Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall)

by Michael Lane

  Grey made his way to the stairs and back down to the cool and relative quiet of the entryway as the Ciderhouse emptied. The others followed soon after. Ronald looked a little unhappy to be leaving. They retrieved their belongings from the doorman and stepped outside, where the air was cold enough to make them glad of the hard cider.

  They compared notes as they rode back to camp. If they’d really been looking for work, they had a couple of good prospects. As far as information on the Castle went, there was only a crumb.

  “I managed to get their conversation turned around to outlaws and such, finally,” Grey said of the group at the bar. “The only contact these folks have with Creedy’s men - normally - is a toll-post on the old interstate where it crosses the pass. The interesting bit is that the man who usually runs that post left this winter and put someone else in charge.”

  “Left?” Ronald asked. “Killed and buried, more likely.”

  “Usually that’d be my guess, but he’s been seen. He passed a caravan headed west. This guy, he’s named Straud, was headed east on a route maybe three or four days south of here.”

  “Was he alone?” Clay asked.

  “No. They say he had a load of mules with him, a wagon and eight or ten guns.”

  “Why would they have an old fat guy escorting a shipment of whatever it was?” Clay asked. Grey noticed he and Georgia were riding stirrup to stirrup.

  Georgia laughed.

  “What?” Grey and Clay chorused.

  “They’re pulling back to get ready to run up north and steal your valley, boys. The fat guy probably just hauled the best of their loot from the tolls to somewhere he and Creedy can get to it easily when they leave.”

  “But why would they move it so early? Why not travel with all his guys around it to keep it safe?” Ronald asked.

  “Maybe they’re coming sooner than we thought?” Grey asked and immediately shook his head. “No, we’re being stupid. If we were leaving the valley we’d be loading up what we needed to survive and getting everyone ready so we could all make it out. But this is Creedy.” He glanced at Georgia, who was grinning. “You already had this figured out, didn’t you?”

  “Pretty much. I worked it out while I was dancing, in fact. Your old partner is probably going to leave here with his top advisors, a corps of gunmen he thinks he can trust, and all the loot that’s portable. He doesn’t give a shit about the men he leaves behind,” Georgia said. “He’ll leave them this territory while he goes off on his own.”

  Clay nodded and tipped his hat to Georgia. “Ma’am, you are both lovely, wise and a good dancer. If you can shoot, too, I’ll have to marry you.”

  Georgia cocked an eyebrow and ran her palm over the pale stippling of scars on her cheek.

  “The last man that asked me to marry him tried to get a shotgun divorce later on,” she said. “He couldn’t shoot any better than he screwed, luckily.”

  “There’s no accounting for fools,” Clay said, frowning majestically. “I suppose that I will need to seek your favor by showing some familiarity with both of those skills?”

  Grey ignored the banter, which continued, growing gradually more lewd and finally making Ronald blush and walk his horse ahead, out of earshot. Grey thought he was missing his new blonde friend.

  If Georgia was right, he reflected as they rode back to camp, and Creedy moved with a smaller force, pulling the head and heart out of his organization instead of taking it wholesale, that opened up possibilities. A smaller group with fewer men could be split, driven, worked on over time and miles. There were still questions - too many of them to make any plans - but there were possibilities.

  Maybe they could do this.

  Chapter 11: The Greens

  The Colonel and his aide stood at the window of the old Billings Hotel and watched a horse drawn plow rattle past, clearing the roadway of wet April snow. The aide, a young man with blonde hair cropped short, read through a series of reports: Ammunition, animals, men healthy, men ill, fuel stocks, fodder. They moved to a dark oak desk against the wall. The older man signed the papers with a silver fountain pen.

  “I want them all ready to start moving in a month, Purvis,” he said as he approved a requisition for sulfa powder for the medical corps, then lay the pen aside and straightened his narrow tie.

  “Sir? Not this fall?”

  “No. We’ve received information that makes an early arrival in central Washington important,” the Colonel said. His accent was Bostonian, with broad vowels and a lazy sound that contrasted with his stiff, perfect posture.

  “We may not have rail support then, sir. The engineers say they need to fix sections of track west of here, and the scouts haven’t checked all the bridges through Idaho yet.” Purvis fussed with his stack of papers. He hated surprises.

  “We’ll make do,” the Colonel said. “If we have to rely on cavalry and infantry, we’ll still have the force we need. Just let the corps commanders know. Today. We move out May first.”

  “Yes sir.” Purvis saluted and hurried from the suite. The Colonel returned to the window, staring down as a squad marched past, each man in mottled olive, each shoulder bearing the shield and eagle of the CDF. They were a fresh unit, raised here in Montana, and a few had trouble keeping time. Somewhere in the distance a diesel engine blatted into rumbling life for a few moments, and the heavy sound rattled the window glass.

  It was eight hundred miles to the Larson Homeland Security Center. At a steady march without the railway to speed progress, that was six weeks travel time, the Colonel mused. That would put his forces on the spot in mid-June, with good weather. With luck, they’d be able to pull some of the tankers across the mountains, and that would allow for the vehicles to lend support.

  He moved to the faded green couch that faced a long-dead wall mount TV and sat down, careful to fold his uniform jacket over the couch arm first. On the glass-topped coffee table facing the couch sat a Bakelite box as big as a suitcase. He thumbed the combination into the wheeled lock on its front and lifted the cover free, exposing a nest of copper wire and vacuum tubes. Four large paper-wrapped dry cells occupied fully half the space in the case. A folded headset and key rested atop the components, and a brown-backed notebook. The colonel picked up the notebook and opened it.

  A series of scrambled numbers and letters was written in his own hand, and below it:

  Creedy moving by July, taking part of garrison. Plan head into Canada, probably Okanagan. Unknown if Creedy aware of materials.

  “And now it’s a race,” Rastowich said, closing the book.

  Georgia lay in thick sagebrush on a hillock overlooking a stretch of crumbled road. Three hundred yards from her position a Shell station crouched, the yellow clamshell sign speckled with bullet holes and faded to a powdery gold. The building sat where the old secondary highway crossed a smaller road. It was a big one with four pump islands and an attached repair bay; an old truckstop sitting in the midst of a vast asphalt patch. Six horses were tied to the pumps under the building’s peeling canopy. Much of the tin and ply roofing had been torn away by windstorms and the canopy was now just a scaffolding of rusty steel that cast a dappled web of shadows. The station itself was of cinderblock, and still in fair shape. The windows were long gone, but someone had nailed corrugated steel over the larger gaps. One man was visible. He wore a coyote-hide jacket and green pants and had a squashed green safari cap on his head. He carried a shotgun slung on a rope over his shoulder. Georgia watched him through her rifle’s scope. She could see him clearly, and could read the boredom and annoyance on his face. For no reason she could see he paused and swatted one of the horses, making it shuffle a step sideways.

  It had taken a week to find out about this little garrison, which locals just called The Shell, and it was to supply the first key they needed to open the doors of the Castle.

  The area around the station was agricultural, with fields and solitary houses, each marked by the smoke of fires. There was little livestock other than chi
ckens and a few sheep. The station itself sat amongst the ruins that clustered at the junction. None of the closest buildings were inhabited or inhabitable. Fire had swept through them at some point, and most were roofless jumbles of warped, rotting two-by-fours and disintegrating particle board, or gaping basements; pits full of brambles and broken glass. Georgia saw movement, and tracked the rifle to it.

  Harmon, dressed in ragged bib overalls, was moving up the intersecting road, pushing a pair of heavily-loaded bags draped across a bicycle. The bike’s tires were long gone, and Georgia could imagine the sound the rims made on the broken asphalt. She monitored her breathing and balanced tautness in her stomach with smooth, cool thoughts. It was all math, she reminded herself.

  The man in the coyote furs spotted Harmon, and unslung his shotgun, cradling it in the crook of his right arm as he moved to meet him. Harmon stopped pushing and wiped his face with his sleeve. He smiled in a goofy way that made him look light on brains, and waited for the guard to reach him. Behind the guard, Grey, Mal and Clay left the cover of the weeds and trotted across the parking lot to the near wall of the station. Grey leaned his head around the corner to make sure Harmon had seen, and waved a hand. Clay and mal started around the rear of the building.

  Harmon talked for a few more seconds, then gestured at the bike, and reached into the far sack’s open top. Georgia watched as he withdrew something, unhurriedly, and turned back to the guard who stumbled backward and fell. The sound of the shot reached her a split-second later, followed by another as Harmon shifted the gun to a two-handed grip and finished the fallen man. He was off and running, then, reaching a hiding spot in the nearest ruins before the fallen bicycle’s wheels came to rest.

  Within seconds men were boiling out of the station, each one armed with pistols or shotguns. Four sprinted toward their fallen friend, while the other stopped near the horses, peering around in confusion. Grey stepped around the corner with his rifle shouldered and shot him as he turned to the movement, then stepped back as the four in the road returned fire. Three charged toward the corner Grey had ducked behind, while one dashed for the remains of a ruined house not far from where Harmon had hidden. Georgia tracked him, hyper-alert, and squeezed off a single shot. She led for his motion and the distance without conscious thought. He fell and did not move. She felt a brief pulse of cool satisfaction and released the breath she had held.

  The survivors heard the crack of the rifle and crouched against the front wall of the building, staring wildly about. Clay and Mal stepped around the front corner of the station, and there was a brief burst of pistol fire. Mal walked forward, checking the open doorway as he darted across, and stood looking at the three where they had fallen in a heap. Georgia saw him shoot one of the men as he lay. Grey joined them and he and Mal moved inside, while Clay took up a position near the horses. Harmon reappeared, with Ronald and Sowter, from where they had been ready in the ruins, and joined him. It was over, and Georgia’s one empty was still hot when she picked it up.

  Georgia watched while the shell case cooled in her hand but saw nothing moving. The brief moment of satisfaction had passed, and she sighed as she slung the big rifle and went to fetch the horses.

  The inside of the station was filthy and stank of body odor, pot, spoiled food and urine. The shelving had been shifted to barricade the windows behind the layers of sheet steel and the dead men had ranged a circle of chairs around a stained table in the room’s center. Cards and earthenware bottles exuding a sour yeast stink lay scattered on it. In the old stockroom, they found the bedrolls of the little garrison. In one of the bathrooms they found a girl, probably fourteen or fifteen, chained to a sink and crouched in her own filth. She wouldn’t speak, but sat unmoving as Clay, with a file found in the junk-filled repair bay, sawed through the padlock anchoring the chain around her throat. She remained silent and still when Doc later examined her. Ronald found as clean a blanket as he could and draped it around her shoulders. He went outside and threw up, afterward. Mal patted him on the back as he came back in, but said nothing.

  Clay and Sowter found three rusty steel cases, each with a padlock, stacked behind the counter that had held the till. They called Grey over.

  “That’s them,” he agreed. “Let’s get those loaded. Go ahead and use some of their horses.”

  Doc emerged from the back room.

  “Grey, we need to talk,” he said. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and sighed.

  “Talk quick, we need to get loaded and get out of here.”

  “The girl. She’s catatonic, or close to it. I can’t leave her.”

  “You can’t stay,” Grey almost shouted. “Sorry. You knew what this would be like. What do you want me to do about her?”

  “We have to take her along, just until I can find someone to take care of her.”

  Ronald was pale but listening. He nodded. “I can watch her, Grey.”

  “I’d argue but there’s no goddamn time. You two get her on a horse, I don’t care how. We need to get out of here before anyone gets too curious. The locals will be scared off by all the shooting, but only for a while.”

  Sowter, Harmon and Georgia watched while the horses were loaded and the blanket-wrapped girl was manhandled onto a quiet horse. They were away less than half an hour after the first shot, and saw no one.

  “You’d have thought there would be one or two come down to see what the noise was about,” Sowter grunted as they made their way around the base of the hill and back into the scabland beyond.

  Grey nodded, eyes sweeping across the nearest farmhouses where they hid in their clumps of shade trees. “How scared does that make them? That not one came down to see?”

  They camped that night on a ridge ten miles west of the Shell station. It was the first night in a long time that they had seen the meteors so thick, and a dazzling spray of them waxed and waned throughout the night. All were short sparks of fire, with none of the lumbering trails of thunder that had been common a decade before. Grey watched them for a while before falling asleep. He wondered if anyone wished on them anymore.

  Sometime during the night or early morning, the girl crawled away, avoiding whichever of them had been on watch at the time. She had left a heap of blankets to counterfeit a body in her bedroll and she wasn’t missed until dawn. When it got light enough to follow her trail, they tracked her through thorny bushes to a precipice overlooking a tumbled mass of jagged basalt. Her body, thin and pale, lay among them. The ground was hard and rocky, so they built a cairn over her where she lay.

  Doc said a few words. Ronald said nothing, but he was the last to leave the grave.

  Grey wondered if she’d known the cliff was there.

  They moved camp. That evening Sowter made a smokeless fire from tinder-dry brushwood pulled out of a rocky-flanked arroyo and started a pot of beans and dried chilis boiling. Clay and Mal took turns with the file, sawing locks off the steel boxes.

  The contents varied. All were less than half-full. Most held a few bits of silver or gold jewelry mixed with trade goods like cloth or clothing, tanned leather, wax, thread, needles and tools, bags of seeds, bottles of medicine, coins. One contained ammunition of varying calibers and a bundle of unused notebooks. One notebook had been used to tally the goods - all protection fees collected from local farmers, Grey thought, with additions here and there from murdered travelers. They consolidated the contents into two chests after picking out what ammunition fit their guns and a quarter of the cash, and headed south and east.

  Chapter 12: Potter’s Creek

  Cory Jones was an unhappy man. He’d been to the Castle for Creedy’s big speech and had come back to Potter’s Creek unimpressed. His little corner of the kingdom produced one thing of value: Horses. His ranchers ran a thousand head or more, and the best of the two- and three-year-olds went to the Castle to be broke and trained. Creedy’s men went through a lot of horses year-to-year. They did a lot of miles in bad country, and many of the Castle soldiers weren’t much
good at caring for the animals in any case.

  Jones thus had a vast supply of valuable horses, which was wealth he couldn’t spend. They weren’t something you could stick in your pocket when the CDF came and claim poverty. He also wasn’t convinced the new bosses would keep a one-eyed local commander with a taste for youngish boys - and he suspected a lot of the ranchers would be quick to point him out as a thief, anyway. If they didn’t keep him on, well, what would he do? He didn’t fool himself that his innate charms would woo the smooth-faced boys he liked, and without cash he’d be left half-blind and alone, surrounded by people who didn’t like him much.

  Jones aired his worries to his sergeants, in confidence of course. He’d have been horrified to learn how quickly everyone in town knew that Cory, known widely behind his back as Boyfuck Jones, was worried he was going to be out of a job. The one thing he did notice was a rise in disorderly behavior by some of the ranch hands. He had a few whipped, and that settled down.

  So the timely appearance of a cold-eyed man named Simmons who needed a business partner was music to Boyfuck’s ears.

  Simmons was a big-bellied man with a squint who drank constantly as they talked. He’d walked into the old fire hall Joes used as barracks and office, dropped his weapons on the counter in front of a surprised guard, and said that he was there to talk business with the boss. After a minute of confusion, the guard escorted Simmons upstairs to Jones’ suite of rooms. Simmons asked to speak in private, so Jones had taken a seat on the old sofa, laid a pistol on the seat cushion beside his hip, and told the guard to go.