Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall)

by Michael Lane

  “Everyone who isn’t hurt, get over there and start helping the injured,” he heard himself shout as he struggled to his feet. “Move it!”

  Two of the Company’s three medics had been inside. The remaining one, a thin young man in spectacles, looked at the blaze, his satchel hanging from one hand, his face ashen. The lenses of his glasses were orange with reflected firelight.

  “Soldier, do your job,” Nakamura said. The medic blinked, saluted and trotted off, skirting the scattering of grassfires that were blooming everywhere. The rest of the men at the command point followed. Some grabbing blankets, water and linen rags for bandages, others sprinted off with the few stretchers the company had been equipped with. Nakamura shuddered and moved to stomp out any small fires that threatened the tents.

  “Captain,” a female voice said. Nakamura turned to see the strange woman looking at him intently. Her lip was bleeding and he wondered if she’d bit it when the blast knocked everyone down. “I need to see the Colonel immediately. Tell him it’s Ahab.”

  Nakamura opened his mouth, but shut it without speaking. He raised a hand and pointed to the burning pile of rubble.

  The woman raised a hand to her forehead and her shoulders sagged.

  “The Colonel filled me in. It’s all for nothing, now, isn’t it?” Nakamura asked as black flakes of ash settled softly around them, worms of fire glowing at their edges. The woman cursed under her breath.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “Creedy took something out of here yesterday. Old cases. They may have been from the subbasement.” She shook her head and pulled herself erect. “It can wait until dawn. What do you need me to do?”

  Nakamura fetched an armload of blankets from the supply tent and gave her half. They were scratchy green wool and smelt faintly of mothballs.

  “Help me with the wounded. Do I call you Ahab?”

  “Call me Sam.”

  Chapter 22: Hit and miss

  “God fucking damn it,” Hollis snarled, as two men carried the body of one of the sentries into the firelight and dumped it. A bullet had taken him in the chest, entering under his right arm and exiting beneath the left, which was missing from the elbow down.

  It had been three days of mud and endless drizzle since the bridge, and each day had seen a death among the guards as whoever was tailing them struck and drifted away. It had been rifle fire each time, precise and from distances that made it hard to determine where the shooter had been.

  “We’re never going to get north with these wagons,” Hollis said. The lean woman, Gregor and Creedy sat at their own fire, while the men guarded the trailers, walked the perimeter and hid their own bedrolls and small fires behind rock outcrops.

  Gregor sipped at a cup of barley tea and said nothing.

  Creedy glanced at the trailers, then turned to stare at Hollis.

  “Those trailers are full of ten years of work,” he said, his voice bland. “Silver, gold, guns, ammunition, food, drugs. You think we should just ride off and leave them?”

  Hollis spit into the fire and locked eyes with Creedy, her face intent. His remained expressionless.

  “It’s not like we can spend it if we’re dead.” She reached down beside the rock she sat on, scooped up a handful of clay-rich mud and watched it slide between her fingers. “Even if it doesn’t start raining again at sunrise, we’re lucky to make ten miles a day in this slop. The horses are worn out, the wagons are impossible to move, and whoever is following us is good at what they do.”

  Creedy tilted his head to one side, inquiringly.

  “You have a suggestion, my dear?”

  She nodded. “We take the cases and head south. If they’re what you think they are, we can sell it to the cartels. They’d want it for bargaining with the army.”

  Creedy pondered this, sipping his own tea and grimacing.

  “You think they’d want it? I wouldn’t know who to contact, though,” he said. “What few cartel leaders I’ve met, I’ve generally killed.”

  Hollis flicked the mud from her fingers.

  “I have a contact,” she said. “In Chico.”

  Creedy smiled and Gregor stirred where he sat, rolling his shoulders.

  “Now why would one of my trusted captains have a cartel contact in Chico?” he asked.

  “Business,” Hollis said, smiling thinly. “You are a genius at extortion. Esteban is good at drugs. A girl has to earn some mad money. It’s a tough old world.”

  Creedy laughed.

  “You were always the best.” He tilted his mug back, draining the last of the sour brew. “Pride will fuck a man if he’s not careful. We’ll take the cases and head south, but I want to try to bait whoever is after us at Chelan, so they can die trying to stop us on the bridge there.”

  Gregor grunted and emptied his mug into the fire, watching the steam rise.

  “You think the men will try to cross if we leave?” he asked.

  “They won’t have much of a choice.” Creedy said. “The CDF is behind us somewhere, and the men have two trailers full of swag. They won’t just ride off and leave it. They’re greedy. They’ll try.”

  “We can take the gold from the trailers, first, of course,” Hollis said. Creedy chuckled.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Hollis sighed and looked relieved. She twisted her head to look back over her shoulder at the darkness. Even the meteors were absent tonight.

  “Who’s out there?” she asked. She turned to study Creedy, who lowered his gaze to the fire.

  “It feels personal,” Hollis said. “Old business.”

  Creedy sat silent. After a while, they went to bed.

  As the sun came up the rain started in, heavier now. Every time they left the roads the ground was slippery, sucking clay and boggy loam that mired the wagons and slowed the caravan’s speed to a crawl. The men cursed and dismounted time and again to heave the trailers free of mudhole after mudhole, fighting to reach the next ribbon of cracked asphalt. Exhaustion was written on every face as the group finally rolled to a stop, staring down from a rocky plateau to the Columbia far below, and the graceful arc of an old steel bridge. A few miles distance to the west, the land was cut into neat green squares, where Chelan farmers worked their fields and orchards. As the day faded the rain slowed, and a scattering of lights burned here and there in the flatland of the riverbottom, winking out as the inhabitants went to bed.

  Gregor told a sentry to take a rest; that he couldn’t sleep and would stand watch in his place. The three were gone within an hour, the cases strapped behind their saddles, their pockets filled with the most portable valuables from the trailers; old jewelry, a satin bag of gold teeth, coins from fallen empires, sticky brown balls of heroin in jelly jars, a child’s velvet marble bag filled with precious stones. They stuck to the high tableland, to the rockiest paths, and headed south through the humid night.

  Grey rode in as dawn was breaking. The rains had stopped, and rose-colored bands of cloud dropped slowly out of sight over the eastern horizon. As the sun left the last wraith of cloud a low rumble echoed from the west, an aerolite burning and shedding sparks as it trailed out in a feathery line of fire. It flashed brightly, disappearing as it dove into ever-denser atmosphere. A long count of seconds later a final blast echoed and roared through the valley. Grey’s horse continued stolidly on, no stranger to explosions.

  Clay and the others squatted around a tiny fire inside one of a series of old corrugated steel warehouses, just off the rusting line of the train tracks. Cottonwood trees twice the height of the warehouse sprouted through the clinker, squeezing between ties, buckling some sections of rail with slow patience. Downslope, a thick curtain of trees walled off the view of the bridge and the river. On the far side of the tracks stood a trio of concrete grain elevators streaked with rust and lime.

  “You’re wet,” Georgia said as Grey dismounted and stood dripping on the cement floor.

  “She never misses a thing,” Mal offered. His guns lay in pieces before him, an oil
y rag on his knee. “You pay for that meteor personally to announce your return?”

  “I forded a few miles east of the bridge last night,” Grey said, disrobing and wringing each piece of clothing as he did. The river had been stronger than he expected and his horse had been shaking with exhaustion when it reached the north bank. In retrospect, the night crossing had been foolish. “They’re up on the bluff on the south side. We should see them by noon. Maybe a little after. The road down to the bridge is steepish and they have those trailers to worry about.”

  Georgia watched Grey, who was now down to a no-color set of long underwear, his clothes spread on the floor near the fire. He yawned, a paunchy, broad man with a beard and hair that hung in lank, dirty ropes.

  “You don’t look like much without all that leather and wolf-pelt on,” she said, dipping a cup of stew from the pot that crouched in the coals. She handed Grey the cup. He used a dirty index finger to squeegee the drippings from its side and stuck it in his mouth. Georgia rolled her eyes.

  “I may not look like much,” he said after extracting his finger, “but I am the oldest and wisest man in his room.”

  Mal raised an eyebrow.

  “What?” Grey demanded. “You’re older?”

  “By a year, as I recall.”

  “Shit. Second oldest and wisest?” Mal conceded the point with a gracious wave of his hand and began assembling his automatics.

  Clay chewed on a strip of jerky and adjusted his hat.

  “You’re in a good mood for someone getting shot at around lunchtime,” he said.

  “I am,” Grey admitted. “I’m too old for this shit, and I’m happy that we’re getting nearer the end now.”

  “You used to love this stuff,” Mal said. “Don’t tell me you don’t crave the juice anymore.”

  Grey sat down, serious now, but still smiling.

  “I don’t. I get more fun out of running my trapline.”

  “Holy hell, Grey, if you get domesticated, I may have to retire,” Mal said.

  “Being a loner trapper in a drafty cabin back in the bush is domesticated?”

  “It is for you,” Mal argued. “You’re creeping me out with this hale-good-fellow stuff. Can’t you say something bleak?”

  “Well, odds are good one of us is getting shot. There is that,” Grey said.

  “You had to go and ask,” Georgia said, rising and walking to her rifle case.

  Grey watched the others getting ready, listening to their quips and their laughter. He knew it was nerves. He felt it himself, a familiar hectic amusement that was made of fear and adrenaline.

  He turned his clothes. They didn’t seem to be getting any drier.

  Long before noon, Grey settled in on the roof of a sagging three-story brick building that overlooked the north end of what a faded blue-and-white sign called the Beebe Bridge. Grey wondered who or what Beebe was.

  The building made him nervous. It was isolated and too near the end of the bridge. Mal had argued against it. It would be the first point anyone crossing the bridge would make for, but the other still-standing buildings were too far away, or screened by foliage. It would have to do. The odds of Creedy’s men charging pell-mell into the face of concentrated fire were, he reflected, very low. They’d pull back, losing another tithe of their strength, and making the next time that much easier.

  Chelan was close by, no more than a couple of miles to the northwest, and as he waited Grey distracted himself by using his rifle’s scope to scan the distant fields and orchards where they peeked through the trees. It was too far to pick out people, but he could see the occasional horse and cart. Below him on the building’s ground level, Mal walked through the maze of interconnected rooms, hands in his jacket pockets, studying the floor plan. Grey could hear him as he whistled something complex and baroque.

  Georgia lay prone behind the V formed by two huge willow trunks, farther from the bridge and far down the river bank. The river angled sharply under the bridge and the structure’s entire length was within her range as it lay almost perpendicular to her. Clay sat in the brush at her side, his back against another willow.

  The ranch hand watched her, his eyes unreadable. Georgia felt his gaze and turned her head to him, cheek resting on the rifle’s stock.

  “What is it, Clay?”

  He picked a stem of grass and chewed it for a moment before answering.

  “I’m love with you. When this is over, assuming we aren’t dead, will you come home with me?”

  A redwing blackbird’s metallic two-tone call belled in the silence that followed.

  “Clay,” she said. She looked across the river for a long minute before turning back. “You really go straight ahead, don’t you? You don’t want me, Clay. I’m not very nice. I live on my own ranch, have a face that looks like someone used a cheese grater on it, raise horses that cost more than they sell for, only get invited to go out when there are people to shoot and avoid polite conversation like poison.” She sighed. “Why would you want someone like me?”

  Clay switched the grass to the other corner of his mouth.

  “Who I want is really up to me, don’t you think?” She started to speak, but he raised a hand and cut her off.

  “Everything you said sounded like old excuses you’re used to giving. Just take a while and think about why you’re saying them. Then let me know what you decide.” He turned and looked across the river. Georgia opened her mouth, then closed it and rubbed her eyes. The blackbird called again.

  “They’re here,” Clay said.

  The wagons waited at the far end of the bridge, as before. The Castle guardsmen that had escorted them slowly down the long hill clustered about the battered beige boxes. There didn’t seem to be as many as there had been. Georgia had tried to count them as they descended, but the wagons and the way the guards circled them made it impossible.

  “They look confused,” Clay said. Georgia had made him remove his Stetson, afraid that its off-white glare would mark him. His hair had reddish tints in the sun, she saw. She shook her head and nestled behind her scope.

  “Can you hit them from here?” Clay asked. To him the riders looked a mile away.

  “Oh yes,” Georgia said. She scanned from face to face. At three hundred yards she could make out features clearly. She couldn’t find Creedy, just one young man’s face after another. About half were heavily bearded, but the remainder mostly sported scruffs of whiskers that made her think they were no more than teens. One smooth-faced boy couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen.

  The beardless boy turned his horse and gestured at another rider. He had a shotgun slung across his back, and Georgia thought the three or four round, tasseled things than flapped from its stock might be scalps.

  She went back to scanning faces as the riders milled and gestured, looking for Creedy’s khaki suit. “Maybe he’s been smart enough to change clothes,” she muttered.

  “Shit,” Clay hissed. “Look, on the ridgeline.”

  Georgia swiveled her weapon. Along the jagged edge of the ridge behind the bridge’s south foot, high above the Castle guns, a dozen horsemen were silhouetted briefly as they dismounted and began to clamber down into the quarter-mile of brush and rocks that separated them from the wagons. They were too far away for Georgia to glean much detail, other than all but one wore the same blotchy green-grey uniform of jacket, pants and helmet, a black vest, and all seemed to carry identical black rifles.

  “Well if that isn’t perfect. I think it’s the army,” Georgia said. She laughed but it sounded forced to Clay. “Fuck me if Grey can manage a simple ambush without someone uninvited showing up.

  Chapter 23: The Bridge

  Nakamura led the CDF squad as quickly as possible, trying to get within range before the men with the trailers spotted him. From his position on the slope a swelling bench between his troops and the Castle’s men obstructed their view shortly after the CDF troops began the descent. The way was steep, broken with sheer drops of ten or fift
een feet in spots, and detours were needed here and there. Despite the terrain they made good time and reached the shallower talus slope below the rocky outcrop undetected. He gestured to his left and right and his men spread in a line across a hundred yards, readying their weapons. He glanced at Sam, who still wore the ragged leather and denim she’d arrived in. She did not glance at the Captain, but snugged the stock of a rifle into her shoulder and flicked the safety off. Nakamura raised his hand and gestured sharply forward.

  From the river’s far side Georgia and Grey watched through their scopes as the newcomers started down the final slope. The first of the Castle men fell, and the crack of gunfire came across the water a second later.

  Grey was looking almost straight down the length of the bridge from his perch, and as a frightened teamster whipped the first wagon into motion his view was reduced to a narrow gap down the side of the white and tan camp trailer. He shifted the crosshairs to the man who sat on the makeshift coachman’s platform, whipping the reins, and waited.

  “I hear a lot of shooting over there, Grey. What the hell?” Mal called from below.

  “The army got here. They’re driving them to us,” he called down.

  “Oh goody,” Mal called back. In the shadows of the building’s foyer he drew his automatics and thumbed the safeties off.

  The Castle troops returned the initial fire in a brief fusillade that kicked up dust across the hillside where the CDF soldiers crouched in what cover they could find. People in Chelan raised their heads at the distant drumroll of gunfire and dropped their tools where they stood. They gathered children and livestock and disappeared into their homes. Those who had weapons readied them.