Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

by S. M. Stirling

  I figured I’d better stay real quiet on the whole subject. I needed Orry and Mattie to live through whatever this was, and who could tell what they’d do if they found out how weird I was, or how weird they looked to me?

  Orry was crying harder now, still inside his sleeping bag. Mattie touched my arm, took my hand, guided me to my feet, and led me to the door. We carefully opened it, finding the beginning of gray daylight, and a huge moon halfway down the clearing western sky.

  The chinook was on its way out, but the bad weather still wasn’t here. Mattie dragged the door shut behind us. He was holding Orry’s crowbar. “I think we can probably get into the bathrooms,” he whispered, “and it might be our only chance today for a comfortable place to go.”

  We pried the women’s side door open on the little building; it seemed like a good idea to take turns keeping watch while the other one went in peace. It was freeze-ass cold to drop my pants in there, but at least there was toilet paper. By the time I’d finished, Orry was walking down the slope toward us, and if his face was kind of red and smeary, he seemed to at least be done crying for the moment.

  We let him have his turn; he emerged with a wry smile. “Good thing there’s only three of us. That’s all the toilets there were and we’ll have to bring up buckets of water from the lake to flush,” he said.

  “Why would we bother?”

  “For the next guy. That way he doesn’t get sick from our crap and spread disease, which will find its way to us.” He held up an REI folding bucket. “There’s a cook pot in my pack too, so we can boil water once we make a fire, and I’ve got water purifying tabs.”

  “If we boil it do we need the tabs?” Mattie asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Pretty much all surface water in Colorado has cryptosporidium. You want to shit your guts out for two weeks?”

  “There’s a soft drink machine in the rec building,” I pointed out.

  “There’s no electricity—” Orry began.

  “There’s no cops and we have a crowbar,” I said.

  “I’m still going to grab water to flush the toilets,” Orry said, and headed down to the lake. Meanwhile, we broke in and found the machine was mostly full. We started stacking bottled water and Mountain Dew.

  “Can’t believe I didn’t think of that,” Orry said, joining us. “That private property libertarian thing, I guess.” He seemed on the brink of tearing up, probably thinking of his father again.

  Afraid he would set Mattie off, I asked, “So where’s the shelter?”

  “Up by Lyons. Dad equipped it with pretty much everything we’re likely to need.”

  “How far?” Mattie asked.

  “Thirty-two miles. We might even get most of the way there by dark. Going west from here, there’s a whole chain of public parks, school campuses, and software company campuses. Dad said to go this way ‘in case of civil disorder,’ which we sure got. So . . . you guys have any better plan?”

  We didn’t, so we all sat down and ate more chips, cookies, and candy for breakfast. My pack was getting emptier, so we reshuffled to even out the load of water and soda.

  “I’d like to get a look at the city before we go,” Mattie said. “Just to see what’s happening down there. I mean, what if the power came back on overnight?”

  “The Coke machine would’ve been working,” I pointed out.

  “And I’d rather not go up the slope and maybe show on a skyline,” Orry said.

  I looked at Mattie’s face and shrugged. “Maybe if we’re quick?” I was guessing Mattie was hoping to see cars moving and traffic lights working and then go back and find his parents still alive. I’ll never get those parent and kid things but I knew Mattie needed that last look to be sure.

  From where we lay prone on the ridgeline, we had big, long views to the south and east.

  Eastward, the sun was just above the horizon, a huge ball of red, dark as a fresh wound, slashed by black lines of retreating clouds. I-25 was a horizon-to-horizon smear of abandoned cars. In the nearby housing developments, some fires burned, and some swaths of burned buildings were still smoldering. The big refinery in Commerce City was pouring out black smoke, as were the tall buildings downtown and in the Tech Center. And it was quiet, quiet like when you’re backpacking.

  “Let’s go,” Mattie said. “Let’s get away before more people are out.”

  * * *

  MONDAY, 8 JUNE 2015, ABOUT 10:20 A.M.

  RAFTER XOX RANCH, WESTERN NEBRASKA

  Marjorie comes up the ladder with her minister’s robe bunched around her waist, tucked into her belt. The bread-and-wine kids scramble up after her. I step to the side with James, to make room for the emergency funeral party in the center space.

  Glory is at my side; she knows there will be a message. But what message?

  I can tell Glory to take one of three words to the fighters getting ready below:

  Straight, meaning as Marjorie finishes the funeral service, James will shoot Mattie. Then our fighters will swarm out and slaughter the assholes.

  Bent, meaning on that last Amen, James will shoot the leader of the assholes, the snipers will try for everyone close to Mattie, and the rescue party will try to reach Mattie before the surviving assholes can kill him.

  Broken, which means that on some cue that Marjorie won’t know, we go all out to take them by surprise before any of them can kill Mattie.

  Mattie was the one who explained the three plans to me, back when he came up with them:

  “We’re a ranch. We don’t have fences and fortifications everywhere and some of our hands have to work out on the range, miles from home, completely out of touch with base, for months at a time. And we have to raise cattle and drive cattle to stay in business. We can’t spend all our time rescuing our people, or avenging them. So to keep our people safe, at a price we can afford to pay, the crazy evil men out there on the range have to know in their bones that harming one little girl carrying water up from a creek to the chuck wagon is tantamount to dancing on a greased branch with a noose around your neck. The reason to pick any of the alternatives is supposed to be, always, to make sure no one ever, ever, ever gets anything out of taking a hostage from Rafter XOX.

  “So,” Mattie said, “no matter what, and this applies to us too, Claire, these are the rules. If a rescue looks likely to fail, if there’s any chance they could get away still holding the hostage, even if it looks like they can kill the hostage before we get there, we play Straight. We never, ever let them have any power or success; better to kill our own people than let them do it. So we play Bent only if we’re damned close to certain that they can’t take the hostage back. Broken is when the odds are bad but we’re being stupid and trying anyway. I’d rather we never used it.”

  Since we built the Rafter XOX compound, Mattie and I have stood on this gate through nine hostage situations. We have never yet played Broken. We’ve played Bent three times, Straight six. We rescued the hostages in every Bent, though one died of wounds later.

  I know Mattie would call this situation the “classic case” for Straight. The rescue party will have to cut him out of that travois and there’s a good chance he’s injured badly enough that they’ll kill him trying to move him, and there are three armed enemies a step away. He might even have been killed already, if he had a broken neck or internal bleeding, when the travois turned over. He may be my husband and the other owner of the Rafter XOX, but no one is indispensible.

  So I turn to Glory to tell her we’re playing Straight, steel myself, and lean down to her ear. “Tell them Broken. On the Cup.”

  I only realize what I’ve said when I see her cover her mouth to hide her grin, and she has plunged down the ladder before I collect myself enough to call her back.

  Well, the die is cast. I mutter, “Broken on the Cup” to James.

  The asshole below is prating on about how he wants a third of our cat
tle now and a quarter of every drive through “his” territory forever.

  “We’ll talk after the funeral,” I say, loudly. He looks up, blinking; he has only been performing for his followers. I feel a flash of sympathy, knowing how that is.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1998, 1:15 P.M.

  NORTH OF LAFAYETTE, COLORADO

  We were eating the last of the chips and cookies from my pack and coat on the porch on the southwest side of a boarded-up farmhouse. The chinook was holding but the sky was clear deep blue, the distant mountains were sharp as a laser print, and the wind was freshening. The blizzard would be here before sunset.

  Mattie was going on about how all those boarded-up farmhouses were the result of corporate agriculture. Years later, on cattle drives along the Deseret Trail, he would go on about how once farms got small again, those very old houses came back into use.

  The one pleasant constant was that Mattie would go on; it was the most comforting, dependable sound I knew.

  “We’ve made just over sixteen miles,” Orry said. “And it’s way past noon. We can’t get there in daylight; we should find somewhere to hole up pretty soon.”

  “Okay by me,” I said. “You skinny little boys can keep going forever but hauling my fat ass all this way is work. And we need to make sure that hole is warm—there’s a blizzard coming.”

  Mattie asked, “How do you know that?”

  “Years of cross-country skiing,” I said, “which is skiing for people so stupid they try to ski uphill.”

  Orry laughed. “That’s exactly what my mom always told Dad when he’d make us practice because—because—” And just like that he folded up into tears and sobs. “Daddy.”

  Mattie looked at me like I would know what to do, then fell into tears himself, reaching out to hang on to Orry.

  Dad had explained, during Mom’s many breakdowns, that people who have those feelings need some time before they can be of any use.

  So I just took Orry’s map from his limp fingers, turned it around to put the mountains on my left, US 287 on my right, and eventually found the stretch between Ruth Roberts Park and Mineral Road. I put my finger against the scale, then kind of crooked it around on the map and figured things out. By then the guys had gone quiet, just sitting and holding each other. I asked, “Is there anything in Niwot?”

  “Where?” Orry asked. It came out real shaky.

  “Niwot. We lost all that time swinging wide around Lafayette to avoid the fighting, and the fighting seemed to be about looting, and looting happens around stores. Are there stores in Niwot?”

  “Not many,” Orry said. “It’s mostly office buildings and some houses.”

  “Then there’s at least a fair chance we can find a place to hole up there, and we can go through, not around. We should keep moving while it’s light.” I stood up and put on my pack, and so did they. The blue-black clouds of the oncoming blizzard were pouring upward from the mountains in front of us.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1998, 4:45 P.M.

  NIWOT, COLORADO

  The last three miles west along Mineral Road, a freeze-ass-cold wind blew into our faces and right through my big bulky coat. Grit and dirt sanded our faces. Orry forged ahead like he was trying to finish a marathon. Behind him, I plodded along with one hand between Mattie’s shoulder blades to keep him moving.

  I don’t know what the others were thinking; in Mattie’s case probably nothing, or he’d have been fact-spouting. I thought about Mom and the way she’d always wanted me to say I had feelings that I didn’t. She’d probably just lain in the bed crying till someone killed her, or set the house on fire, and Dad had probably died trying to protect her.

  I tried to feel bad that she wouldn’t bother me for a hug again, or tell me what to feel. I wondered—

  “That’s Diagonal Highway,” Orry said, “that traffic light up ahead.”

  “Hope we don’t have to wait too long at it.” Yeah, it was a stupid joke; sometimes that’s just what you do.

  Orry explained, “It’s the southeast corner of Niwot. I’m hoping we can beg our way into somewhere with heat. Lots of woodstoves up here.”

  Close to the intersection, we walked past cars sprawled across the road in a jumble; a few were smashed or down in the ditch, but mostly they had just stopped at strange angles.

  Mattie coughed and gasped, “All their engines must’ve gone out right at the same moment, and power brakes and power steering too. It’s a lot tidier on Diagonal than on Mineral because Mineral Road had the light at the time.”

  I was just glad he could notice anything besides how cold and sore he was. I wrapped an arm around Mattie, dragging him along with me, and Orry took Mattie’s other side.

  At Diagonal Highway itself, a sign pointed to the right with a hand-lettered message:

  Refugee Shelter in IBM Building

  Orry said, “Let’s see if they’ll feed us. At least it’ll be out of the wind.”

  When we were about three yards from the main door, a gray-haired lady in a pebbly-gray skirt-suit pushed the door open. “Come on in. I’m Jennifer Shaw. Let’s get you in here so I can close this door and open the inner one. We don’t have heat so we’re trying to keep everyone’s body heat in.”

  A big man, heavyset with a thick beard and bald head, pushed the door shut behind us. “Sorry about this but we’ve had a couple people who tried to get violent, so I gotta pat you down while Ms. Shaw talks to you for a minute. I’m Harry Uhlman.”

  “Okay, but I’ll need my knife when we leave,” Orry said.

  “No prob. But we need to keep it at the front desk. Already had one stabbing, don’t need more.” He was respectful and polite about frisking the guys; Ms. Shaw frisked me.

  “You’ll have to forgive Dr. Uhlman for not patting you down properly,” she said. “He’s normally a chemist, not a cop,” she said.

  “If there’s even such a thing as chemistry anymore. I spent all afternoon trying to get gunpowder to do something besides fizz, and gasoline to burn fast enough to power anything.”

  Mattie, reviving now that we were out of that freezing wind, told about his homemade battery experiment, and glowed when Uhlman said, “Excellent thinking!” and scribbled a note about it.

  They asked us about where we’d come from, and what we’d seen. That started Orry and Mattie crying again. Shaw and Uhlman looked at me really weird when I said, “My mother has mental problems, my dad wouldn’t leave her . . . I just, you know, I couldn’t stay, not with what was happening down there.”

  I was careful to say it kind of flat and dead, so that they assumed I was just in shock.

  “Well,” Shaw said, “we’ve already kept you standing here too long. Let’s feed you and bed you down for the night. At least it’s out of the weather—sorry it’s not more.” As we followed her through the second set of doors, into the main lobby, she said, “Mr. Andrews, your turn,” and a guy in a suit went out to join Uhlman.

  We followed her through the lobby and down the hall in the dim, failing light from the skylights.

  Everywhere people leaned against walls, sat or lay on the floor, some chatting, most just staring.

  “Most of these people were stranded in the big traffic jam last night, but all day we’ve had people walking in from Longmont and Boulder, even one family from Lyons,” Shaw said. “You’ve got the record for longest walk to get here, though, I think.”

  In a glass-roofed atrium, they had set up tables with plastic baskets like cheap restaurants used to serve sandwiches in. The basket she handed me contained an orange, a bag of SunChips, a bag of pretzels, three slices of bread, two slices of Velveeta, a Slim Jim, and a can of Sprite. “One basket to a person, take the one we give you. You can trade among yourselves if you want. We were all here last night setting up for a big conference that, obviously, didn’t happen, plus the
King Soopers up the road donated a lot. Please do plan to move on soon; with as many people as we have, we won’t have enough to last beyond noon tomorrow, and we have no idea where to get more.”

  We gobbled our food baskets. Then Shaw guided us, by candlelight, to a small windowless conference room, where the tables and chairs had been cleared out. Two families already sprawled asleep on the floor along the back wall, and didn’t even stir when we came in.

  We took the remaining corner that wasn’t at the door, with our packs for pillows and our coats for bedding under the sleeping bags. With so many people in a small sealed room, it wasn’t terribly cold.

  “Good night,” Shaw said, and took the candle with her.

  I was almost asleep when Mattie breathed, “Claire?” in my ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you hear what my dad said, just before they hit him? I thought he was looking right at me and I didn’t, I couldn’t, I want to know—”

  I lied, slightly. “I thought he said, ‘I love you.’”

  “I thought so too. But I can’t get it out of my mind that maybe it was the Hindi for ‘Run away!’”

  “Which he would have said because he loved you,” I said, taking a wild guess at what Mattie wanted to hear.

  “Yeah.” His arms went around me and he buried his face in my shoulder. Oh, well, if he really needed the comfort, he could sleep holding me for another night, anyway.

  * * *

  MONDAY, 8 JUNE 2015, ABOUT 11 A.M.

  RAFTER XOX RANCH, WESTERN NEBRASKA

  Marjorie makes the funeral very impressive. Of course, she might really be commending Mattie’s soul to her god. As she raises the chalice aloft, two dozen crossbows slap-buzz! in unison. Asshole Leader falls dead, and so does the hatchet man, nearest Mattie.

  Machete Guy is only hit in the calf, and falls forward, closer to Mattie. He heaves himself forward with his hands as James stomps on the pedal of his crossbow, and has a head and a hand under the travois before James’ next bolt strikes him square between the shoulder blades.