Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  Finally, regaining a bit of sense, he managed to slither out from under the ancient, moldy fabric. He stumbled out of the room, still sputtering and sneezing. The attack subsided slowly. He gripped the upstairs bannister, squinting in that torturous, semi-orgasmic state that comes before a whopping sternutation. His ears rang with an extra murmur that seemed almost like voices.

  Next thing you’ll be hearing church bells, he told himself.

  The final sneeze came at last, in a loud “Ah—chblthooh!” Wiping his eyes, he reentered the bedroom. The trapdoor lay fully exposed, layered under a new coating of dust. Gordon had to pry the edge of the secret panel. Finally, it lifted with a high, rusty skreigh.

  Again, it seemed as though some of the sound came from outside the house. But when he stopped and listened carefully, Gordon heard nothing. Impatiently, he bent down and brushed aside cobwebs to peer into the cache.

  There was a large metal box inside. He poked around hoping for more. After all, the things a prewar doctor might have kept in a locked chest—money and documents—would be of less use to him than canned goods stashed here in a spree of wartime hoarding. But there was nothing other than the box. Gordon hauled it out, puffing.

  Good. It’s heavy. Now let’s hope it’s not gold or any similar crap. The hinges and lock were rusted. He lifted the haft of his knife to smash the small lock. Then he stopped abruptly.

  Now they were unmistakable. The voices were close, too close.

  “I think it came from this house!” someone called from the overgrown garden outside. Feet shuffled through the dry leaves. There were steps on the wooden porch.

  Gordon sheathed the knife and snatched up his gear. Leaving the box by the bed, he hurried out of the room to the stairwell.

  This was not the best of circumstances to meet other men. In Boise and other mountain ruins there had been almost a code—gleaners from ranches all around could try their luck in the open city, and although the groups and individuals were wary, they seldom preyed on one another. Only one thing could bring them all together—a rumor that someone had sighted a Holnist, somewhere. Otherwise they pretty much left each other alone.

  In other places, though, territoriality was the rule—and fiercely enforced. Gordon might be searching in some such clan’s turf. A quick departure would, in any case, be discreet.

  Still… he looked back at the strongbox anxiously. It’s mine, damnit!

  Boots clomped noisily downstairs. It was too late to close the trapdoor or hide the heavy treasure chest. Gordon cursed silently and hurried as quietly as he could across the upstairs landing to the narrow attic ladder.

  The top floor was little more than a simple, A-frame garret. He had searched among the useless mementos here earlier. Now all he wanted was a hiding place. Gordon kept near the sloping walls to avoid creaks in the floorboards. He chose a trunk near a small, gabled window, and there laid his sack and quiver. Quickly, he strung his bow.

  Would they search? In that case, the strongbox would certainly attract attention.

  If so, would they take it as an offering and leave him a share of whatever it contained? He had known such things to happen, in places where a primitive sort of honor system worked.

  He had the drop on anyone entering the attic, although it was dubious how much good that would do—cornered in a wooden building. The locals doubtless retained, even in the middle of a dark age, the craft of fire making.

  At least three pairs of booted feet could be heard now. In rapid, hollow steps, they took the stairs, skirmishing up one landing at a time. When everyone was on the second floor, Gordon heard a shout.

  “Hey, Karl, looka this!”

  “What? You catch a couple of the kids playing doctor in an old bed ag… sheeit!”

  There was a loud thump, followed by the hammering of metal on metal.

  “Sheeit!” Gordon shook his head. Karl had a limited but expressive vocabulary.

  There were shuffling and tearing sounds, accompanied by more scatalogical exclamations. At last, though, a third voice spoke up loudly.

  “Sure was nice of that fellow, findin’ this for us. Wish we could thank him. Ought to get to know him so we don’t shoot first if we ever see him again.”

  If that was bait, Gordon wasn’t taking. He waited.

  “Well, at least he deserves a warning,” the first voice said even louder. “We got a shoot first rule, in Oakridge. He better scat before someone puts a hole in him bigger than the gap between a survivalist’s ears.”

  Gordon nodded, taking the warning at face value. The footsteps receded. They echoed down the stairwell, then out onto the wooden porch.

  From the gable overlooking the front entrance, Gordon saw three men leave the house and walk toward the surrounding hemlock grove. They carried rifles and bulging canvas day packs. He hurried to the other windows as they disappeared into the woods, but saw no other motion. No signs of anyone doubling back from another side.

  There had been three pairs of feet. He was sure of it. Three voices. And it wasn’t likely only one man would stay in ambush, anyway. Still, Gordon was careful as he moved out. He lay down beside the open attic trapdoor, his bow, bag, and quiver next to him, and crawled until his head and shoulders extended out over the opening, slightly above the level of the floor. He drew his revolver, held it out in front of him, and then let gravity swing his head and torso suddenly downward in a fashion an ambusher would hardly expect.

  As the blood rushed to his head Gordon was primed to snap off six quick shots at anything that moved.

  Nothing did. There was nobody in the second-floor hallway.

  He reached for his canvas bag, never taking his gaze from the hallway, and dropped it to clatter on the landing. The sound triggered no ambush.

  Gordon took up his gear and dropped to the next level in a crouch. He quickly moved down the hall, skirmish-style.

  The strongbox lay open and empty next to the bed, beside it a scattering of paper trash. As he had expected, there were such curiosities as stock certificates, a stamp collection, and the deed to this house.

  But some of the other debris was different.

  A torn cardboard container, the cellophane wrapper newly removed, colorfully depicted a pair of happy canoeists with their new collapsible rifle. Gordon looked at the weapon pictured on the box and stifled a strangled cry. Doubtless there had also been boxes of ammunition.

  Goddamn thieves, he thought bitterly.

  But the other trash almost drove him wild. EMPIRIN WITH CODEINE, ERYTHROMYCIN, MEGAVITAMIN COMPLEX, MORPHINE… the labels and boxes were strewn about, but the bottles had been taken.

  Carefully handled… cached and traded in dribbles… these could have bought Gordon admission into almost any hamlet. Why he might even have won a probationary membership in one of the wealthy Wyoming ranch communities!

  He remembered a good doctor, whose clinic in the ruins of Butte was a sanctuary protected by all the surrounding villages and clans. Gordon thought of what that sainted gentleman could have done with these.

  But his eyesight nearly went dim with dark tunnels of rage when he saw an empty cardboard box whose label read… tooth powder…

  My tooth powder!

  Gordon counted to ten. It wasn’t enough. He tried controlled breathing. It only helped him focus on his anger. He stood there, slope-shouldered, feeling impotent to answer this one more unkindness by the world.

  It’s all right, he told himself. I’m alive. And if I can get back to my backpack, I’ll probably stay alive. Next year, if it comes, I can worry about my teeth rotting out of my head.

  Gordon picked up his gear and resumed his stalking exit out of that house of false expectations.

  * * *

  A man who spends a long time alone in the wilderness can have one great advantage over even a very good hunter—if that hunter nevertheless goes home to friends and companions most nights. The difference is a trait in kinship with the animals, with the wilds themselves. It was something
as undefinable as that which made him nervous. Gordon sensed that something was odd long before he could attribute it. The feeling would not go away.

  He had been retracing his steps toward the eastern edge of town, where his gear was cached. Now, though, he stopped and considered. Was he overreacting? He was no Jeremiah Johnson, to read the sounds and smells of the woods like street signs in a city. Still, he looked around for something to back up his unease.

  The forest was mostly western hemlock and bigleaf maple with alder saplings growing like weeds in nearly every former open area. It was a far cry from the dry woodlands he had passed through on the east side of the Cascades, where he had been robbed under the sparse ponderosa pines. Here there was a scent of life richer than anything he remembered since before the Three-Year Winter.

  Animal sounds had been scant until he stopped moving. But as he kept still, a flow of avian chatter and movement soon began to flow back into this patch of forest. Gray-feathered camp robbers flitted in small groups from spot to spot, playing guerrilla war with lesser jays for the best of the tiny, bug-rich glades. Smaller birds hopped from branch to branch, chirping and foraging.

  Birds in this size range had no great love for man, but neither did they go to great lengths to avoid him, if he was quiet.

  Then why am I nervous as a cat?

  There was a brief snapping sound to his left, near one of the ubiquitous blackberry thickets, about twenty yards away. Gordon whirled, but there, too, there were birds.

  Correction. A bird. A mockingbird.

  The creature swooped up through the branches and landed in a bundle of twigs Gordon guessed to be its nest. It stood there, like a small lordling, haughty and proud, then it squawked and dove toward the thicket again. As it passed out of sight, there was another tiny rustle, then the mockingbird swooped into view again.

  Gordon idly picked at the loam with his bow while loosening the loop on his revolver, trying hard to maintain a frozen expression of nonchalance. He whistled through fear-dry lips as he walked slowly, moving neither toward the thicket nor away from it, but in the direction of a large grand fir.

  Something behind that thicket had set off the mockingbird’s nest defense response, and that something was trying hard to ignore the nuisance attacks—to stay silently hidden.

  Alerted, Gordon recognized a hunting blind. He sauntered with exaggerated carelessness. But as soon as he passed behind the fir, he drew his revolver and ran into the forest at a sharp angle, crouching, trying to keep the bulk of the tree between himself and the blackberry bramble.

  He remained in the tree’s umbra only a moment. Surprise protected him a moment longer. Then the cracking of three loud shots, all of different caliber, diffracted down the lattice of trees. Gordon sprinted to a fallen log at the top of a small rise. Three more bangs pealed out as he dove over the decaying trunk, and hit the ground on the other side to a sharp snapping sound and stabbing pain in his right arm.

  He felt a moment’s blind panic as the hand holding his revolver cramped. If he had broken his arm…

  Blood soaked the cuff of his U.S. Government Issue tunic. Dread exaggerated the pain until he pulled back his sleeve and saw a long, shallow gash, with slivers of wood hanging from the laceration. It was the bow that had broken, stabbing him as he fell on it.

  Gordon threw the fragments aside and scrambled on hands and knees up a narrow gully to the right, keeping low to take advantage of the creekbed and underbrush. Behind him whoops of gleeful chase carried over the tiny hillock.

  The following minutes were a blur of whipping branches and sudden zigzags. When he splashed into a narrow rivulet, Gordon whirled, then hurried against the flow.

  Hunted men often will run downstream, he remembered, racing upslope, hoping his enemies knew that bit of trivia. He hopped from stone to stone, trying not to dislodge mud into the water. Then he jumped off into the forest again.

  There were shouts behind him. Gordon’s own footfalls seemed loud enough to wake sleeping bears. Twice, he caught his breath behind boulders or clumps of foliage, thinking as well as practicing silence.

  Finally, the shouts diminished with distance. Gordon sighed as he settled back against a large oak and pulled out his belt-pouch aid kit. The wound would be all right. There was no reason to expect infection from the polished wood of the bow. It hurt like hell but the tear was far from vessels or tendons. He bound it in boiled cloth and simply ignored the pain as he got up and looked around.

  To his surprise, he recognized two landmarks at once… the towering, shattered sign of the Oakridge Motel, seen over the treetops, and a cattle grate across a worn asphalt path just to the east.

  Gordon moved quickly to the place where he had cached his goods. They were exactly as he had left them. Apparently, the Fates were not so unsubtle as to deal him another blow just yet. He knew they didn’t operate that way. They always let you hope for a while longer, then strung it out before they really let you have it.

  * * *

  Now the stalked turned stalker. Cautiously, Gordon sought out the blackberry blind, with its irate resident mockingbird. As expected, it was empty now. He crept around behind to get the ambushers’ point of view, and sat there for a few minutes as the afternoon waned, looking and thinking.

  They had had the drop on him, that was for certain. From this point of view it was hard to see how they had missed when the three men fired on him.

  Were they so surprised by his sudden break for it? They must have had semi-automatic weapons, yet he only remembered six shots. Either they were being very stingy with ammo or…

  He approached the grand fir across the clearing. Two fresh scars blemished the bark, ten feet up.

  Ten feet. They couldn’t be such bad marksmen.

  So. It all fit. They had never meant to kill him at all. They had aimed high on purpose, to give him a scare and drive him off. No wonder his pursuers never really came close to catching him during his escape into the forest.

  Gordon’s lip curled. Ironically, this made his assailants easier to hate. Unthinking malice he had come to accept, as one must accept foul weather and savage beasts. So many former Americans had become little better than barbarians.

  But calculated contempt like this was something he had to take personally. These men had the concept of mercy; still they had robbed, injured, and terrorized him.

  He remembered Roger Septien, taunting him from that bone-dry hillside. These bastards were no better at all.

  Gordon picked up their trail a hundred yards to the west of the blind. The bootprints were clear and uncovered… almost arrogant in their openness.

  He took his time, but he never even considered turning back.

  * * *

  It was approaching dusk before the palisade that surrounded New Oakridge was in sight. An open area that had once been a city park was enclosed by a high wooden fence. From within could be heard the lowing of cattle. A horse whinnied. Gordon smelled hay and the rich odors of livestock.

  Nearby a still higher palisade surrounded three blocks of what had once been the southwest corner of Oakridge town. A row of two-story buildings half a block long took up the center of the village. Gordon could see the tops of these over the wall, and a water tower with a crow’s nest atop it. A silhouetted figure stood watch, looking out over the dimming forest.

  It looked like a prosperous community, perhaps the best-off he had encountered since leaving Idaho.

  Trees had been cut to make a free-fire zone around the village wall, but that was some time ago. Undergrowth half as high as a man had encroached on the cleared field.

  Well there can’t be many survivalists in the area, anymore, Gordon thought, or they’d be a whole lot less careless.

  Let’s see what the main entrance is like.

  He skirted around the open area toward the south side of the village. On hearing voices he drew up cautiously behind a curtain of undergrowth.

  A large wooden gate swung open. Two armed men sauntered out, look
ed around, then waved to someone within. With a shout and a snap of reins, a wagon pulled by two draft horses sallied through then stopped. The driver turned to speak to the two guards.

  “Tell the Mayor I appreciate the loan, Jeff. I know my stead is in the hole pretty deep. But we’ll pay him back out of next year’s harvest, for sure. He already owns a piece of the farm, so it ought to be a good investment for him.”

  One of the guards nodded. “Sure thing, Sonny. Now you be careful on your way out, okay? Some of the boys spotted a loner down at the east end of old town, today. There was some shootin’.”

  The farmer’s breath caught audibly. “Was anyone hurt? Are you sure it was just a loner?”

  “Yeah, pretty sure. He ran like a rabbit according to Bob.”

  Gordon’s pulse pounded faster. The insults had reached a point almost beyond bearing. He put his left hand inside his shirt and felt the whistle Abby had given him, hanging from its chain around his neck. He took some comfort from it, remembering decency.

  “The feller did the Mayor a real favor, though,” the first guard went on. “Found a hidey hole full of drugs before Bob’s guys drove him off. Mayor’s going to pass some of them around to some of the owners at a party tonight, to find out what they’ll do. I sure wish I moved in those circles.”

  “Me too,” the younger watchman agreed. “Hey, Sonny, you think the Mayor might pay you some of your bonus in drugs, if you make quota this year? You could have a real party!”

  “Sonny” smiled sheepishly and shrugged. Then, for some reason, his head drooped. The older guard looked at him quizzically.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Sonny shook his head. Gordon could barely hear him when he spoke. “We don’t wish for very much anymore, do we, Gary?”

  Gary frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean as long as we’re wishing to be like the Mayor’s cronies, why don’t we wish we had a Mayor without cronies at all!”