Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall)

by Michael Lane

  The column of men spread and stopped shoulder-to-shoulder in a long line on the crest of a hill, looking down into the valley below, studying the line of a distant river, the trailing smoke of a village on it banks and the fractured, fading web of old roads. Grey turned away and studied his companions.

  It had been a hard year. Their faces were hollow-cheeked, with sunken eyes. They’d been eating meat and little else for months, and sores on lips or gums were common among the men. Grey clenched his jaw and felt his teeth move in their sockets. They needed fruit or vegetables. They also needed a score.

  Grey took a long pull from the bottle he carried. The harsh alcohol made his bleeding gums sing with pain.

  The band’s coffers were empty, the gold taken that summer from the gangs in Trail was long gone. It had been old jewelry, not mined gold. Three families had carved out a niche for themselves simply by discovering an old portable acetylene welder and using it to burn into safety deposit boxes in banks. They’d used some of the gold to hire guns, and had begun expanding. When Grey heard about it, Kingsnake had helped convince him to ride north and clean them out.

  There were only a dozen guns guarding the families, and it had been easy. They’d lost just two men and ridden off with close to six pounds of gold jewelry, little red felt bags of precious stones and the miscellaneous loot stripped from the gold hunters’ homestead. They had lived high for a while. The money hadn’t lasted, though. It never did.

  He looked again at his ragged band, seeing the filthy faces, the unsmiling stares that held hunger and a certain trembling eagerness as they looked down into the valley at the little township.

  Grey realized that he must look equally bad, equally mad and feral and hateful. He’d known he was slipping, but now he could see himself from the outside in a lightheaded way. He felt bile burn the back of his throat. He studied his swollen hands, the knuckles raw and red; saw the crescents of dirt and blood dried under his nails. The legs of his jeans were black with grease and dirt, and his coat, roughly cured from the hide of a bear, stank of rancid fat and sweat. Only the knife hilt in his boot-top, the pistol at his side, and the rifle rested across the saddlebow were clean. His father’s rifle. He ran a filthy finger along the satin smoothness of the barrel.

  He’d known, then, that he was done. He’d at least had the honesty not to lie to himself. He knew what he was, but he was done with it. He had become one of the men who’d killed his family.

  He could ride off now. Kingsnake would gladly take over the band. He’d run it for most of the past year anyway.

  Grey squinted. He could just see farmers at work in the fields far below, the white and brown specks of cattle on the green squares of pastures.

  He could just ride off, but that wouldn’t stop anything. It would be the smart thing to do. There were twenty of them, and one of him.

  It would be smart to just run, like he always did.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Georgia said.

  Grey shook his head and blinked. The wind had dropped as evening approached and it was quiet now. He could hear the crunch of their horses’ hooves on the gravel, the whisk of their hocks through the grass.

  “They’re not worth that much,” Grey said. “Did I look sour?”

  “You looked sad.”

  “Ah. I’m just tired.” Grey stretched, feeling his spine crackle, before slouching in the saddle once more.

  “If you’d learn to ride with proper posture you’d feel better,” Georgia said with a smirk. “But, aside from your hideous riding skills, what’s bothering you?”

  Grey snorted.

  “Nothing, I just want it over and done.”

  Georgia huffed and rolled her eyes. “Fine, work the laconic wilderness trapper shtick. See if I care.”

  They rode in silence for a while, and Grey watched the sky begin to darken to cobalt. They followed Mal into a box canyon with basalt walls made of perfect hexagonal pillars. Clay caught up to them as they dismounted on the sandy floor between the walls.

  “No water for the horses here, so give them as much as you can from the canteens,” Grey reminded them. He retrieved a crumpled guidebook from his pocket, peering in the dim light at a beige map surrounded by ads for businesses dead for thirty years. “We should hit the north end of the lake tomorrow morning. We can water them there and fill up our canteens.”

  “And then?” Clay asked, stepping to stand beside Georgia. Grey saw her lean against him.

  “Then we find a good lookout on the best route north, and we wait,” Grey said.

  Mal rubbed his rump and grimaced.

  “It’ll be nice to walk for a change. That saddle is slowly sawing me in half.” He began gathering bleached bits of wood from the sand, brush washed down by the spring rains, and tossed them into a pile. The seasoned wood rattled with a half-musical sound.

  “Do we have a plan?” Clay asked, squatting to lay the fire, breaking the smallest twigs into kindling.

  “Not a tight one,” Grey said. “Until we see how many and where there’s not much we can say for sure.”

  “In general, then?” Clay opened an oilskin pouch and took out a pinch of cottony lint, tucking it beneath the kindling. “I miss matches,” he muttered, readying his flint and steel.

  “In general, we get ready, and we try to make sure Georgia has a shot at Creedy, then we deal with whatever counterattack they make, then we pull back and let them either break and run, or head north again,” Grey said. “If they break, we go home. If they still try to head north, we get in front of them and do it again.”

  “Simple as pie,” Mal said with a crooked smile as he deposited a final armful of wood near Clay. “I do have a question, though.”

  “Yes?” Grey grunted, sitting down.

  “What if they do something else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if they hunker down in their Castle thing - which I remind you we’ve never seen - and try to discourage the CDF? Or bribe them?” Mal cocked his head. “Do you plan on us going in to get your old friend if we have to?”

  Clay turned to stare at Grey, who could feel Georgia’s eyes on him as well.

  “If it comes to that, and I decide I need to, I’ll go in by myself,” the old trapper said after a while. “At that point the only thing I have left to settle is personal.”

  The four didn’t talk much over their sparse dinner. Grey took first watch, sitting in the shadows at the canyon’s mouth, his rifle across his knees. He cocked his head as soft footsteps approached from the direction of camp.

  “Don’t shoot me, boss,” Mal said as he wended his way through the maze of fallen rocks that littered the canyon’s floor. He found a shadowed cleft between two large chunks, wrapped his serape tightly around his shoulders, and settled down.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “I can always sleep. There’s a lot of sex going on back there and it’s making me feel horny and alone, which is a bad combination.”

  “Ah.”

  They sat, watching the stars in their slow parade. Short pinprick streaks flicked across the darkness as little meteors expended their energy in a last bright celebration of friction.

  “Grey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t get those two killed for a personal vendetta.”

  “I won’t.”

  “If it comes to it, I’ll go in with you, but those two need to go back north.”

  Grey turned to look at Mal, but his face was just a lighter smudge in the shadows.

  “All right, Mal.”

  The wait wasn’t long. With the third sunrise the watchers, behind their screen of brush and boulders, saw the Castle begin to stir.

  Through his binoculars, Grey had studied the place until boredom had set in. It was an unattractive, functional building, with three main wings and a lower entry hall that enclosed an assumed court. The walls were concrete, streaked with the white droppings of birds. Windows were plentiful in the upper floors, and almost
all still held sheets of greenly reflective glass. Aerials and other metalwork devices crowded the roof in several areas. Around it the land was barren and carefully cleared of other buildings. A few stumpy teeth of concrete thrust through the sandy soil here and there, reminders of long vanished outbuildings. The building’s ground floor entry faced the north and the watchers had a good view of figures entering and leaving. Most took one of two paths and were heavily laden; some to the trash-heap that nearly filled a low swale to the east, and some down the road to the south, escorting a wagon filled with old steel drums. Clay guessed they were for water, refilled at the nearby lake.

  Nothing moved but the Castle garrison. There were no fields within five or six miles, and trade seemed to come only via mule train or wagon from outlying areas. No cabins clung to the walls for protection. At mealtimes, smoke would issue from sooty steel ventilators on the building’s west side. There was little else to see, until that third dawn.

  Georgia was on watch.

  “Quick, take a look, they’re coming,” she said. The others left their bedrolls and peered at the Castle, rubbing their eyes.

  One of the huge steel doors set belowground gaped open, and a string of riders was exiting, milling as they formed up in the shadow of the building. Grey tried to count heads, but gave up as they roiled and circled, waiting as two wagons, both made of ancient camp-trailers, crept up the ramps, pulled by teams of four horses. The faint barking of dogs reached them.

  “That’ll be him,” Grey said as the riders formed up around the wagons and started north. They followed the flat land that led between the rocky-topped hills, and would pass to the watchers’ left, if they held their course.

  Mal lay fully concealed behind two boulders, peering down a battered telescope. After a moment he sat back, collapsed the brass tube and tucked it into his jacket.

  “I wonder what he has in those Winnebagos?” he asked.

  “My retirement fund,” Georgia said.

  “We’ll give them a day to get clear of the local area,” Grey said. “The wagons make them slow, and we can afford to wait until they’re out of reach of their friends.”

  The watchers packed up, then ate before setting out, allowing the caravan to make its way out of sight between the bluffs to the north before mounting and following.

  The day was clear and hot, and before long Grey and his riders were soaked with sweat. They rode at a slow walk, afraid of catching the caravan; too slow for their motion to provide a cooling breeze. In the afternoon they paused and Grey went ahead to scout. He returned two hours later.

  “There’s a shallow creek up ahead - we’ll water the horses,” he reported. “Creedy and his men crossed an hour or so back. He left a pair to watch his back trail, so I stayed hid until they left.”

  Mal nodded. Clay gigged his horse until he sat beside Georgia and leaned over to whisper to her. She snickered. Grey turned his horse and led the way to the ford.

  Clay dismounted, cursing as his feet slipped in the churned clay of the creek’s bank. He slogged off to Georgia, who had dismounted farther up the hill.

  Mal remained in the saddle while his horse drank, staring northward.

  “Tomorrow?” he asked in a low voice, pitched for Grey alone.

  Grey nodded. “Tomorrow. At the bridge by Brewster.”

  “Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation,” Mal said, his eyes on the ridgeline to the north. “Mais délivre-nous du mal. Amen.” He grinned.

  They rode hard, the horses grateful for the exercise after a slow day, swinging in a great loop east through the scablands. They passed scattered farmhouses, with lights in some of the windows, and startled small herds of cattle that rumbled away in the dark. There were no garrison posts to avoid on the route Creedy had taken. They made fifteen miles, and crossed the flat concrete span of the old Brewster bridge in purple predawn light.

  Brewster lay east and north of the usual trade route through Wenatchee. The ruined town had an unhappy reputation, and had never been resettled after the Fall. The inhabitants had fallen prey to one of the sicknesses that killed millions, and survivors had fled, some taking the plague to settlements that took them in. In the end, people had written Brewster off as somewhere to avoid, and years later it stood stripped and empty, a few dozen buildings crumbling slowly back into the ground. The bridge remained, though, firm on massive piers while the Columbia rolled endlessly on beneath it, blue-green and deep and powerful. It had a muddy, vital smell.

  Clay and Mal found cover in the ruins at the bridge’s northern end, in the mazes left by toppled walls and rusted cars. They would stay hidden and engage Creedy’s men from the rear if they crossed. Georgia and Grey settled in on a brushy hillside north and west of the bridge, where they had a view of its entire length.

  The waiting began.

  Chapter 20: Locals

  The town had clustered around the two ends of the bridge, with the body of it on the northern bank. A narrow mercantile strip of brick and cinderblock ran east-west along the old highway route, paralleling the rusted rails of a spur line. The north end of the bridge entered what had been the southern residential section, far away from the few still-standing warehouses.

  Brewster lay silent and ruinous, acacias, sycamores and twisted pines softening the rubble and slowly reclaiming the streets. It was a dead place, a bad pace. In an area where settlements were steadily growing, no one built near it. Feral cats were rare, and dogs were wholly absent. Outside the ducks and geese on the river, they saw no birds.

  Afterward, Grey blamed himself for failing to ask why.

  Rat was blind in one eye, but his hearing was the sharpest among all his brothers. He lay curled in the infested rags that were his bed, listening as the distant sound of hooves stopped. He rolled over, careful not to bump his head on the cobwebbed timbers of the crawlspace. The family had moved under the old school after its roof had collapsed, and had dug a series of shallow burrows in the clay beneath the foundations. He crawled through the fetid dark on knees scabbed and calloused, pausing to poke and hiss at Cutter and Bugs where they lay curled in their own nests.

  “There’s someone here,” he lisped, his crooked teeth yellow as butter. What little light there was seeped through the ground-glass windows set in the foundation. “Tell Ma, and get everyone ready.”

  Rat was hungry. Lately the family’s diet had consisted of ground squirrels and the little striped snakes that were common in the weeds near the river. It had been a long time since anyone had stopped in Brewster. He drooled a little, wiping it on the wrinkled leather vest he wore.

  Cutter scrabbled away, moving with spidery agility, and Bugs followed, chanting nonsense under his breath. Coughs and whispers multiplied in the rank shadows as the others woke.

  Rat was excited. Mama would be proud of him for hearing the newcomers.

  And maybe she’d quit looking at him so hungry.

  Creedy, flanked by Hollis and Gregor, paused on the ridge above the Columbia, eyeing the long bridge below, narrow and dark against the reflected glare of the river.

  The caravan waited while Creedy scanned the far shore with binoculars. It was fully ten minutes before he dropped them to swing from their strap about his neck, and gestured with his right hand. The caravan started toward the river, riders both before and behind the wagons, which wallowed on suspensions long-since gone soft.

  “If there’s anyone there, it’s only a few, and well hidden,” Creedy said. He wore his inevitable neat khakis, still clean despite the days of travel. He’d managed to shave, as well.

  “Do you have any idea who has been hitting us? Why Potter’s Creek? Why Mattawa?” Hollis asked when the troopers were out of range.

  Creedy shook his head. Gregor, his size dwarfing the quarterhorse he rode, eyed the bridge and frowned.

  “If they want the Castle, they can have it, now,” Creedy said. “If they want us, then this bridge is a great spot to try.”

  Hollis pointedly avoided looking back at the b
rushy slope behind the column, where six sharpshooters lay hidden. She sucked air through her teeth, looking at the width of the river, instead.

  “We’re not going to have accurate cover fire if anything happens. It’s too far,” she said.

  “True, but having bullets whiz past should make them keep their heads down,” Creedy said. “We’re going to have to treat each bridge this way, and we have many more to come.”

  “I know. Let’s get it over with,” Hollis said, spurring her horse forward.

  Georgia had settled behind a low concrete wall screened by the hanging branches of a willow tree. She watched Creedy’s men as they began descending to the bridge’s far end, studying them through her rifle’s scope. The bridge was a long one, and the riders who led the group were still the better part of a mile off as they mounted the span.

  “When the last of them gets in range, you start at the back. Hopefully that’ll run the leaders across,” Grey said, watching over her shoulder.

  Georgia counted heads.

  “There’s a lot of them. Are you sure you want them coming this way?”

  Grey grunted and shrugged. “There’s less than I’d expected. If they don’t panic and split up, then we pull back and try again later. We just need to thin them down and worry them.”

  Georgia tracked the rifle slowly. The Castle’s men were clad in a mix of old jackets and rough leather garb, and most wore hats or bandanas to ward off the increasing heat of the day. As they came closer she could see that they were almost all armed. Perhaps a third carried rifles; the rest had shotguns or pistols. Creedy had brought his best. The wagons reached the south end of the bridge and waited there. She didn’t expect they would try to cross until a signal was given. There would be no way to turn the teams around on the bridge. The rear of the column was at the midpoint of the bridge and the lead riders were within the limits of her range, she thought.

  “You should get ready,” she said. “It won’t be long.” She tilted her head, feeling the stippled plastic of the stock sticky against her cheek.