by Nick Cole
Holding her back.
Her mouth moving.
No, Poppa. I need you.
I am slipping away.
The worst has come upon me.
No, Poppa. I need you.
She struggled, but the Boy was too powerful. He held her. She hit him, scratched him. Beat at him. He didn’t flinch.
The thing I never wanted to happen is happening to me right now.
And…
You take everything with you.
The good.
It was all good.
It just is.
He passed tents.
She must have seen our gear and put two and two together. She’s a smart girl. The smartest.
I love you always.
That’s what the Old Man kept saying as he drove the tank past them all. Past the Boy.
Past her.
I love you always.
Read my lips.
I love you always.
No, Poppa…
I love you.
Always.
Chapter 50
The road leads north through the last of the grassy plain as the Rockies rise up in dark defiance of what the Old Man must do within the space of this day.
This morning I thought about death.
I thought to myself, ‘Everyone has a last day,’ as if my last day were something that might never happen or happen so far in the future I didn’t need to be bothered by thoughts of it on such a fine day. But it seems today will be my last day.
Why are you silent, my friend from the book?
Santiago?
But there was nothing. No words.
Maybe they are with her now.
Maybe I will have to catch the fish all by myself now. Just like you did, Santiago. My friend from the book.
The Old Man drove and tried to remember passages from the book. As if that would start his friend talking to him again. But he could think of nothing because of his fear of what lay ahead. As if his mind were the last of the grassy plains that were fading all too quickly into the South, a place he would never go again.
You would say, It wasn’t as bad as you’d imagined it would be in all those nightmares. Yes, you would say that. You would say that to me, Santiago. You would tell me it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it might be.
But it was.
Then, don’t think of it. Her laughter, think of that instead.
But he couldn’t.
And then he did.
THE RUINS OF little Raton lay at the beginning of the foothills. The last of New Mexico as the map might have told him. Green trees with almost gray trunks, their leaves danced back and forth, shimmering in the breeze.
On the other side of Raton the road immediately disappeared beneath a long-ago mudslide now hardened and swallowing the road and the bottoms of the trees. The Old Man could see the tops of rusting cars and the edges of buildings poking out from beneath the calcified mud.
He proceeded forward in starts and stops as the road disappeared now and again, its winding course climbing through chopped granite hills. The forest began to thin, and as the Old Man topped a small summit and looked out onto the valley and the lands of the North, he saw a country burned and long dead.
Trees beyond counting lay fallen like struck matches, like burnt toy soldiers knocked over in long rows.
Instead of earth and dirt, there was gray and ash.
Instead of shimmering granite, there was blackened heat-torched rock, melted and blasted.
The Old Man knew if he turned off the tank at this moment and simply listened, he would hear nothing. He would hear the absence of everything.
AFTERNOON THUNDERSTORMS began to form out over the gray and foreboding mountains that rose up in hacked and jagged peaks.
The Old Man looked behind him and saw the gray smoke that had been belching up from the engine had grown thicker and more acrid.
He looked down to check the fuel and engine gauges and saw the temperature climbing. He was down to less than half a tank besides what was left in the two fifty-gallon drums. His eyes fell to the dosimeter.
The radiation is very high here.
You would say, What does it matter now, my friend?
But the voice of Santiago, the one he had carried in his head through the wasteland, and listened to, and even at times longed for, was silent and would not come to him.
You would say that to me.
Beyond the valley and into the next, the scorched and broken earth grew worse if such a thing were possible. Trees grew up through the fallen matchsticks of their ancestors and were little better than dark-barked twisted fiends that seemed barren and even tormented.
There were towns ahead but I wonder if even their foundations remain. On the map they were called Starkville and Trinidad, which seem like places my friend in the book might have gone when he was a sailor and sailed to Africa.
And saw the lions on the beach at sunset.
Did you ever go to a place called Trinidad, Santiago?
Silence.
Then perhaps you did.
In what might have once been Starkville, the Old Man saw the rising stumps of buildings and twisted pipe jutting up wildly through the gray ash and furnace-roasted rock. Within the forest of twisted pines the Old Man saw weird and misshapen man-shaped figures wandering through the ash.
Who are they and what do they know?
Now the day was turning dark and gray. The sky overhead seemed swollen. As if it were pulsing.
If it is possible, it is even hotter that it was.
Soon I will need to drain the fuel drums.
The Old Man drove on, leaving Starkville in ash that sputtered up to mix with the heat and belching smoke from the engine.
A few miles later, the highway could be more clearly seen and was not altogether ruined.
There must have been rains here and what covered the highway has been washed away.
The road carved up a small mountain. Alongside the road, through a dark forest of the twisted fiend-trees, the Old Man could see weighted shacks caught in the act of slow collapse. Like drunkards burdened by the weight of their own misery. At the top of the rise he looked down and saw Trinidad.
The blackened and gray remains of the little village lay in the saddle of a small valley. Beyond, leaden plains of ash stretched off to the north.
I am close to the end of this.
Below the Old Man lay brick buildings that had weathered that long-ago, worst-of-all-worst days, when nuclear weapons had fallen like downpours in a thunderstorm. Windowless holes gaped bleakly out upon ash and darkness like a nearsighted man fumbling through the end of the world. Down in the streets the Old Man could see rusting and tire-less cars. A highway bridge that once crossed over the road connecting both halves of the town seemed recently demolished. The stone lay scattered in all directions like bits of protruding white bone jutting up through the fire-blackened skin of a corpse. In front of this, before the idling tank and the Old Man, great logs and machines had been piled to block the road. On a panel truck whose charred side had been brushed mostly clean, there was a message in that sickly neon-green slop-paint.
“Welcome, Nuncle!”
I could drive over it. I could crash through their makeshift barrier.
But the bad tread. You would tell me to be careful of the bad tread, my friend Santiago.
Yes.
To the right, an off-ramp led down into the remains of Trinidad.
Chapter 51
Narrow streets barely accommodated the tank as it forced its way east through Trinidad. The Old Man crushed long rusting vehicles and machines that had been dragged into the street. Ahead he could see an intersection.
If I turn left, that might lead alongside the highway, and then at some point, I could get back onto it.
Silence.
The Old Man watched the dark buildings that crowded the sides of the street, peering through the cracks and missing windows for sign of an ambush. Crushing a small car, he
felt the right tread slip for a moment, and when the Old Man pushed harder to re-engage the gear, he was horribly convinced it never would. A moment later, though, the small car disappeared beneath the treads on a hollow, plastic milk carton note as the right tread re-engaged and pulled the massive Abrams forward.
In the moment before the explosion, the Old Man was thinking about colors. It was as if the landscape, the town, the sky, all of it, had been repainted by an angry lunatic artist with only three oily paints on his sad palette.
Bone white.
Ash gray.
Bloody rust.
That was when the building to his left exploded outward into the street. It was maybe five stories tall, packed tightly against other buildings that must have once been something in the days of gunfights and circuit judges. The explosion came from inside the building, near its supports. Brickwork concussed outward toward the tank. If the brick had been recently made instead of the two-hundred-year-old building material that it was, time rotted by the frontier birth and nuclear death of America, it would have killed him. Instead, it sprayed outward in a dusty rain of red grit that pelted the tank like a sudden downpour. Something large hit the Old Man on the side of his helmeted head, but he felt it disintegrate with a rotten and rusty smuph.
The Old Man ducked down inside the hatch, looking upward. As if in slow motion, he could see the roof of the building turning down toward him. Without thinking he reached up, grabbed the hatch, and slammed it shut as the building didn’t so much as fall on the tank, as slide down on top of it. The tank rocked sideways and the Old Man was thrown down onto the loader’s deck.
‘It’s too much for just me,’ was his last thought.
WHEN HE CAME to he got to his feet, feeling weak and shaky. Red light swam eerily across the interior.
He remembered the building falling on him. Its slow-motion fall that seemed like a cresting wave looming over him. The oddness of seeing the building’s roof shifting down toward him as it moved from the horizontal to the vertical.
Am I stuck? Is there so much debris piled on top of the tank that I’ll never be able to get out from under it?
And…
What if the bad tread has finally broken loose having come so close to the end of this journey and yet, I’m still so far away!
The Old Man climbed into the commander’s seat and took hold of Sergeant Major Preston’s jury-rigged controls.
Please work!
He pushed forward and heard the engine spool up into an urgent whine. Something crumpled in front of the tank and then the sound of grinding gravel and dirt being churned angrily enveloped everything. But he didn’t feel the tank move forward.
I’m stuck.
Sudden panic roved about his bones and fingers, creeping its way into his skull.
Stop!
He pulled back on the control sticks, urging the massive tank into reverse. For a moment nothing happened, then, slowly, the tank began to move. Backward. The Old Man could hear debris falling away from the front of the tank.
Through the optics he could see the massive building sliding away from the gun barrel.
If I rotate the turret I’ll be able to see what’s going on behind me, but I might drag it into another building and bring that one down on me too.
The Old Man reversed back along the street until he recognized things he had crushed or other hauntingly familiar aspects from the moments before the building had exploded.
The first thing that crashed down onto the tank was a sink that came from out a window high above. Its porcelain shattered into a million bright shards, some of which nicked the optics. Now all manner of objects were raining down from the buildings along the street. The Old Man could see misshapen men suddenly appearing in gaping window frames to hurl down sinks, and paint cans full of rocks, and large pipes.
I need to see what’s behind the tank. They could have another trap ready, or even more explosives to bring down another building.
Ahead, there was no way around the dust-blooming pile of the fallen building. The rain of objects increased to an almost cacophonic pain in the Old Man’s ears.
To his left, he could see he’d backed up past the remains of another tall building whose bottom floor had once been a café or a diner. He could see vinyl dining booths ripped and shredded within the darkness.
The Old Man gunned the engine and pivoted the tank.
There is no other way than this!
He checked the dosimeter and saw that the radiation levels were well into the redline.
The tank, which was capable of sudden and alarming bursts of speed, tore through the front entrance of the restaurant. In a moment the Old Man was crushing through the darkened kitchen, heading for the back wall.
The brick in these buildings must be rotten. Made even more so because of the radiation. So I’ll see if it puts up much of a fight against our tank. Right, my friend?
Right, Santiago?
Silence.
The tank burst through the back wall of the restaurant in a dusty spray of redbrick and launched itself off a loading dock, landing in a wide alley beyond, after a sickening moment of free fall.
“Ha ha!” the Old Man shouted in triumph.
He pivoted the tank right and sped off down the alley. The alley led to a small side street and the Old Man chose a road leading down toward the center of the town.
The tank bounced softly along the street, crushing or pushing other debris out of its way. Ahead, the Old Man could see the northern rim of the valley and the ribbon of highway climbing up out of it. A few streets later he took a right turn, and a block after that he urged the tank up an ashy embankment and back onto the old highway heading north.
Chapter 52
Beyond Trinidad the road ran through a plain forever burned. A brief fork of lightning arced across the sky from west to east.
I have never seen lightning move sideways. Always up and down. But never across.
He stopped the tank.
He opened the hatch and a moment later noticed that the fuel drums had disappeared.
Probably when the building fell on me.
I’ll have to make it there on what’s left in the tank.
There is nothing for miles around.
The Rockies are like the dark shapes of ships crossing the ocean at midnight. You would have seen such a sight, you would know what I mean, Santiago.
“Natalie?” the Old Man said into the mic.
“I’m here. Where are you now?”
“I don’t know exactly. I don’t have my map with me anymore. But I’m just past a place called Trinidad.”
“You must hurry now. We don’t have much longer.”
“How far away am I?”
“Two hours if you maintain a high rate of speed.”
“Do your people have protection against the radiation? It’s very high here.”
“Yes. We have a convoy of vehicles that run on electric power. If the weapon does its job, we should be able to exit the facility in lightly shielded vehicles and make our way to someplace safe.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” began the Old Man. “If you don’t know where to go… well, there are some people waiting for you at a place once called Wagon Wheel Mountain. They’ve been told you might come and they’ll wait there for you. Then they’ll try for Tucson. You and your people could go there too.”
Ash stirred and whirled briefly on the melted road.
Far out on the plain another flash of lighting arced brightly across the darkening hot afternoon.
Silver sunbeams shot through clouds to the east.
“You should activate the beacon now,” said General Watt. Natalie.
Yes. I should.
It feels sudden. As if it’s all happening too fast.
That is always how things happen that you don’t want to have happen. Right, Santiago? You would say that to me. You would say that and then say, my friend.
The Old Man opened the case containing th
e beacon. Turning the device around, he located the on switch. A green light responded. But the red light that indicated the malfunctioning laser continued to blink.
Even if it worked, what good would it do me now? I’ve probably absorbed too much radiation.
The Old Man reached down and drank warm water from his canteen. His mouth tasted of metal. His tongue was numb.
“I have your signal,” said Natalie after a moment.
“What do I do now, Natalie?”
“Keep the beacon on. I’ll direct you to the emergency entrance near Turkey Trail. It’s south of the main complex. The mountain collapsed there when we were hit. The weapon should create an opening or allow us to set charges and clear the area.”
And what will happen to me when this weapon goes off?
You would say to me, You know the answer already, my friend. There is no need to ask.
Yes, you would say that to me, Santiago.
“And what will happen to you, Natalie? Will you stay behind or…”
She said she would self-terminate if they didn’t make it out.
Yes, but that was when there was no hope.
Isn’t there always hope? Tell me of hope, Santiago. Tell me how you felt in the days and nights on the boat when the fish carried you farther and farther out into the gulf. You had hope, my friend. Otherwise you would not have fought so hard. Fought with every skill of fishing you’d ever learned. You had hope, didn’t you?
“You have given us a chance,” said Natalie. “You have given my children a chance. I won’t lie to you anymore. Once you’re over the target, I will need to download into a secure and portable mainframe that is barely big enough to contain me. In fact… I will be ‘asleep.’ There will not be enough memory for my processes to run at optimum capacity. Someday, if they can ever find, or build a new mainframe, they will try to reactivate me. Someday.”
Lightning appeared briefly, farther to the north.
And where will I go?
“I was wrong, Natalie,” said the Old Man. “About what I said to you.”
“You have said many things since we first began to talk to each other. But, I think…”