The big man beside him wheeled; he was wearing a football helmet, and carrying a sledgehammer with an eight-pound head over one shoulder. His jacket had slabs they’d cut from steel-belted tires fastened over most of it, too.
Eddie had added a Home Depot machete slung over his shoulder in an improvised harness, but hadn’t tried to add much protection to his pre-Change outfit-he disliked anything that restricted his speed. They both wore backpacks; Mack’s held their most precious possession, what was left of a twenty-pound sack of beef jerky. He hoped it was beef, at least-it was what they’d traded the girls for, that and two cartons of Saltines, some peanuts and a precious surviving six-pack of Miller.
He’d considered staying with that gang, but he’d gotten a bad vibe from them all, the way they looked at him, and especially at Mack, like they were noting how much meat he had on his bones.
I’m not really sure they wanted the bitches just to fuck ‘em, either, he thought. Ass is cheap these days if you’ve got food. And they didn’t look very hungry. Sorta suspicious.
“Someone’s coming,” Mack said.
“Yeah. That’s why we’re here,” Eddie said reasonably. “To meet someone. Now shut up and let me think.”
There were a lot of people coming, from the sound of it. They stepped back towards the curb, between two trucks.
The young man’s eyes went wide, then narrowed apprais-ingly.
The first men to turn the corner were armed-a dozen with crossbows, which gave Eddie a case of pure sea-green envy; he was still kicking himself for not getting one of those right after the Change, when the sporting-goods stores and outfitters hadn’t all been stripped. The other twenty or so carried polearms; murderous-looking stabbing spears seven feet long. He’d seen the like elsewhere. What really interested him was their other gear.
They all wore armor; sleeveless tunics covered in overlapping rows of U-shaped scales punched out of sheet metal somehow; they had conical steel helmets with strips at the front to protect their noses, and kite-shaped shields of plywood covered in sheet metal, painted black with a red eye in the center.
Behind them came more people; not armed, but looking businesslike, many carrying tools-sledgehammers, pry bars, saws, and dragging dollies. Behind them came flatbeds and improvised wagons of half a dozen types. The people drawing the vehicles were handcuffed to them, and looked a lot thinner and more ragged than the others. One of the wagons, the last, bore bodies-some fresh, many the wasted skeletons held together by gristle that littered the ground around cities elsewhere. Now he saw why the city itself was less rancid; someone was cleaning house, doing the rounds of buildings where people had dragged themselves to die.
And I sort of suspect that these guys just pushed people out of town to get rid of them, now, he thought. Pushed ‘em out before the food was all gone. That’s why the dead’re so thick south of town. Clever.
And there was a honcho, in a rickshaw-like arrangement, sort of a giant tricycle, pedaled by another of the thin-looking men; men who worked like machines with their eyes cast permanently down. The passenger was black and solidly built and wearing a dashiki and little beaded flowerpot hat; one hand held a fly whisk, the other a clipboard.
The… soldiers, I suppose; unless they’re the only racially integrated street gang outside a movie … stopped and leveled their weapons.
Eddie smiled broadly, raising his hands palm-out. “Hey, no problem. You guys the law around here?”
“We are the law and the prophets,” the black man said, in a deep rich voice. “We are the nobody-fucks-with-us Portland Protective Association, and you’d better believe it.”
“Where do we join?” Eddie asked.
Several of the spearmen looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes and grinned, not a pleasant expression. The man in the pedicab waved his fly whisk eastward.
“That way. Here.”
He handed over two disks on strings; squinting at his, Eddie saw “Probationary Applicant” printed on it.
“Being an Associate of the PPA isn’t all that easy, but you can try-and they’ll find you something to do. Those let you go straight through to headquarters, and man, you do not want to be caught wandering about.”
He made a lordly gesture with the fly whisk, and the two wanderers headed east. Signs of order increased; traffic on foot and on bicycles and in weird tandem arrangements hauling cargo, an occasional group of marching armored troops… and at what had been the green lawns of Couch Park, a huge pit.
Thick acrid black smoke poured out of it; a gas tanker stood nearby, feeding lines that spurted burning gasoline over the deep hole. Eddie watched a handcart pulled through a gap in the raw earth berm around the fire pit; it was heaped with skeletal bodies, some no more than bones held together by rotting gristle, some nauseatingly fresh and juicy, swarming with maggots or tunneled by exploring rats. Even now he gagged a little at the smell of the smoke, and of the carts lined up to feed it. He supposed the gasoline kept the fires hot enough that flesh and bone themselves would burn.
“Why’re they doing that, Eddie?” Mack asked.
“Not enough room or time to bury them all,” Eddie said. This bunch doesn’t fuck around, he added silently to himself. “Rotting bodies make people sick, Mack.”
The big man nodded, looking nervous. You could fight to take food or anything else you wanted, or to fend off a band after your own goods or the meat on your bones. But you couldn’t fight typhus, or cholera, or the nameless fevers that had taken off nearly as many people as the great hunger, or the new sickness people whispered about, the black plague.
They went past the line of dead-carts; the guards keeping the workers to their tasks on that detail wore scarves over their mouths, and stood well back. Another civilian overseer-this time a fussy-looking middle-aged white accountant type-intercepted them. Besides his clipboard, he wore a suit and tie, the first one Eddie had seen since right after the Change.
“Doesn’t anyone listen?” he half shrieked, looking at the disks around their necks. “South from here! See that building?”
He pointed to a tall glass-sheathed tower with beveled edges. As Eddie followed the finger, he saw a rhythmic blink of light from the roof; some sort of coded signal, worked with lights.
“That’s the Fox Tower. Stop two blocks west of it and then turn south. Straight south to the Park Blocks; that’s where the sorting is today. And you’d better be careful; the Protector himself is there this time!”
“The Protector?” Eddie asked. “He the man, here?”
The clerk’s lips went tight. “You’ll see. And you’d better be respectful.”
Eddie looked at the line of spears, and the burning ground. Several other pillars of black smoke rose from the city, and now that he knew what they were he could easily tell them from the ordinary plumes from random fires.
“Oh, yeah, duibuqi, so sorry, no disrespecting, man. None at all.”
The streets were mostly empty; the long rectangle of park swarmed. Several of the big grassy areas had been fenced off; some held horses, others men learning to ride horses; one fell off and staggered to his feet clutching an arm as Eddie watched.
Much of the rest of the park had been converted to vegetable gardens; a whiff told him where the fertilizer had come from. And another line of spearmen was prodding several score men with disks around their necks towards a small baseball park with bleachers, the kind neighborhood kids would have used back before the Change. Another man with a clipboard waited there; he had a belt with tools around his waist; beside him cooks were boiling something in big pots over wood fires. It smelled like porridge of some sort, and Eddie could hear Mack’s stomach rumbling.
The man with the tools shouted for silence.
“All right,” he said, when the newcomers had damped down the rumble of their talk. “First thing, anyone lies to us is really going to regret it-but not for long. Understand?”
Eddie preempted Mack’s question: “He means if you lie
and they find out, they’ll off you.”
“Oh,” Mack said, nodding thoughtfully.
“We need skilled workers,” Mr. Handyman went on. “Any blacksmiths first and foremost. Farriers too.”
“Well, that lets us out,” Eddie murmured; the closest he’d come to blacksmithing was a few hours of shop in high school, and he didn’t even recognize the name for the other trade.
“Plumbers, fitters, machinists, bricklayers, carpenters,” the man went on. “Doctors, dentists. Gardeners and farmers too. Line up over there at the desks and give the details. And people, do not lie. General laborers over here.”
Over here had another bunch of tough guards, and a bin full of metal collars.
No, not my thing, Eddie thought.
There was a scattering of men and women sitting in the bleachers around the baseball field, mostly close up by home base. There were also racks of weapons near the entrance-spears and shields-and an alert-looking squad with crossbows.
Eddie nodded, unsurprised. Yeah. An elimination event.
Also there was a big horse-drawn carriage, the type they’d used to show tourists around town before the Change; it had four glossy black horses hitched to it, and another couple standing saddled nearby, with collared servants holding them. Plus six or seven big armored men, standing by their mounts. Eddie’s status-antennae fingered them for muscle.
One more servant sat in the carriage, holding up a lacy parasol-a blond chick, and a real stunner, dressed in something out of a pervert’s catalogue and a silver collar. Across from her was a woman in her twenties, a brunette-no collar, and a fancy dress. Leaning back against the side of the carriage with his arms negligently spread along the top of the door was a tall man who seemed to be clad in a rippling metal sheath.
A little closer, and Eddie could see that it was armor-thousands of small burnished stainless-steel washers, held on to a flexible backing with little copper rivets through the holes in their center; it clad the man from neck to knees, slit up the back and front so that he could ride a horse.
Around his narrow waist he wore a leather belt carrying a long double-edged sword and a dagger; over his broad shoulders went a black silk cloak; on his feet high black boots with golden spurs on the heels. A servant nearby held his shield and a helmet, hammered steel with hinged cheekpieces and a tall raven-feather plume.
The face above the glittering armor was narrow and aquiline; the hazel eyes that surveyed the field were the coldest the young man had ever seen. Eddie estimated his age somewhere between thirty and forty; that sort of bony look didn’t show the years much.
I think I’m in love, he grinned to himself. Man, this dude is bad! Look at those chicks, that carriage, that gear, all of this. I want a piece of it. Oh, sweet motherfucking Jesus, do I!
“Hey!” he shouted aloud. “I didn’t come here to shovel shit. I came here to join the Association and fight. I want to be with you when you move out of Portland.”
Mack rumbled agreement, and about a dozen others among the crowd did as well; none of them had come through since the Change looking plump but they were notably less gaunt than the others.
The man in the coat of rings shifted his gaze to Eddie, coming erect with lazy grace. He walked nearer, the muscle just behind.
“And what makes you think we’re leaving Portland?” he said softly, he had an educated man’s voice, calm and precise.
Eddie met his eyes, forcing himself not to flinch or show the sudden rush of cold anxiety that ran from crotch up to stomach.
“Because that’s where it all is, now,” he said. “The farmers and the farms, that’s everything. If you’ve got them, you’ve got everything.”
A guard bristled. “You call the Protector ‘sir’, cocksucker, or ‘Protector’.”
A thin brow crooked up, and the man raised a hand for quiet. “Why did you come into town, then?”
“I figured, what with the panic and all, probably not all the food got eaten right after the Change. Just the stuff in stores, maybe canned goods in warehouses, that sort of thing. But the bulk stuff, the wheat and like that in the silos and elevators, maybe on ships, a lot of it wouldn’t get taken. Whoever got a grip on that could build up their own army-and it’ll take an army to squeeze those farmers out in the valley. Freelancing don’t cut it anymore. I heard some rumors about you, and I figured that was what was going on. Protector. Sir.”
“Well, well, well,” the lord of Portland said. “We’ve got one with brains. Perhaps I’ll have a use for you. Any education?”
Eddie shrugged and grinned. “Two years community college,” he said. “And the school of hard knocks.”
“More hard knocks we can arrange,” the man said. He nodded his head towards the baseball field. “It takes a special sort of man to be an Associate. We have a little contest first, a chance to show your quality. The winners are inducted into our ranks, if they’re not too badly crippled.”
Eddie nodded. “Figured it would be like that, from your setup,” he said calmly. “One question, Protector?” At the nod he went ahead. “How come you figured things out so fast?”
The man smiled, and gestured another bristling guard back. “I was a man who realized what the Change meant,” he said.
He clapped his hands sharply. “Let the play-offs begin!”
Fifteen
“I’m surprised,” Will Hutton said a week later. “Hadn’t expected gratitude to last so long, but they still love us.”
Havel grinned as he watched the bustle of the Bearkiller camp; the fresh morning air smelled of horses and canvas, cooking meat and baking bread and a little of dust and earth.
“I don’t think they really needed those tents they gave us,” he said, holding his horse’s bridle beneath the jaw and stroking its nose. “And word about the cannibals spread pretty quick. The story didn’t lose any in the telling, I bet, either.”
Gustav tried to nuzzle his face; he pushed it away with his right palm. Horses were a bit like St. Bernards when they got affectionate, given to slobbering all over you with the drooling jaws of love. The powerful earthy-grassy scent of the big gelding was strong in his nostrils. Will Hutton had picked it for him, twelve hundred pounds of agile muscle and endurance, a descendant of Steel Dust and Shiloh on his dam’s side, crossed with Hutton’s Hanoverian stallion.
The tents the locals had donated were National Guard standard, meant to sleep eight men; a row of them stretched across a green meadow not far from the Clearwater. Families and groups of the unattached milled about each in the morning chill, getting ready for the day. The wagons were nearby; one of them was a ranch-style chuckwagon; Angelica had hugged the vehicle and kissed the tilt when it arrived. The horse lines lay a little beyond, and beyond that the ground sloped up towards the west; stock drifted over it, watched by mounted herders.
The cattle and sheep had been surplus to local needs too, but the extra horses were very welcome. So were the four precious milch cows and their calves.
Havel pushed his helmet back by the nasal, so that the padding of the lower rim rested on his scalp and he had an unobstructed view; it was becoming a gesture as natural as breathing. The long shadows of men and horses stretched before him towards the west, and the wind was gratefully cool through the steel rings of his armor. More and more of the Bearkillers drifted in, until he was ringed by faces old and new.
So much for making a quiet exit, he thought. Christ, we talked about the trip long enough.
The Larssons were there, and Pamela, and a scattering of others-Aaron leaning on his crutch, and Billy Waters too for some reason.
“I still think it’s a bit risky to send you,” Will grumbled. “Yeah, we do need a detailed scout of the way we’re headed-news just plain spreads too slow and gets too garbled. It’s purely foolish to keep the whole shebang pokin’ ahead into the blue. So sending Eric ‘n’ Josh I can see. Why you, though?”
“I like to see the ground I’m going to be operating through,” Havel said patien
tly-he’d listened to the same argument for days. “And I can bargain for us, arrange safe passage and make deals.”
Plus personal reasons, he added to himself; Signe was hanging back, looking sheepish. Not her fault, but…
“You can run the camp well enough, Will.”
The Texan grinned. “I surely can; hell, I may even get some horse wranglin’ in. I’ll just tell ‘em if they think I’m tough, wait until Lord Bear gets back.”
Havel winced slightly. “Well, whatever works. And you’re needed for teaching-so are Pam and most of the others. How many newbies have we got now?”
“Twenty-seven, countin’ the kids and the teenager we rescued. Eighteen grown men and women.”
“Right, and they all need to know the basics,” Havel said. “Half of them have never forked a horse and none of them have ever picked up a sword. We need a long stop for that anyway, and to get the bowmaking operation and the other stuff going. Three men with a good string of remounts can travel fast. I should be back in about a month.”
He paused. “Hey, Astrid,” he called.
She started, pulling her eyes from a red-tailed hawk circling high above.
“It’s your birthday next week, isn’t it?”
She nodded. He turned and took a parcel out of his saddlebag.
“Eric and I found this for you. I know you miss that Lord of the Rings you had. We won’t be here on the day, so-”
The wrapping was plain brown paper, but she gave a suppressed squeal, slung her bow over her shoulder, and took it eagerly.
Havel hid a grin as she jumped from one foot to the other and tried to undo the knots.
Sort of gives you an idea of what she would be like as a normal teenager, yakking for hours on the phone or mooning over some idiot musician, he thought.
She gave up on the knots and drew her hunting knife to cut the string.
“It’s a complete set!” she burbled. The books were bound in gray, with a golden ring and a lidless eye on the cover.
“Ohmigod! The Allen and Unwin hardcovers!” A quick glance inside. “A first edition Allen and Unwin with the foldout pocket maps intact! A-” she choked. “A signed first edition! Ohmigod!”
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