by Wren, M. K.
“Why?”
“Well, to . . . to find out if there was anybody else left.”
“Yes. We made a sojourn like that many years ago. We didn’t find anyone. I understand the reason—the true reason—for your sojourn, Luke, but I’m surprised the Doctor or the elders let you leave the Ark.”
“They let me go because—well, I had a vision. It came in a dream. The Lord told me to go out and find . . . other people. I told the Doctor and the—how did you know about the Elders?”
“You mean that the elders form a sort of ruling committee over which the Doctor presides?”
“Yes, that’s true, but how did you know?”
Rachel might have told him that such a system of government was almost inevitable in the kind of community he described, but she only shrugged and asked, “Where did you go? And did you find anyone?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling a little, fully aware of the power that single word wielded. “I’ll tell you about my travels, if you’d like.”
Mary looked up at Rachel, saw that she had apparently frozen with her glass only a few inches from her lips. If you’d like. How, after all these years, could they not like to hear about his travels if they included the discovery of other survivors. Mary asked perversely, “Aren’t you getting awfully tired?”
He didn’t expect that. “No. Really, I’m not.”
For a moment he seemed as imploringly earnest as a child who didn’t want to be put to bed. She rose to add more wood to the fire. “Yes, of course we’d like to hear about your travels.”
He returned her smile, watching her as she sat down, drawing her knees up and folding her arms on them. Then he took a long breath, as if he were bracing himself, but not for an undesired ordeal. She had the feeling he’d been waiting a long time to tell this tale.
“Well, even after the Doctor and the Elders agreed that I should make the journey, it took a while to get ready, but the day finally came. I set out after morning service on the first of July with Amos, my mule, and headed south on the coast highway. I remember it was a clear day, and I . . . I’d never done anything before that seemed so right and good. There were times later I doubted that, but now . . .” He paused, blue eyes warm as he looked at Mary and Rachel. “Anyway, the first few days I passed a lot of little towns and didn’t find a soul in any of them, but I wasn’t discouraged. I knew the Lord was guiding me. Every evening I built a big beacon fire in case there was anybody around to see the smoke or the light.”
Those words were a mnemonic snare, and Mary looked into the flames in the hearth and remembered another fire: the one that had burned in the fathomless darkness on Saddle Mountain.
Luke went on. “Sometimes I camped in empty houses along the highway, but most of the time I bedded down on the beach near my fire. In a couple of places the highway had slid out, and I couldn’t walk on the beach for one reason or another, so I had to go around through the forest. I got myself good and lost once, but I just headed for the highest hill I could see and listened for the ocean.”
Rachel asked, “Did you have maps?”
“The Doctor gave me some road maps. I still have one, but it’s in tatters. Anyway, Amos and I kept going on down the coast, and one day I saw a sign on the road that said I was leaving Oregon. Gave me a funny feeling, like maybe I might never come back again. I stayed on Highway 101 to Crescent City, but it was in the middle of a big burn. You could hardly tell there’d ever been a town. So I headed on south for Eureka. I think—yes, it was along there I ran out of the bum and into the most beautiful forest and the biggest trees I’ve ever seen.”
Rachel smiled at that. “The redwoods, no doubt.”
He nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s right. I saw signs along the road that told about them. Well, I came out of those woods after a few days, passed through what was left of some towns along the way.
I wasn’t too far north of Eureka when I thought I saw smoke in the hills to the east. I built a big fire that night, but a storm came in toward morning. Rain lasted three days. The fourth day I built another beacon fire, but I never saw even a breath of smoke.” He paused, shook his head. “Maybe I didn’t really see any smoke to begin with. Anyway, I went on to Eureka, and at first I couldn’t figure out what happened to it. It was partly burned, but everything around the bay looked like it had been dynamited. Then I saw the mud. I guess there’d been a flood.”
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Of course there had. Nearly every town on the California coast was hit by tsunamis from the big quake.”
“I don’t know that word, soonaw . . . whatever.”
She spelled it out for him. “It’s a Japanese word. It refers to the waves triggered by earthquakes.”
“Oh. When was this big quake?”
Mary blinked, and she was glad he was looking at Rachel, who was more successful at hiding her surprise as she responded. “The California quake? It was a few months before the End. April, wasn’t it, Mary? It was the worst disaster in American history. The death toll was at least two million.”
Luke was visibly staggered. “I don’t remember anything about that,” he said, nearly whispering.
Rachel studied him with a tolerant smile. “I think you’ve led a very insular life, Luke.”
“Insular? There’s another word I don’t know.”
“Well, it comes from the Latin for island. In this context, it means isolated, cut off.”
“You know so many things. You’re a very wise woman—just like my vision told me.”
Rachel held her smile. “If I’m wise, it’s because I’ve had wise teachers, the best from all the ages.” Then at his puzzled frown: “The books, Luke. They’re my teachers.”
He nodded. “Like the Bible.”
Rachel’s smile slipped. “That’s one book.” Then she added: “Other books are full of different kinds of wisdom. But I want to hear more about your journey.”
He seemed distracted, as if he’d lost his place. Mary prompted, “You were talking about Eureka.”
“Oh, yes. Well, I didn’t find anybody there, so I kept going. South of Eureka, Highway 101 angled inland, and it was about there I counted off my first month. I had a walking stick, and I cut a notch in it every night. Didn’t seem like I’d covered much ground for a month’s travel, but it was slow going. I had to build my beacon fires, and that meant gathering wood, and I wasn’t carrying much food, so I had to hunt or fish along the way. It wasn’t long after I notched off that first month that I ran into another big burn, and as soon as I hit a main junction I decided to go east. I came to the end of the burn that way and found a lake. It was called Clear Lake, and it was beautiful with little houses on the shore. I was sure somebody must still live there, but I didn’t see a sign of smoke. I stayed awhile to fish and hunt and dry the meat. Good thing, too.” He gazed into the fire, but he was seeing something else that even in memory stunned him.
“Once, before Armageddon, the Doctor went to Sacramento. He told me about the huge farms and orchards. I figured when I headed east into the big valley, I was bound to find people. But that place . . . it had changed since the Doctor saw it. It had turned into a desert. To the north and east, that’s all I could see: dry, brown desert. To the south there’d been fires. I went half a day south and never came out of the burn, so I figured there was no use going any farther that way.”
Rachel asked, “How far were you from Sacramento?”
“As I remember, it was maybe fifty miles down I–5. That’s how the highway was marked on my map.”
“Sacramento had probably been bombed. You were close enough to be in the firestorm zone.”
“Firestorm?”
“From the nuclear bombs.”
“Is that what caused the desert?”
“No, that was probably caused by the nuclear winter—the cold would be far worse
inland than it was on the coast—and what you call the Blind Summer. The plants were killed, Luke, and that left the land bare to erosion. Weren’t there any plants at all?”
“Nothing but sagebrush and dried-up grass. There wasn’t any water. Thank the Lord, I’d filled up my canteens at Clear Lake. It was days before Amos and I found a creek with a little muddy water in it.” He stopped, staring again into bleak memory. “In that place, I could believe—I mean, there was no way to doubt what the Doctor said about Armageddon. The world had come to an end there.”
“Yet you said there were plants,” Rachel interjected. “Where there are plants, there’ll be animals. You could say the world had changed there, but not that it had ended.”
Luke didn’t seem to know how to respond to that. Mary took a swallow of her mead, again prompted him. “What happened after you found the creek?”
“Well, I kept on north on the highway. Finally I came to Red Bluff. Just acres of ruins, the sand piling in the windows, but there was a river running though it, and along the banks there were big trees with their bark peeling off, but they were green and seemed healthy otherwise. There were willows and cattails, and even some ducks and rabbits. And fish in the river. I camped there, stocking up on meat, about four days. I saw a big, snowcapped mountain to the north with smoke coming out of one peak.” He laughed bitterly. “At first I thought somebody was living up there, but there was too much smoke to be made by people. Besides, nobody could live on top of a mountain that high.”
“That was probably Mount Lassen,” Rachel said. “It’s a volcano. It must’ve been going into an active phase. Did you see Shasta? It would be farther north.”
He shrugged. “I remember a town called Mount Shasta. That was past Redding. All the towns along there were in ruins. But after that I ran into patches of forest, and it was easier going. At least, there was more water. I went through two more big bums going into the Siskyou Mountains, but when I finally got to the Oregon line, I was in green forest, and dear Lord, it was beautiful. Just over the line, I camped at a place called the Siskyou Summit. There was still a sign there. I made another beacon fire. I was so tired, so discouraged, but I figured since there was live forest here, this would be a good place to find people. And I did. I mean, they found me.”
Mary felt her heart take a double beat; she leaned toward Luke as if by getting closer she could have his answer sooner. “Who found you?”
In the strained set of his jaw was something on the edge of hatred, and when he spoke, it echoed coldly in his voice. “It was Amos hee-hawing that woke me up, and when I looked around, I saw maybe ten men, all carrying rifles or shotguns. They had beards and wore clothes with a funny pattern—different shades of green blotches.”
Mary said absently, “Camouflage suits.”
“Survivalists,” Rachel added.
Luke sighed, his anger waning. “I never did find out what they called themselves. I guess one of them hit me on the head. When I woke up, I was in a little room that was mostly underground with nothing in it but a cot and a chamber pot and one small window high up. All I could see was a bare yard and a metal fence with barbed wire on top. People walked by once in a while, and I hollered at them, but they just went on like they didn’t hear, except one old man. He squatted down by my window and talked to me. Told me there were a thousand people in the settlement—he called it a compound—but the next thing he said was they had ten tanks fueled up and ready to roll. There couldn’t have been that many people in what I saw of the place later, and I sure never saw a tank. They had a lot of guns, though. I asked him if he believed in God and Jesus Christ, and he got mad, said he did, but he knew I didn’t. Then he asked why I spoke American if I was a Russian. About then, two men came in and took me out into a big room. There was a table there with a man sitting behind it and an empty chair in front of it. That’s where they made me sit. The man at the table was in charge. Tall man with white hair and a long beard. Looked like a prophet. The others called him sir, but none of them used names. He said I was a spy, and he wanted to know where I came from. Well, I wasn’t about to tell him. I figured he’d likely as not send men with guns—or tanks, for all I knew then—over to Canaan Valley. He kept asking me questions, but I wouldn’t answer, and finally the other men . . . they started trying to beat the answers out of me.”
Mary winced. “Is that how you got the scars on your back?”
“The scars . . .” He seemed surprised, then his eyes flicked down. “I . . . got a few scars from that place. Well, they put me back in my room, and I saw they’d boarded up the window. That was before the door closed. After that, I couldn’t see anything. I don’t know how many days I was there or how many times they brought me out to ask me questions. The only other thing that happened was now and then somebody came in with food and water.”
His tone was flat, emotionless, yet Mary felt an intangible electric link spanning the small distance between them, felt her mind opened, if only briefly, to his mind and to endless hours of dark terror. She said, “I don’t know how you kept your sanity.”
Luke looked at her and caught his breath. Then he turned away. “Well, I prayed a lot. Talked to Jesus like He was right there in the room with me. Maybe He was. Finally one day the head man came in. I called him Prophet Lucifer. . . .” Luke stopped, frowning. “You know, the funny thing is, he looked a lot like the Doctor. Anyway, he said he’d decided maybe I wasn’t a spy after all, and he was going to let me go. He led me outside, and that was the only chance I had to see the settlement. There were five big buildings, all half-underground, built of cement blocks. This was in a valley, and in the distance I could see barns and fields. Maybe thirty people were gathered, even a few women and a couple of children, and there were two or three big dogs. They looked kind of like Aggie.”
Mary stroked Agate’s shaggy back. “German shepherds, probably.”
“I guess so. Then the prophet gave me my rifle and pointed to a backpack, said my things were in there, along with some pemmican and jerky. I asked about Amos, but he said, ‘We need the mule.’ I didn’t argue. I just hope they took care of ol’ Amos. The prophet led me to the main gate. There was a road leading up out of the valley, and I took off at a trot. I must’ve been a mile away before it came to me why he let me go. He figured I’d head for home, and he could track me and find out where I came from. I climbed a hill above the road, and sure enough, after a while I saw two men and a dog coming my way. I headed north into the woods, trying to figure out how to get free of them. About sundown, I made camp. Once, I heard the dog bark in the distance. The next day I kept going till evening, when I came to a little lake. Well, that’s what I’d been looking for, that or a river. The dog couldn’t track me into water. Late that night I swam across the lake. Used a log to float my pack. Cold!” He laughed ruefully. “Dear Lord, that water was cold. When I left the lake, I walked up a creek maybe a quarter of a mile so the dog couldn’t pick up my scent where I came out of the lake, then I climbed up on the bank and rested till sunup. When I had enough light, I set off through the woods till I came to a highway and headed east on it. Must’ve been three days later when I came on another lake, and I was so tired and hungry by then, I had to stop. Caught some fish and lit a fire to cook them. First fire I made since I left that settlement. I found a limb for a new walking stick—the prophet kept my old one— and I cut my first notch in it. I wonder what happened to it. Must’ve dropped it while I was sick. Anyway, I guess I outfoxed those men. Never saw them or the dog again.”
Mary sighed, looking at Luke in amazement. Then she realized that Rachel was watching her, and Mary found her knowing regard unnerving. She asked Luke, “Where were you by then?”
He took a swallow of mead. “I didn’t find out till a couple of days later when I came to a junction with some road signs. I was on the west side of Upper Klamath Lake, according to my map. Most of the lake had dried up, but the
re was still some water and fish. I built my first beacon fire since I was captured, but I slept a good ways from it. Well, I knew if I was going over to the east side of the Cascades, I had to do it then. I didn’t know how much time I’d lost, but the vine maples had turned, and it was cold at night.
So, I went north to Crater Lake. It was a wonderful, strange place. The color of the water . . . I couldn’t describe it.”
Rachel nodded. “You don’t have to. I’ve been there. Crater Lake is one of the sacred places of the Earth. Was it . . . changed?”
“Well, I don’t see how it could change.”
Rachel smiled at that. “Where did you go from there?”
“East till I came down out of the Cascades, then north toward Bend.” Again, his eyes were haunted by disquieting memories. “It was another desert. I guess it always was dry over there, but this was blowing dust and dead pine trees sticking up out of the dunes, and I nearly died for lack of water before I reached Bend. The town was burned out, but there was a river there. I stayed for a while to lay in food, and every night I burned a beacon fire, but I never saw any smoke. Didn’t expect to, really. Finally I decided I’d better get back across the mountains before winter set in, so I headed west and came to what was left of a town called Sisters. There’d been forest fires through there and to the north, so I took the south fork of the road west of town. The ground was already covered with snow, but the weather stayed good, and I got over the pass. The highway followed a river, so I had fish and water for a while, but after a couple of days I ran into another burn. I never got out of it till after I left Eugene.”
Rachel asked anxiously, “Was there anything left of Eugene? The university? The library?”
“Nothing in the whole city. Everything had been burned.”
Rachel let her breath out wearily. “Probably firestorm from the bombs that hit Salem.”
“Must’ve been. Anyway, I realized then that I had a better chance of finding somebody alive on the coast than anywhere inland. It was a long way round and a long time traveling for me to come to that.”