by Cole, Nick
As if it were his to keep.
As if she were his.
A gunshot cracked sharply across the interior of the house.
In the central court within the house he found Shao Fan, whose pupils are wide above the barrel of a smoking rifle. He seemed not to recognize the Boy.
Shaven-head was dead, flung away like a forgotten rag doll, his arms covering his face.
Shao Fan retreated, running to a far door and throwing himself beyond it.
The Boy pulled his pistol, the cut-down rifle, from his belt and advanced through the courtyard.
The Boy heard his own feet, hard thumps on the soft wood of the walkway that led to the door. In the instant before he heard the gunfire that came from the far side of the door, he heard the metallic sound of a rifle breech being snapped back into place. The Boy threw himself sideways as the paper door erupted in splinters and acrid smoke.
The Boy charged through the screen, breaking what was left of it open with the tomahawk.
Shao Fan, eyes wild and wide, broke the breech of his rifle and slipped another long bullet into the barrel. The assassin snapped the breech back into place. In the space of the moment in which the assassin nodded to himself, assured that the rifle was ready to fire, and before he raised it to fire, the dull silver tomahawk appeared buried in his chest. He stared at the axe in stunned and wide-eyed silence, stared as if in the moment before, it had not been there, and in the moment after, it had always been there.
He continued to try and raise the rifle but his arms would not respond. He felt life leaving him all at once.
He was afraid. He realized how underappreciated this moment before dying was.
‘If there were just more time,’ thought Shao Fan, raising his head, looking into the eyes of the savage boy charging across his bedroom.
Pistol raised.
Mouth roaring.
There were tears in the eyes of this savage that Shao Fan now recognizes, as his vision surrendered to a closing black circle.
Be careful who you love.
And then the pistol erupted in the hands of the savage and Shao Fan was no more.
THE BOY PASSED through the rape of the last Chinese outpost. It was the same as Auburn and even worse, he thought, as if seeing it all from far away.
He passed the dead guards at the gate, stepping over them. Beyond them, another guard was moving and bleeding, crawling toward the water. Numbly the Boy passed on.
He found a small canoe and set out across the bay.
Alone, the work of paddling the canoe was hard.
His left side was weak. But he did not care about it anymore.
You’ll do your work. Same as the other side.
The day was hot and he reached the far side, the southern end of the bay, by noon.
The air smelled of sage and dust.
Behind him, black columns of smoke rose in the north. He could barely see the colony. It was as if it never existed.
He climbed the low hills and found Horse.
They rode south along the old 101.
He was tired and his eyes felt too heavy, but he pushed on until twilight.
At dusk he built a fire near a long, flat bridge over a dry riverbed. He sat staring into the fire.
In time he heard the rider coming up along his trail.
The Boy took up his pack and loaded it onto Horse.
He scanned the murky darkness and saw only the dim outline of another figure.
The big bay horse clattered along the road and the rider drew up just beyond the reach of the firelight. The form was familiar. But the darkness hid everything. It was the hat, the Stetson hat, that gave away the rider, and then the voice, dry and friendly.
“Thought you might be asleep by now,” said Dunn. “Figured you’d be all wore out after goin’ ashore with them savages last night. All that blood and mayhem and fire makes a man tired, don’t it?”
The Boy stood near Horse. The tomahawk was in his hand. The pistol, loaded, waited in the saddle on Horse.
Horse complained.
Easy, boy.
“Been following you since Auburn. Thought I’d catch up to you inside the Chinese base. But surprise, surprise, I found yer horse all staked out and waiting. Figured you’d slipped in among the crazies. But I knew you’d be back for yer horse.”
The Boy said nothing.
“So I waited with my new pistols. Just like MacRaven’s.”
The Boy waited to hear the hammer of Dunn’s guns being thumbed back.
Maybe he rode up with them ready to go.
Sergeant . . . ?
“Raleigh was a good man. Didn’t deserve what you did to him.”
Man’s come a long way to talk, Boy. Figures he’s earned hisself a speech. He won’t do nothin’ till he’s got it all out.
“Him and I was partners long before you ever come outta . . .”
So whatever you got to do, Boy. Do it now!
“More’n partners in fact, he was . . .”
In the moment the Boy threw the tomahawk, he meant it. He threw it not just at Dunn, but at a world that was cruel and made of stone.
Don’t let it go unless you mean to, Boy.
The aim was true but it caught Dunn’s horse in the throat as Dunn jerked at the reins to protect himself.
The horse screamed.
Dunn fired.
Two thundering roars erupted from Dunn’s pistols.
Two wet slaps.
The Boy felt the spray of Horse’s blood across his face as he turned and reached for the saddle, a moment later spinning away from Horse, the pistol extended toward Dunn, who rode his mount into the earth, stepping off in one smooth motion, dropping his pistols for the wicked knife he kept on his belt.
The Boy fired and Dunn fell dead, back over his fallen horse.
Flung back.
Put down.
Dead.
The Boy turned back to Horse, who looked up at him from the road once more.
That Horse look of contempt.
Resignation.
Forgiveness.
Horse laid his long head down against the cracked and broken highway as his eyes closed finally, firmly, as if to say, I’m done with the world.
Epilogue
Where do you go now, Boy?
The road turned south and the days were long and hot. A narrow valley wound its way along the coastal mountains and would continue on all the way to Los Angeles. Or what was left of it now.
But in the days that followed, the Boy turned from the 101, limping, and climbed the smooth grassy hills to the east, soft gentle hills, rising and falling in waves of green grass.
He dragged his body over the hills, his left side aching, withered, refusing to go farther.
He continued on.
On the other side of the hills, he found a wide valley that stretched away in a brown haze to the south.
Who am I now?
He stood in the gusting wind atop the hills.
He continued down into the hot valley.
Ancient roads, ruptured and disintegrating, overrun by erupting wild growth, crossed from east to west. All else was dry and brown, hard dirt and sun-rotten dead wood.
Fires had crossed the valley and there remained little of what once was.
Rusty water towers, fallen and gouged.
Wild tangles of barbed wire.
Fallen walls of blackened stone.
He crossed the old Interstate Five and continued down into the heat of the valley.
The trees here would not grow. They were stunted and sickly and even the ground seemed either unnaturally dark or washed out and spent altogether. Thorns, of which there are many, grew in wicked profusions of ochre, sickly green or pus yellow.
In a village of adobe walls he found misshapen men and women. All of them were blind and dragging themselves along through the dirt. They ate from sickly stands of a dark green kale that gave off a foul aroma when they stewed it inside an old oil drum filled with bra
ckish water.
They knew he was there and they searched for him, but their keening and sniffing in the dusty heat after his scent repulsed him and he went on into the silences beyond their village.
Stands of palm trees clustered in sinister groups as if talking about him and though their shade would be welcome, and maybe even their fruit, he went wide to avoid their dark and fetid clusterings.
In the night he slept in an old grain silo and thought that he should hear birds in its rafters or the bony trees outside.
He could not remember when he last heard the song of a bird.
He drank water from a standing pond because he could no longer stand the ragged dry trench that was his throat. He saw the footprints of the blind villagers in the hard-packed soil.
They too had drunk here.
Blind would not be so bad.
In the still water he saw a monster.
A monster with red-rimmed eyes that reflected no light, no life. A face and chest covered in blood and dried mud. Horse’s blood. Muddy, knotted hair and a broken feather. Lips cracked and bleeding.
A monster.
He wandered south, following the twisting ribbon of the once-highway through a silent land of rust and scrub. He caught small things and felt little desire and even less satisfaction in the thin, greasy meals that resulted.
Who am I now?
Dry wood turned to sparks floating off into the night above his fire.
What is left to do and where should I go?
And there was no answer other than his own.
Nothing and nowhere.
In the day all was hot and boiling, dry and raw. In the night tepid warmth refused to surrender until long after the bloated moon had descended into darkness.
The thin road straightened and carved its way into southern mountains.
In the road signs he spelled Los Angeles.
He remembered Sergeant Presley calling it “Lost Angeles.”
I should burn the map.
What good is it now?
Mission, not complete.
But he didn’t and he continued on toward a crack where the road disappeared into the mountains.
At the last gas station in the foothills he spent the night.
There was nothing left to find here and there hadn’t been for forty years.
In the gas station’s emptiness he heard the grit of sand and glass beneath his feet. In times past, in all his wanderings with Sergeant Presley, he had wondered and even dreamed about the people of Before. What had they done in these places? There had been food and drink, beyond imagining, Sergeant Presley had explained bitterly, all on a hot day such as this, for people to stop and come in from the road.
He spelled I-C-E C-O-L-D S-O-D-A.
I was raised in places like this. It seems as though it should feel like home to me.
But it didn’t.
And . . .
I don’t care anymore.
That night, though he did not want to, he dreamed.
Dreams, who can stop them? Who can understand them?
He and Jin walked through the streets of a city. Up cobblestone streets where people live. Happy people. He turned to a fruit stand filled with green apples. It was a market day or a fair, and he selected an apple for Jin.
In that dreaming moment he understood the meaning of the name Jin. Her name meant “precious.” In the dream he was glad that he understood this now. It was as though he had found something rare and its ownership had caused his lifelong feeling of “want” to seem like a fading nightmare. As though he had recovered a lost treasure and it changed his future forever. As though his life, their life, would be only good now.
Now that he knew the meaning of her name, the dark times were behind them.
When he turned back to her, she was gone.
A happy villager, smiling, maybe the Weathered Man, told him she was over there, with the man’s wife, looking at silk dresses for their wedding. And the smiling farmer handed him the green bottle of Pee Gee Oh full of bubbles, and they drank and the farmer encouraged him to laugh and be happy.
“It’s all coming back,” said the Weathered Man in perfect English.
And the Boy knew he meant the world from Before. That the days of road and ruin are coming to an end and that there would be homes and families now. That he and Jin would have a place in this new world that everyone was so excited about.
A place together.
He was excited. He wanted to find Jin and tell her about all the good things that are soon going to happen to them.
But his mouth wouldn’t make the words to call out her name.
He searched the stalls.
He searched the roads.
It was getting dark in the dream and the market was closing.
“We’ll find her tomorrow,” said the Weathered Man. “Come home with us and stay the night.”
Though he didn’t want to be, the Boy was led home and the dream advanced in leaps and starts as the Boy watched throughout the night, looking out a small window, looking onto a dark street.
Waiting for Jin.
He could not wait to tell her that everything good was coming back again.
Soon.
In the dream he could not wait to hold her.
In the morning, the sun slammed into his weak eyes. Tears had dried on his dusty, crusted cheeks. His insides felt sore, as though they have been beaten with sticks.
He sat up and looked toward the road and the mountains.
It was real, he thought of the dream.
The road cut its way onto a high plateau, passing stands of oak and wide expanses of rolling yellow-green grass. In a high pasture he found sheep and a man watching over them.
The man waved at him from the field and the Boy turned off the old highway and into the field.
The sheep, maybe a dozen of them, wandered and bleated absently through the tall yellow grass of mid spring. Beyond the pasture, oak trees clustered at the base of a steep range of hills that shielded any view of the east and whatever must lie that way.
“Stranger, come and have water,” called the man over the constant bleating of the sheep.
The man was rotund and dressed in a ragged collection of scraps sewn together. He carried a crooked staff and leaned on it heavily. His hair, gray, sprang from his head in every direction. His voice was a mere rumble of thunder and gravel.
“The road is hard,” he said, watching the Boy drink the cool water held in a tin cup. The water was clear and sweet.
“It’s a good spring here,” said the shepherd when the Boy did not respond.
The Boy handed the cup back.
“I have wild apples near my camp; come and have some.”
The Boy followed the man across the pasture and into a stand of wild fruit trees.
They sit in the shade, eating apples.
“Saint Maggie said that food leads to friendship.”
The Boy said nothing.
“Who might you be, now?”
The Boy opened his mouth to answer. But he couldn’t.
“Can you speak?”
The Boy shook his head.
“Then I’m sorry. The words of man are overrated. Saint Maggie again.”
The shepherd took a crunchy bite from an apple.
“I speak too much.”
Then, “That’s why I’m here. I spoke too much when I shouldn’t have. But I love to talk. Love to hear the sound of my own voice. And the sounds of others for that matter. I love talk.”
There was more silence for a while.
“Still, my words are overrated.”
“Will you stay, or are you determined to go on to the south?”
The Boy rose.
“You will find nothing worth having there!” the shepherd’s voice rose in pitched urgency.
“You will find the worst of this world and the worst that the world that died had done to itself.”
The Boy began to stumble toward the road.
“I
f you go west you will find life. Some. But in the south there is nothing but horror. Trust me, stranger!”
As an afterthought the shepherd said. “East. Don’t go east into the desert. That is death for sure.”
The Boy considered the high sun. Orienting himself.
He turned toward the east.
The shepherd looked at the Boy, eyes wide with amazement and then horror.
A high hill, speckled by a few gnarled oaks, rose up to the east.
The Boy began walking toward the hill.
The shepherd murmured, “No.”
The tall grass brushed against the legs of the Boy and he could hear the shepherd hobbling behind him, breathing heavily in the still air.
“Stranger, don’t go that way. I told you it was death.”
They neared the base of the steep hill as the shepherd pursued the Boy.
“There lies a desert, and it will consume you. A wasteland. You will be no more. Saint Maggie said, ‘We must do our best. We must live despite life. God will do the rest.’ Stranger, you will find no love that way. Turn west and live.”
The Boy fell to his knees and began to climb the hill.
The shepherd fell to his knees.
“I will pray for you, stranger. I will pray for you.”
The shepherd was still praying, hours later, when the Boy reached the top of the steep hill and saw the line of hills beyond, descending into the vast bowl of the desert.
WHAT DO YOU find when there is nothing left, Boy?
The days were brutal and there was no water. The land fell into a furnace of burning hard-packed dirt and suffocating dunes.
You left me, Sergeant.
I had to, Boy. The world didn’t need me anymore.
I needed you.
And someone, Boy, someday will need you also.
She’s dead.
He fell to his knees and wept.
The flat desert stretched away in all directions.
Never give up, Boy. I told you. The world needs us.
You take everything with you.
It’s too much, too much to carry, you and the broken places and the evil of the world . . . and what . . . and Jin.
He stumbled.