Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall)

by Michael Lane

  The visitor made an offer that seemed too good to be true.

  Simmons needed a partner. He was setting up shop independent of the Castle, preying on the ever busier trade route along the old Interstate 90 corridor, and needed a local angel to help shift stolen goods. It was the sort of arrangement that would have gotten Jones killed in the old days, but with Creedy handing over the reins to the CDF, the horse breeder saw it in a different light.

  “I need a fence,” Simmons had said, downing his third or fourth shot of Jones’ whiskey. “I wouldn’t cut anyone in, but with the army coming, I want a respectable way to shift stuff. You have the horses and a business, and will be sitting pretty to move goods after these army idiots finish running around.”

  “But if they find out, they’ll line me up against a wall and shoot me,” Jones objected.

  “Why would they bother? You’re taking trade from someone. Tell them it was for horses. Not your fault the goods were liberated somewhere else. It’s a straight fucking deal. My boys and I do the dangerous work; you get a thirty percent cut for doing nothing. You just load it on your horses whenever you’re selling nags down south or on the coast, and change it for cash and ammo.”

  Jones wrinkled his nose. He had a broad baby face, and whenever he spoke or grimaced it moved like putty, with deep creases and folds that crawled across his visage.

  “Don’t pretend there’s no risk to me,” he argued. “If I don’t have a convincing reason to have a sack full of gold teeth or Mexican opium or whatever your boys borrow off the trade routes, it’ll be my ass against the wall.”

  Simmons grunted, belched and looked annoyed.

  “Fuck me, there’s always some risk in anything,” he said, face flushing. “We could fall off our horses and break our goddamn necks. This is guaranteed gold. My boys aren’t about to hit a caravan moving fucking Mexican dope. The last thing we need is a cartel pissed off. But think of the stuff moving through now that the shipping is coming back. There’s goddamn silk from China for sale around Wenatchee and at George. There’re silversmiths on the south coast and they sell to mercantile concerns all over, and that silver moves through Snoqualmie pass, then down across the lonely old scabland. Hell, even the basics for the shitkickers like salt and seeds will make us a pretty penny and all we do is put it in a different sack and resell it.”

  Simmons paused and stared at Jones.

  “And I can always find someone else. I came to you because you have horses. But so do a lot of guys. So quit dancing. Do you want in or not?”

  “When would we start?” Jones asked.

  “I’ve got enough for a first run already,” Simmons said. “People in town say you usually take a string of horses to the coast this month, so that could be our trial run.”

  Jones cocked his head to one side. “My horses, and I’m going to have risks, as you pointed out, so I want a bigger cut. No one will be able to find you if it goes bad, but me, I live right here. So I want sixty percent.”

  Simmons had a talent for profanity and Jones let him go for a while. In the end they shook on forty percent and Simmons proposed a toast to their partnership.

  With a little luck, Jones thought, this would net him the cash he’d need, if things went the way he was afraid they might. And if the CDF looked like it was going to be a problem, well, he could always go off with a caravan to the coast, and if neither he nor any of the money came back? That would be a problem for Simmons to work out.

  Sowter and Mal, backed by Georgia on a distant rise, made the exchange with Jones and three of his men. Grey watched and followed after the meeting broke up; making sure no one was trailing his people. They met a few hours later at their campsite, a level, sandy area screened on three sides by steep basalt outcrops. It sat on a low rise, not far from a chain of weedy lakes in low-lying rocky holes that supplied their horses with water.

  Red-eyed and still smelling of whiskey, Sowter recounted his talk with Jones. He was just finishing when Harmon and Ronald walked into camp after picketing their mounts. Grey nodded to them.

  “We got the stuff to Jones. How’d you do?” Grey asked, once they’d sat down. Harmon pulled his boots off and wiggled his toes.

  “I think we managed it,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know how fast word will get out, but Ronald was damn convincing.”

  The younger man grinned and looked up. Grey raised his eyebrows. Ronald’s left eye was swollen mostly shut and was surrounded by a massive blue-black bruise.

  “I take it there’s a story behind that?” Clay said. Doc rose and tried to examine the eye, but Ronald, still grinning, waved him off.

  “It’s fine, I just got a fist in it,” he said. “You want to tell them, Harmon?”

  “You got punched for it, so you get to tell the story,” Harmon said.

  “It was luck, more than anything,” Ronald said. “We stopped at Vantage, where the ferry runs, and hung around the little bar that’s built under the wreck of the old bridge. It had some stupid-ass name that I forget.”

  “The Squat Hole,” Harmon put in.

  “Right, that was it. Anyway, we drank beer and made sure we looked drunker than we were. People were all talking about the garrison we hit - no surprises there. We wedged right in with the guys at the bar, and Harmon and I were talking about the riders we’d seen leaving the crossroads Shell a few days back - going like hell toward Potter’s Creek and taking loaded mules with them. I was arguing that they were just traders in a hurry, that they’d seen the massacre when they stopped to pay toll, but Harmon kept harping on how they had too many guns. It wasn’t too long before half the guys at the bar were asking about it, and we were just spooning it out, smooth as porridge.

  “One big guy did most of the work for us,” Ronald said, chuckling. “I kept being the voice of reason - argued that they were just traders and that Harmon was full of shit, when this guy starts off on how he was a Castle soldier, and he wanted to hear Harmon, and I should just shut the fuck up.”

  Harmon started to snicker. “So Ronald here turns to him, looks him in the eye and says ‘then you ought to have the brains to know that Boyfuck Jones wouldn’t have the balls to try and shoot up a Castle garrison and steal from your boss.’”

  Ronald grinned, then winced and rubbed his eye. “He punched me a good one for that. The room went kind of spinny and I fell over.”

  Grey saw Doc joined in the laugh that followed. He was glad; the old man had been very quiet since the girl had died. The punch in the eye had apparently distracted Ronald from thoughts of her, too.

  “Then we have a good start. Now we sit back and watch the fireworks,” Grey said.

  “You think maybe Creedy will come out?” Mal asked. He was, as usual, already in his bedroll and trying to sleep.

  “I doubt it. Not yet,” Grey said. “But I want to see how many men he sends. If he only sends a few, I may want them, too.”

  Ronald scratched his head and studied Grey.

  “It’s funny,” he said, “but I don’t know how to feel about any of this.”

  “Which bits?” Grey asked.

  “Well, the killing, setting up more killing, the girl from the station, the farmers so scared they won’t come out to see who’s riding across their fields.”

  “You feel confused?” Grey asked. “Kind of foggy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s normal, kid,” Grey said, poking their little fire with a twig. “It’s because you’re a good man, and this is ugly stuff. Just remember that it needs doing.” Grey shrugged and tossed the twig onto the flames. “It’s a good thing. You ever get to where it doesn’t bother you, and you’ve lost something you may not get back.”

  Mal cracked an eye at that - the man slept more than a cat, Grey thought - “Are you impugning my amoral nature, sir?”

  “No, you get a pass if you were born that way.”

  “Okay then. Can someone wake me up for my watch, please?”

  Teddy was fourteen and pudgy, wi
th angelic curls and blue eyes. He’d been a swill boy at the local brewery, and had caught Jones’ eye last summer. An exchange of goods had moved Teddy to Jones’ over-furnished rooms, and the boy had turned out to be both mercenary and sensual. He was in his room on his bed, reading one of the crumbling comic books that Cory had found for him, carefully sounding out the words, when the noise started in the street outside.

  Potter’s Creek had a small mercantile core with a drygoods, barber/dentist and blacksmith, a little cafe that turned into a bar at night and a ramshackle motel that served horse traders and caravaners that came through. A gutted semi parked perpetually across from the fire hall had been converted into a stand that sold vegetables in season. The town’s access points were shielded by staggered barricades made of old sections of concrete K-rail. Three or four of Jones’ ten men were supposed to patrol town at all times. Right now they were gathering in the road next to the semi, facing a group of riders three times their number, and the confused babble rising from the crowd interrupted Teddy’s slow reading of Spider-Man. He went to his window and pushed it open so he could hear more easily. There was a thump below him on the fire hall’s first floor. Down the street he could see other men with guns moving in and out of buildings. He knit his fingers into a nervous knot and watched.

  Harris sat slumped in his saddle and stared at Jones. The Potter’s Creek boss was talking, but Harris had quit listening some time ago. His men were searching the town. This needed to go right, to go smooth. He’d only just clawed his way back to a position where Creedy would trust him with a job, and he didn’t mean to fail. The scarred flesh on his back writhed as he considered the possibility. He frowned, his moustache giving him a misleadingly sad and sympathetic look.

  Harris stretched, twisting his neck and hearing it pop, and looked over Jones’ shoulder at his little knot of men. They shifted and stared around, eyes never resting anywhere for long.

  “You know what, Cory,” Harris said when Jones paused. “Even if you don’t have the stuff, you need to be shot for running such a shithole. Your guards didn’t stop us riding in and taking their goddamn guns, so what good are they? What good are you?”

  “Fuck, Harris, half of them know you. They’re not going to shoot our own men,” Jones shouted. His face was pale and his hair hung in lank sweaty threads. “What the hell are you looking for? You ride in and start tearing the place up for no reason. What’s going on?”

  “That’s what I should be asking you. What’s going on, Cory? You feeling a little left out? Trying to bankroll a nice retirement when the new boys get here?” Harris asked. His mouth thinned in a sneer as a pair of his men exited the fire hall, dragging a rusty green steel box between them.

  “Not a good plan, if that’s what it was,” Harris said, watching his men open the box. Jones turned to see where he was looking.

  “Harris, that stuff I took in trade, if there’s a problem with it, you got to believe me, I had no idea.”

  “The problem is you stole from the Castle. You stole from Mister Creedy, and you go caught,” Harris said, pulling his pistol

  “I didn’t steal anything! A guy - his name’s Simmons - he brought that in, he wanted someone to help him move it,” Jones babbled. Harris cut him off by working the slide of the automatic he held. The men behind Jones shifted to the sides.

  “Oh, so it didn’t come in trade? Now some guy brought it?” Harris raised the pistol and shot Jones in the throat. The gunshot brought a cessation of all other noise. Jones took a step or two back in the sudden silence and sat down, hands raised to his wound as his lap filled with blood.

  “Why do you bother lying to me, Boyfuck?” Harris asked.

  He watched as Jones struggled to rise. After a while he rolled onto his left side and ceased moving. Harris raised his eyes to the men of Jones’ garrison. One tried to run, and a member of Harris’s squad tripped him and then kicked him in the head until he stopped moving.

  Harris turned his horse and looked at the circle of locals that had turned out to watch.

  “I’ll be back in a week or so, and we’ll be putting in a new garrison,” Harris yelled. “Anyone decides this would be the time to run off with anything better think again. Jones thought he could, so you remember that.”

  There, now that’s the way you do that, Harris thought. He smiled and holstered his gun.

  The fire hall had a balcony of sorts on the second floor that ran for ten or twelve yards along the west side of the building. By sunset the local garrison hung from it, the bodies turning slowly in the May breeze.

  The men ignored Teddy. He tried to go back to the brewery once they left, but the owner drove him off with kicks and curses. He tried other places, but no one wanted to shelter anyone who had been associated with Jones, not with Harris coming back. He left town a few days later with a small backpack and his Spider-Man comics.

  Ronald and Harmon rode back into camp the night after Jones died. The pair had been among the townies watching Harris that day, both dressed in ragged picker’s clothing. Ronald jumped off his horse, laughing.

  “Damn, Grey, it worked! They killed off the whole mess of them,” he said, grinning. Harmon nodded and said nothing, but raised ten fingers. He turned away and began to untack the horses and unpack the items Grey had asked him to trade for.

  “Good,” Grey said. He was sitting between Georgia and Clay, cleaning his rifle with a swab and a pull cord. “I’d wanted to sow some distrust, but we got lucky. Someone didn’t have the brains to ask the right questions.”

  Ronald laughed, rubbing at his neck with his left hand. “If they’re all this dumb, this’ll be easy.”

  Sowter was bent over the fire, stirring a pot of beans and corn. He withdrew a spoonful and blew on it before tasting it.

  “You’re real happy about it,” he said, setting the spoon aside and staring at Ronald.

  “Aren’t you?” Ronald asked. “That was the plan.”

  Sowter shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m glad it worked. Never mind me.”

  Grey rubbed his forehead with a palm.

  “It’s normal to feel let down afterward,” he said. He tried to hold Sowter’s gaze, but the heavyset cowboy wouldn’t meet his eye.

  “What the hell’s the matter?” Ronald demanded, looking around. “I’m confused.”

  “I hate lying,” Sowter said. “I’ll do it if we need to, but don’t expect me to like it.”

  “There’s not going to be much more lying,” Grey said. Sowter looked up.

  “No?”

  “Not any more, no. We’ve shaken them up, but if we pulled another stunt like this they’ll know there’s a third party involved,” Grey said. “They’ll figure this one out soon enough. I’m sure a few townsfolk saw you go in to talk to Jones, even if no one saw the exchange. So we’re going to announce ourselves.”

  Clay, watching Ronald, interrupted.

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  “To keep control,” Grey said. “If Creedy figures it out on his own, he’ll feel like he’s in control, think that he’s a step ahead of us. I don’t want him to feel like that. I want him off balance and playing catch-up. We have to keep him reacting to us, not the other way round, or we’ll get killed.”

  “Are you going to ride up to his door and challenge him to a duel?” Georgia asked. “Compare dick-size and then play pistols at twenty paces?” Mal snorted and Harmon, who was carrying his saddle past the fire, paused just long enough to roll an eye.

  “Sort of,” admitted Grey. “But I’m planning on cheating.”

  Chapter 13: Pullman

  The vanguard cavalry company had set up camp in the foothills south of the little town of Pullman. Sentries walked the perimeter and tents were going up in neat rows while small knots of locals came and went, watching with hands in their pockets. The pickets moved them off politely if they came within a few hundred feet, but otherwise ignored them.

  Colonel Rastowich and two squads of ten riflemen veered
off from the main body of the battalion just outside the town. Dusk was settling in and the Colonel could see fires and lights around a cluster of big brick buildings on a hill above the overgrown remains of the old town, which lay along the curve of a small river. He rode toward them, watching the locals who either scattered at his approach or stood, curious and staring. To any who stayed, he offered a nod and a ‘good evening’. Some returned the greeting, others just stared. One old man pushing a barrow of manure abandoned his task and tottered into the road. The Colonel had to pull up to avoid riding him down.

  Rastowich studied the man while his squad eyed the surroundings; one old man in tattered clothes, eyes red and white hair thinning across a pink scalp. He blinked up at the mounted man for a minute, studying him in turn, then straightened and offered a shaky but passable salute. The Colonel returned it by force of habit, and the old man smiled. Rastowich thought he might be crying.

  “Major Jorgensen, 92nd Air Refueling Wing, Colonel. We’ve waited a long time.” The man’s voice was a rasping thing, harsh as gravel in a pan.

  “Colonel Rastowich, Major. It’s good to meet a serviceman, no matter the wait.” He thought for a moment, brow creasing. “The 92nd? Then you’d have been at Fairchild, servicing the B-52s?”

  “That I was, sir.” The old man tried to say something else but started to shake and wipe at his eyes with a dirty sleeve. One of the troopers dismounted, led him to the roadside and helped him sit down. The Colonel left him there and continued down the slope and across the rumbling stream, then up the hill in search of whatever passed for local government.

  The lights and activity centered around the surviving buildings of a university. Locals had moved in decades ago, fortified the structures and then added to them as the population slowly rebounded. The complex was now a maze of brick and wood structures surrounded by rusted chain-link, makeshift barricades and huge heaps of rubble where buildings had collapsed. The Colonel stopped several hundred yards from the first barricades. Captain Nakamura took two men and rode up to parley. They returned soon.