start your fire over there.” She gestured again across the underpass to the far side.

  The man did not answer, but his head swiveled to look at her. His appearance had altered in the few seconds since he’d last spoken. He looked up at her through black, bushy eyebrows and wrenched his face into a grimace of amusement. He fished a small orange whistle out from under layers of dingy shirts and blew three short blasts.

  “I like the fire and the company well enough here.” He stood.

  Almost at once, dark shapes, hunched against the wind, climbed down the slopes at both ends of the underpass, half-walking, half-sliding in the shin-deep snow, carrying skis and long guns.

  Within seconds, Malila was surrounded by men stamping snow off their legs. Most wore beards. Even in the cold, Malila smelled poorly tanned hides and unwashed bodies. Her O-A’s low-level hum had risen to a keen inside her head.

  Bear rose and smiled as his men approached.

  “Let me do some introductions, Miss. These gentlemen are what you might call my fellow travelers. We sort of patrol this stretch of the I-74 to keep it free of … hazards to navigation. As it happens, the weather has reduced our prospects. That is, until George noticed your fire. So we’re just being friendly-like and welcoming you to the neighborhood, you traveling alone and all. Boys, this here is Jane. I’ll let you introduce yourselves … in private.”