by Nick Cole
When Vaclav awoke, black fury and a knife came out at once.
As if expecting someone else, Vaclav was ready.
But in that same summer-storm moment, the dark and swarthy Vaclav got up from the dust, then nodded to the Boy.
Hard men, Boy. Each and every one of ’em. You watch yourself.
I will, Sergeant. I will.
Chapter 26
The Chinese patrol, or what was left of it, waited on their knees in the pasture as the Hard Men watched their interrogation.
Only their leader stood. He was standing in front of a stump, a day’s ride from the outpost at Auburn.
Vaclav and the Boy worked with shovels in the big pit the Chinese prisoners had been forced to dig. It needed to be deeper, so Raleigh told Vaclav, and with a maximum of spitting and curses Vaclav grabbed a shovel and threw another at the Boy.
“New guy digs too,” he spat.
They worked in the pit while Raleigh screamed in Chinese at the patrol leader.
Krauthammer, another of the Hard Men, who the Boy knew by the brief introduction of post-battle observation to be a searcher of pockets and a cutter of fingers for rings that don’t slide off so easily. He had the patrol leader’s pack out on the grass of the pasture and was going through it, tossing its contents carelessly out for all to see.
Dunn stood by the stump, one dusty boot resting upon it. He was chewing on another blade of grass.
Earlier, when Vaclav was up riding point, he’d spotted the Chinese patrol.
Leaving the wagon full of bodies in the road, the Hard Men pulled back into the forest after staking the wagon’s horses and locking the brake.
“You’re with me, kid,” said Raleigh. “You too, Dunn. Rest of you circle around down by the river and come up along the road behind them. Once we attack, come on up and give us a hand.”
No one said anything. They’d done this before.
Back among the trees, the hot afternoon faded in the cool green shadows of the woods.
“Chinese are killers, kid,” whispered Raleigh. “You’re too young to remember, but they killed this country. Now we’re gonna take America back.”
Dunn laughed dryly.
Raleigh rolled his eyes.
The battle was short.
When the Chinese came walking up the road, they fanned out once they spotted the wagon full of dead bodies. A few of them moved forward to inspect it.
A moment before they reached the back of the wagon, Dunn whispered, “I don’t see no guns.”
“They wouldn’t have ’em this far out, Dunn. Too afraid of losing ’em.” Raleigh’s voice reminded the Boy of a rusty screen door.
Good, don’t think about the fight until you have to, Boy. You don’t know nothin’ about it till it starts up, so no use gettin’ worked up before it begins.
The Chinese carried long poles, spear-tipped ends.
Dunn charged out of the foliage, his horse snorting breathily as he beat the croup hard with a small cord. The Chinese recoiled as first Dunn broke the brush, then Raleigh, and finally the Boy.
Don’t think about it, Boy.
He knew Sergeant Presley meant more than just the fight. If for a moment he’d harbored the idea of riding away during the confusion of this battle, he knew they’d forget the Chinese and come straight after him.
I know too much.
They closed with the Chinese and the Boy chopped down on one of the patrol with his tomahawk then wheeled Horse about to swing into the face of an enemy shifting for a better position.
So these are the Chinese, Sergeant.
My whole life has been filled with the knowledge of them as enemies, as monsters, as destroyers. I have seen them play the devil in all the villages and salvager camps we passed through on our way across this country. But you taught me they weren’t the only cause of America’s destruction, Sergeant. You said they only came after, trying to carve away a little bit of what was left for themselves. I’ve never seen them as the devils so many have. You fought them for ten years in San Francisco, Sergeant Presley, but you taught me they weren’t our worst enemy.
We destroyed ourselves, Boy.
You taught me that.
Now it was parry, thrust, and chaos as the Chinese oriented themselves to the attack of the Boy and Dunn and Raleigh. Some fell, bleeding and screaming and crying, but their leader organized the rest quickly and it seemed, at least to the surviving Chinese, as though they had turned back the main assault.
In moments, the other Hard Men were up out of the woods and all over the Chinese patrol.
A few hours later the Boy found himself in the pit, digging out its edges.
Above him Raleigh was still screaming in Chinese.
“Got it,” said Krauthammer and held up paper. Then he held up a stick. After that, he pulled a bottle of dark liquid out of the pack.
“Put that one down first.” Raleigh pointed toward one of the Chinese waiting on his knees.
Like sudden lightning, Dunn grabbed the Chinese and forced his head down onto the stump. Another of the Hard Men whipped a leather noose about the struggling head and pulled, stretching the brown neck taut as Dunn pulled the struggling body back.
“Vaclav,” called Raleigh.
“What?” screamed Vaclav from the bottom of the pit.
“Can I use your axe?”
“Sure, why the hell not.” Vaclav followed this with curses and muttering and, finally, more spitting.
Raleigh took up the axe, and as all the Chinese started to chatter, he brought it down swiftly on the stretched neck of the chosen victim.
And then they chose another.
And another.
Raleigh turned to the leader and spoke.
The Chinese soldier nodded and held out his hand.
Krauthammer put the paper down and dipped the stick in the bottle of dark liquid.
Raleigh dictated and the leader began to copy.
When it was done Raleigh held up the paper, squinting as he read.
“Right. Kill the rest of ’em,” he said, satisfied with what was on the page.
“Get to work, you!” muttered Vaclav through clenched teeth at the Boy, who had watched all of this.
They finished the trench while sounds that rose above those of spade and dirt pierced the hot afternoon of the pasture.
They buried the Chinese and took to the road once more.
Chapter 27
“Them bodies are smelling,” said Vaclav.
They had been for some time.
“Tough. We need ’em to get through the gates, smell or no smell,” replied Raleigh. “Only way them Chinese are gonna let us in, is if they think we’re bounty hunters. These are the bounty.”
The Hard Men, as the Boy thought of them, were held up in a ravine south of Auburn.
They were waiting for MacRaven.
“Those Chinese up in the outpost are gonna smell ’em out here first. Then where will we be?” continued Vaclav.
“Shut it,” replied Raleigh. They sat in silence, the wagon at the center of the perimeter, each man up on an edge of the sloping ravine, waiting.
When MacRaven did arrive, he was alone. His ashen-faced warriors absent.
For a while MacRaven and Raleigh talked in whispers a little way up the ravine, away from the wagon. Then Raleigh summoned the Boy. “Get over here, kid,” he whispered.
MacRaven rested a warm hand on the Boy’s shoulder.
Don’t show him you don’t trust him, Boy. Don’t even flinch in the slightest.
“Raleigh tells me you done good in the ambush. All right then, I got a new mission for you. If you’re in? Good,” said MacRaven without waiting. He was dressed in the mishmash battle armor of the tribes. His breastplate was an old road sign covered in hide. His shoulders were padded and reinforced with bent hubcaps. He wore a skirt of metal chain across his pants. His smile, like some hungry beast’s, encompassed more than just the Boy, as if the whole world were a meal, waiting to be taken in an
d devoured between his long teeth.
In time, Raleigh and the Boy were on the wagon and on the old road into Auburn.
A foul odor rose from under the hide tarp as the last of the afternoon washed out the brown-and-yellow landscape.
“We do this right and there’ll be rifles aplenty for all of us,” said Raleigh as he drove the team forward, away from the other Hard Men.
AS THE WAGON full of bodies bumped its way along the track, the Boy watched Horse recede, his lead trailing to a stake, Vaclav smiling at him as they drove up the ravine and out onto the main road leading down to the gates of Auburn.
“Chinese got a rifle factory somewhere and the chief thinks it’s here. So we got to do this right,” said Raleigh between clicks and chucks of encouragement to the wagon team.
In the quiet, only the creak of the wagon could be heard beyond the clop of the team.
“Have you ever been to San Francisco?” asked the Boy.
“Nah. We came from up north, working in what used to be Canada. We rode together for years until MacRaven. Then, well, he was the man with the plan, know what I mean?”
“And what’s the plan?”
Raleigh cast a glance at the Boy over his drooping handlebar mustache.
Overplayed it, Boy.
They rode on in silence.
But the voice of Sergeant Presley was there and the Boy thought about what he heard in it.
The mission for you, Boy, is still the same. Find I Corps. Give them the map. Whatever’s about to happen here ain’t your concern.
But they’re going on to San Francisco. If the Army still exists there, then MacRaven and the tribes are going to come at the Army from behind.
This army won’t be any match for I Corps, Boy. We had guns, tanks, helicopters. We’d chew this bunch up and spit ’em out.
He remembered the day Sergeant Presley had said that. They were hiding in the rocks, watching a village outside the dead lands of Oklahoma City—a village of salvagers being overrun by streaming bands of wild lunatics. The savagery had been brutal. They’d ridden three days just to get clear of that mess.
He remembered Sergeant Presley, his breath ragged in the cool night of that ride.
We had guns, tanks, helicopters. We’d chew this bunch up and spit ’em out.
But Sergeant Presley’s gun had run out of ammo long before he’d ever met the Boy.
They’d seen the wrecks of countless war machines in their travels across the country.
They’d seen the burned hulls of melted tanks.
Downed and twisted helicopters.
Jets scattered across wide fields, only the wings and tail sections remaining to tell nothing of what had happened.
Even guns used as clubs by lunatics who didn’t know any better.
He thought of the tribes on the march even now, closing the distance to this Chinese outpost.
Just like that village of salvagers outside Oklahoma City, Boy.
Sergeant, if I Corps had been fighting the Chinese all those years ago, over two hundred miles to the west, how do the Chinese have a settlement here?
I don’t know, Boy. Stick to the mission.
I heard you say that many times, all the times I ever asked you what happened to those tanks and helicopters and jets we passed. Each time you said the same thing.
I don’t know, Boy. Stick to the mission.
We don’t know nothin’ and orders is orders, Boy. You find I Corps and report. Tell ’em…
And yet there was the Chinese outpost, two hundred miles east of Oakland.
And there was Horse.
And there was drawing on cave walls.
And there is the mystery of what will become of me after I deliver the map.
Who will I be then?
And this voice was his alone.
Chapter 28
The Chinese officer was wearing the spun clothing of the soldiers. The pants and well-made boots. The long crimson jacket. The helmet. The officer carried a sword. The Chinese troops that met their wagon in front of the gate pointed rifles, long like Escondido’s, at Raleigh and the Boy and the wagon full of corpses from atop the cut-log palisades.
What remained of an old overpass straddled the Eighty and served as the gateway to the Chinese colony of Auburn. High walls of cut forest pine screened the outpost along the southern side of the highway, surrounding the old historic district of the city from Before. Out of the center of the outpost, a domed county courthouse rose above the walls, and what lay within was beyond the Boy to see and to know.
Raleigh explained to the Chinese officers the character of the bodies and the Boy could not follow their wide-ranging discussion because it was in Chinese.
In time, more Chinese, older, fatter, dressed similarly to the officer, came out from behind the gate—even a few civilians. The Boy remained in the wagon.
All of his gear was gone.
His tomahawk.
His knife.
His bearskin cloak.
“If they see you’re weak, they won’t think much of us,” Raleigh said when he’d told the Boy to leave his gear with Horse and the other Hard Men.
So he’d left his bearskin and weapons and Horse.
“You can trust us,” said a smiling Dunn as he patted a jittery Horse, as if to reassure and unable to, all at once.
Raleigh turned back to the Boy in the middle of the conversation with the Chinese.
“They might make us sleep out here tonight.”
That would be bad for the plan.
“I told ’em, ain’t no way I was giving them the bodies without them paying me my bounty,” said Raleigh, more for show, as if they might just be gone in the morning.
I don’t know how this plays out for me, either way, Sergeant.
Be ready, Boy.
The Boy affected disinterest, which he knew was what Raleigh wanted him to show—that he was stupid and nothing to be afraid of.
The Boy stared off at the high wall and was surprised to see Escondido watching him.
When Raleigh turned back to the heated negotiation, the Boy looked up again at Escondido and barely passed one finger in front of his lip, almost as if he hadn’t, but for anyone looking for such a message, the meaning was clear.
A moment later, the officers were retreating into the gate and Raleigh was climbing back aboard with a groan and a sly smile only the Boy could see.
“We’re in,” he whispered through the side of his mouth.
“They want a good look at them bodies. Chinese love their intel. Figure they’ll know who’s in charge this week and who they can bribe or play off against someone else next week. Won’t matter much after tomorrow morning anyhow.”
They drove through the gates and down the highway a bit before being directed up onto an off-ramp and into the center of the town.
They passed buildings.
A man worked at a forge, beating metal.
A shopkeeper with a patchwork lion skin in his front window nodded. Women crossed the street and entered the shop, talking loudly.
As they descended into the center of town from the highway, the soft glow of lights behind shop windows and houses came to life, blooming in the cool of the early spring evening.
A gang of children dashed down a side street, screaming in the twilight as they laughed and ran.
The Boy smelled spicy food.
But the hunger that had always been with him was dulled by what he saw.
The Chinese lived side by side with the people of other races. There were whites, browns, blacks, and Chinese.
The town murmured with life.
Like a city once must have.
The Boy thought of MacRaven’s lunatic army of savage tribes moving through the thick forest east of the outpost.
He thought of MacRaven in armor.
He thought of the skeletons that were once cities.
He thought of Sergeant Presley’s word. “Involved.”
He waited for Sergeant Presley to t
ell him what to do now.
But he sensed the voice, like himself, had been silenced by the unfolding of life within the pine walls of this outpost.
Civilization.
Like Before.
Am I involved now?
And then…
Who am I?
Chapter 29
“They say they’ll pay the bounty in the morning, which is fine for our purposes,” said Raleigh as he chucked and clicked the wagon team to follow the Chinese guide up to the paddock.
They were being directed to the “Old School,” which was a wide field where they could camp for the night.
“MacRaven will start the attack at dawn. The Chinese will be real busy right about then, so we can get these bodies strung up in peace. After that, maybe we can join the fight.”
Raleigh looked at the Boy for a long moment; then, as if answering some unspoken question, he sighed.
“All right, I’ll tell you the plan. Once they breach the walls with MacRaven’s Space Crossbow, you’ll need to link up with the chief and lead him up here so the tribes can find the bodies all strung up like they got executed by the Chinese. Dunn’ll come up with our horses and gear. Then we can join the cleanup and start looting.”
Real careful now, Boy. You done all the work to gain his trust. Now, don’t overplay it.
The Boy waited.
“I don’t get it,” said the Boy.
“Why do we have to string these bodies up? Seems like the point’s made if the tribes find ’em slaughtered already. They’ll think the Chinese did it anyways.”
Raleigh sighed. There was a moment of things weighed. Scales balancing.
“To the tribes one and all, dyin’ in battle is one thing. But strung up for crimes is another. They’ll be so angry and ready for all the Chinese blood they can spill, they won’t even realize they’re leaderless and under Mac’s total control. “
As an afterthought, as Raleigh turned to back the wagon, he added, “Brilliant, when you think about it.”
“My guess is,” continued Raleigh. “The Chinese will make their last stand down at that old courthouse. That’s probably where the work will take place. I bet that’s where the Chinese keep the guns and women, and that’s where we’ll want to get to, quick-like, once this tricky corpse business is done. First to fight, first to find, eh?”