Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall)

by Michael Lane

  Nights were getting colder still, and in the slanting morning sun the mountaintop trees were faded ghosts under a layer of frost. He’d turned north again, climbing the circling hills around the brick ruins of a small town, when he saw movement.

  Grey settled behind a fallen tree, and checked to make sure the sun was at a safe angle before peeking through his rifle’s scope. He twisted the magnification to maximum and sought the flicker of motion that had caught his eye.

  The town had been built on a long straight main street, probably the old highway, and was crossed by a handful of side streets. Trees and hedges had run rampant over the years and many of the streets were choked with foliage going autumn-yellow and brown. Near the center of the town another road came in from the west, and a concrete traffic circle marked the intersection with the old highway. It took him a moment to spot the men sitting at ease in the circle, enjoying the afternoon sun.

  Even with the telescopic sight, it was too far to make out much detail. There were eight or ten people he could see, all adults. They wore a mix of clothes; most had hooded jackets, at least one wore a deerskin duster not unlike Grey’s. They had horses, too, he realized after a minute. They were picketed under the branches of some crowded cottonwood trees. Two chocolate brown dogs circulated, and Grey discarded the notion of finding a closer vantage point.

  If they’d had a few hundred cattle with them, he’d have written them off as drovers; maybe gone down to see if they had trade to do. There weren’t any cattle, though.

  Grey watched until the sun set and darkness rose up the walls of the valley. Below, campfires began to glow; five of them. The fires pinpointed groups he hadn’t seen for the trees, and he realized there were probably two dozen men, maybe more, camped in the ruins.

  The temperature fell as dusk passed and full dark came. Grey unrolled his blanket and draped it around his shoulders, then settled to watch and nap. Overhead, bolides drew hairline ghosts in the night.

  The predawn sky was pale rose when the distant rattle of hooves and the single bark of a dog woke Grey. The men below were packing up. The watcher shifted a bit, settling sore legs into a different position. He left his rifle propped against the log, and watched the hurried scramble of a camp getting ready to move out.

  By the time the sun had cleared the far mountains, the group was making its way south, six or seven horsemen leaving every fifteen minutes. He could hear raised voices as each group departed, but the distance was too great to make out what was said. The dogs went with the first group. Grey squinted at the sun, riding into a faultless blue sky, and stayed in his cover. The ruins were quiet within two hours; Grey made his way down the hill an hour later.

  He moved through the ruins, staying in the thick brush of yards choked with thirty years of untrimmed hedges. The streets were still in fair shape. They had been frost-heaved into swells and sudden dips, but much of the pavement remained. The first yellow leaves lay drifted atop the mulch of past years in the gutters.

  Calling crows led him to an old garage. Three corpses, a man, a woman and a little girl, were piled inside, the bodies nude and a pale blue-white. Their eyes were gone, and each had a section of electrical wire twisted into the flesh of their throats. Their hands had been bound behind them with more wire. The bodies bore the marks of other abuse, but Grey didn’t pause to study them.

  He found each of the fires he’d seen. The riders had camped in buildings that were still roofed and built their fires in the street before them, leaving charred circles. He moved through each of the campsites. Most had been homes; some still had a few sticks of furniture. All smelled of rodent piss. One group had camped in the stone shell of an old store. Empty shelves lay tipped like dominoes within, but the counters at the front had been cleared to make space for bedrolls. An old jam jar sat on the floor near the store’s entrance, a scrap of paper tucked into it. Grey grunted to himself, walked around the jar once, then stooped and picked it up. He spun off the lid and fished the paper out. He scanned the note, stopping and re-reading it several times. He unzipped his coat and tucked the paper into a shirt pocket.

  "Well, shit," he murmured. He heard the crow's rusty complaints begin again in the garage down the street as he left the shop and headed north.

  Chapter 3: The Port

  Doc found his reading glasses and studied the note Grey had handed him.

  “Spelling is optional with whoever wrote this,” he muttered, forehead furrowing.

  Grey shrugged tiredly and slipped off his boots. A toe peeked through a hole in his sock, and he sighed. While Doc glowered at the note, Grey pulled off the sock and began darning the hole.

  “The first bit’s clear enough,” Doc said, using a thumbnail to underline that portion.

  Wated 1 week – u 3 hurry an catch up. Meet at Rogers – or if gone hed to the Cassel.

  “You don’t know anyone named Rogers or something called the Castle?” Doc asked.

  “Nope. It’s south of here is all I can guess. And they were mounted, so could be a long way.”

  “The three you killed weren’t mounted.”

  Grey shrugged. “The others were leading some spare horses. I think the three were scouts, out on foot.” He bit off a hanging thread and then examined the sock before pulling it on. “What do you make of the second bit?”

  B. says TG r looking for more & may come west summer after next. C will want to move first. Hurry back. Make shur u bring the map or C will feed u to the dogs.

  “Who knows? Not enough to go by other than we have visitors scheduled for next year and the year after,” Doc folded his glasses and set them aside. “If I had to guess, the ones you saw are headed back next year to beat the others to us.”

  Grey scratched his nose and yawned.

  “Well, then I guess we better have a meeting and decide what we’re doing,” he said.

  Doc raised an eyebrow. “What can we do, really?”

  “Run, fight or just give up. That’s your three,” Grey said.

  “What about talking?”

  “That always leads to running, fighting or giving up.”

  Getting the word out meant talking to Maggie, and Grey set off to do so the next morning. Maggie Foch ran horses on the tableland northwest of the lake. It was four days around the eastern shore, or two across the old bridge. Grey decided on the shorter route, despite an abiding and irrational hatred of the ruins of Kelowna.

  Just half a day from Doc’s cabin and scarcely farther from Tillingford’s place, the city ruins were a maze of collapsed buildings, trees run wild, stranded cars and stink. Grey entered the city at dusk, waiting in the ruin of a manor-style home that had occupied a central hill in a spreading orchard. The three-story mansion must have been choice real estate in its day, but Grey found it filled with the stink of mildew and the trash left by decades of squatters. The trees were still there, shaggy and wild, and he’d picked up a pocketful of small, sweet apples as he’d made his way to shelter. He’d seen a few others gleaning the trees, but they kept their distance, as did he.

  From his hilltop, Grey watched the dusk settle in, and picked out the wink of fire here and there in the dark smudge of the city as it spread out across the bottomland to the blue waters of the lake. The bridge was a pale line that stretched a half-mile across the narrow waist of the body of water. North, one could walk thirty miles before reaching the lake’s head; the southern end was equally far.

  Grey reached the old downtown section without incident, moving quietly in the dark. The streets were overhung with trees, crowded with rusted vehicles and old barricades and concealed his movements with little effort. He avoided fires, chokepoints and any sounds of life.

  In the oldest area, things were still more open. Squatters had trimmed back the brush, and a rude but growing port occupied the old marina, where a flotilla of rafts and aging sailboats fished or hauled cargo. The port was surrounded by makeshift walls topped with rusted barbed wire and broken glass.

  Grey stopped three
blocks from the fence. If he made his way south he could avoid the Port, and reach the bridge through the old highway corridor. He looked that way, listening. The feeble night breeze came from that direction, bringing faint scents of smoke and human waste. A rumble of drunken laughter and an arrhythmic drumming came from the Port.

  He walked to the Port’s pallisade and followed it left, until he reached the front of an old bus that protruded through the fence. He approached openly, his rifle slung, and showed his hands at shoulder height. He stopped facing the vehicle and waited.

  “Well?” asked a voice from the dark cavern behind the shattered windshield. “What do you want?”

  “Trade and news,” Grey called. Silence followed and Grey felt the scrutiny of the unseen eyes.

  “You know the rules?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Break any and we’ll dump you in the lake.”

  The door of the bus squealed open, and Grey lowered his hands and steeped up into the long body of the vehicle. Two men with shotguns watched him, one in the driver’s seat, the other in the extreme rear holding his weapon cross-body and nodding to the rear door. Both were big, bearded men who wore the red bandanas of the Port.

  “Step on through,” the one in the driver's seat said.

  Grey did, and exited the bus on the far side of the fence.

  The Port comprised three blocks and the old marina, walled off from the remainder of the city. It boasted a saloon, a ramshackle warehouse that had been a motel in a past life and a warren of shacks that had sprouted in the old city park. It was the largest permanent settlement that Grey knew of in the valley, with about four hundred residents and another hundred transients at any given moment.

  The air stank of sweat, smoke and fish. Ranks of hundred-yard-long drying racks ran down the beach, each guarded by the family that ran them. The racks were draped and groaning under the weight of drying kokanee and lake trout. Beehive-shaped smokehouses clustered near the racks, where the dried fish were finished after a week or more in the dry fall air. Even at night, fishers worked and tended the smudge pots in the smokers. Fires kept the beach lit and their smoke kept the flies at bay.

  Grey watched for a minute before making his way to the docks, boots clumping on the planks of the pontoon wharf. The drunken laughter had shifted into a tuneless chorus of some local ditty that managed to mention fish and sex in each stanza, and it swelled to meet him when he shouldered open the door to the Longliner.

  Heads turned and marked him with looks from the friendly to the feral, then turned away. The bar occupied a long single room that ran half the length of the longest dock, and was built of scavenged lumber on a rusty barge hull. Twenty or so men and a scattering of women were drinking or playing cards at the tables. The rear wall panels were open despite the lateness of the season, giving an unobstructed view of Lake Okanagan and the moon as it dipped in the west. Grey had seen the bouncers hurl problem drunks out the back and into the lake. Sometimes they drowned.

  He walked to the bar, nodding to the lean blonde woman behind it. She had small skulls – mice, maybe - braided into her hair. They clattered when she moved. Her face was wedge-shaped, with narrow brows and tan skin crackling into crows feet at the corners of her eyes.

  “Josie, how goes?”

  Josie smiled and leaned across the bar. Grey did the same and they exchanged a kiss. “Hey Grey, what do ya say?”

  “Little as possible. Can you stow my stuff behind the bar for me while I wander around?”

  She nodded, and he slid his pack across the chest-high bar, followed by his rifle.

  “How much credit do I have left off those hides from the spring?” he asked.

  “The doeskin? Let me look.” Josie clattered off, stopping to refill a mug on the way, and returned with an old day planner thirty years out of date, according to its cover. She flipped through the pages and stabbed an entry with a finger.

  “There you are. You’re still in the black. It was thirty beer or sixty fish, and you’ve got ten beer left.”

  “Well, let’s make it nine,” Grey said, turning so he could watch the other patrons. Josie nodded, took an enameled mug from the shelf behind the bar and poured it full from a gallon earthenware jug. She raised an eyebrow and studied Grey. He’d forgotten how her eyes seemed to shift from blue to green depending on the light, and caught himself staring back.

  “I don’t see you very often, Grey. You spend more time in the woods than a bear. What brings you in?”

  Grey sipped his beer, squinting into his mug.

  “Christ, Harley found somewhere to get hops?” He lowered his voice. “You’re busy right now, and it’s maybe important. I’ll want to talk to you when you close.”

  Josie raised an eyebrow and nodded.

  “Yeah, there’s a guy runs them up from down south. They’re dear, but Harley swears by them.”

  “Well, he’s right. This is the first real beer I’ve had in a long time.”

  Josie smiled a professional little grin and moved back down the bar. Grey watched the two dozen or so customers drink. They soaked up the mugs of beer with smoked fish and dried apples. He circulated, made small talk, and wasted time at the Longliner's billiard table where Big Tom, the current Port master, was playing poker dressed in an incongruous fawn dinner jacket and black wool beret. His opponents were a group of traders out of Abbotsford, far to the west. They had no news that interested Grey. The game eventually broke up with Grey breaking even and Tom grinning at the scowling traders.

  Lawrence the bouncer rolled the last few drunks out as the eastern sky grew pink, doing the heavy lifting while Josie used a bucket on a rope to dip lake water and swill down the floor. Once Lawrence had left, Josie dropped the bar across the door and came to sit at the corner table where Grey waited.

  “What’s with the cloak and dagger shit?” Josie asked, rubbing her eyes with both palms. Grey thought she looked older than he remembered.

  “Don’t want to start rumors. Not yet.”

  “So if you don’t want rumors why are you talking to a bartender?” Josie shook her head, held up a palm. “Never mind. Let me ask you something before we get to whatever bad news you have.”

  “Okay.”

  “When are you going to settle down?” Josie leaned back, making the old chair creak.

  “I am settled. The valley is home.” Grey looked into his empty cup. After a beat, he pushed it away. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “You say that, but how do you know?”

  Grey looked at Josie again, half-smiled, and shook his head.

  “Fine. Fuck. Be mysterious,” Josie said. The skulls rattled testily as she shook her head. “What do you want?”

  “I need to know if anyone’s seen strangers around - probably in groups of three or more, with horses. They’d probably be around the south end, past the crater. They’d be avoiding folks.”

  Josie wrinkled her upper lip and hissed through her teeth.

  “Yeah, there have been a few mentions of some riders; Cort Blackwell for one. He was fishing the south end and saw them on the shore. Cort’s got those old army binoculars, you know? He said they were armed; mostly guns, a couple of bows. There’ve been other stories.”

  “Did anyone talk about what they were doing?”

  “No one seems to see them doing anything. They’re just drifting around the south end mostly, though Kimmie Sato swears she saw horsemen up on the ridge at the far end of the bridge.”

  Grey scratched at a chip in the mug’s enamel with a thumbnail, his eyebrows drawn down.

  “No one’s seen them do anything but look at stuff?”

  “Yeah ...” Josie paused, eyes widening. “Well, shit, I should have seen that myself.” She gave Grey a keen glance and the muscles in her jaw bunched. “Who are they - and when?”

  “Not sure who, but they’re trouble. As to when, I’d guess next summer. Keep that quiet for a week or two. I’m going to Maggie’s to get her boys to spread the word. Can you
talk to the Reverend for me? I want to use the church for a meeting.”

  Josie laughed. “He wouldn’t do it for you, but he will for me.”

  “I know.”

  “When do you want it?”

  “Say four weeks, let people get their crops in and give Maggie’s riders time to spread word up to Northpoint and down through N’kmips. The end of October, I guess.”

  Grey stood, stretching. Josie remained seated. Under the barge little waves slapped the rusting hull with the sound of hollow bells. She stared at Grey, seeing the fatigue that made his shoulders sag, that clawed the creases around his mouth.

  “That's it? Throw a Halloween party?”

  “I guess so. Thanks, Josie.”

  Josie smiled and rest her chin on her palm. “Where are you sleeping? I still have that big bed, you know.”

  “Room for two?”

  “Or three.”

  “You’re a nasty girl, my dear.”

  The bed was warm. It always was with the four of them sharing it. The cabin had been built as a hunting lodge, high in the mountains. It hadn’t had the room or the need for more than a single platform bed. Heat came from a potbellied woodstove that had come from a territorial mining camp a century before. Grey’s father paid $200 for it at a junk shop in Deer Park years before.

  Grey climbed out of bed, his breath pluming in the October air and shrugged on his pants and coat. His father opened an eye.