Five Days Dead

by James Davis

  “Let them burn.”

  After an hour of crawling toward the canyon, he stopped the truck and climbed out to stretch his legs and relieve himself. He had driven a little over five miles. He could have walked faster, but the truck would have been a clue he dared not leave behind. If he were found, it would be a means of escape faster than boots on the pavement. The road now offered two choices. He could continue up Nine Mile Canyon or turn right and drive up Dugout Canyon Road, which he knew led to a dead end. He aimed for a dead end.

  He scanned the skies. To the north the sky was black and the fires in the mountains glowed. To the south the sky dazzled in starlight and the Milky Way was an endless ocean of calm beckoning. He sighed and leaned against the truck grill to smoke a cigarette. He had five cigarettes left and no means to get anymore. He tried to enjoy the smoke.

  The moon was a half circle in the west and played peek-a-boo in the burning sky. To the south the Wheel was a glowing nickel-sized ring and he frowned staring up at it from so far below. There were 10,000 people living up there in a giant wheel in the sky, floating in the vast and endless ocean of the Outland. He had wanted to be one of them. In all his life that was the one thing he could remember that he really wanted. He wanted to live in the Wheel and look out and see the Earth floating below and know that he was not a part of it; that he was somehow separate from all the cares and turmoil.

  When he was a boy and had learned of the Wheel, learned that people lived in space, he had grasped hold of the idea tightly and would not let go. Dad had left and his mother was sad and angry and did not seem to like him very much anymore, so he held on to the thought that someday he might live in space. He knew of the Link and all the things that could be done there; that you could fly or swim under water or be an animal or anything you wanted to be. But he knew it was pretend and even though the kids at school taunted him because he was a stupid neand, he knew the Link wasn’t real. You might think in the digiverse you were doing all of these amazing things, but you were really just sitting on a chair blinking your eyes and tricking your mind. That’s all the digiverse really was; a clever trick, like when Dad told you he was coming back, but knew that he wasn’t. Just a trick, so you didn’t think about what was real.

  The Wheel was real though. He could look up into the night sky and see it shining there. It was a real thing. People were living in space. They were not on this planet at all, only floating above it. He wanted that for himself.

  Harley took another drag on his cigarette and remembered going to Mom as she got ready for work to tell her about the Wheel.

  “Did you know there are people living in space Mom? There are people living on a giant wheel in space. It’s a wheel so it can spin and they won’t just float around, but be able to walk around. I would rather float around, but they spin it because the people there want to walk.”

  “I know about the Wheel Harley.” His Mom had said in the same voice she always used after Dad left. It was a robot voice. It was a dead voice. It had been a year since Dad left and Harley didn't think he had seen her smile once in all that time. He wasn’t doing a very good job taking care of her, he knew. Dad would not be happy at all.

  “I want to live on the Wheel someday. I could live on the Wheel and you could come and visit.”

  “I don’t think there are any Indians on the Wheel Harley.” She was buttoning her blouse and it was a little tight. Mom had been eating a lot more since Dad left. She would sit on the couch and watch movies on the old fashioned television and she would eat Cheetos and hardly ever say a word to Harley. But that was okay because sometimes she would let him watch the movies and sometimes she shared the Cheetos. “I don’t think you would find one Navajo on the Wheel in space,” his Mom had said.

  Harley sat on the edge of her bed and thought for a moment. “Maybe I could learn to be an astronaut and then they would need me in space to be an astronaut and I could live on the Wheel.”

  His Mom looked at him then, and her eyes looked as dead as her voice sounded. “You have to be good at something to be an astronaut Harley. The only thing you’re good at is killing. Remember the dog?”

  Harley remembered he had looked at the floor, ashamed that he had killed the dog, but not sorry. “I remember.”

  His Mom had brushed past him then. “You’re a no-account Harley. That’s all you’ll ever be.” The screen door slammed as she left him sitting on her bed and went to work.

  Harley blinked away the memories and finished his cigarette, tossing the butt into the ravine. The smoke from the fires had curled like tendrils across the sky and blotted out the shining ring of the Wheel.

  “Sure would have been something.” Harley climbed back into the truck and moved on.

  He pointed the semi up Dugout Canyon Road and let it crawl, moving at little more than two miles an hour, barely a shadow creeping in the night. It was eight miles until the road came to an end and Harley found himself nodding off from time to time as he drove. He hoped that by crawling down the road he might go unnoticed in the night. As dawn approached and he still saw no sign of pursuit he held onto that glimmer of hope.

  He could smell the smoke from the wildfire as the canyon narrowed and the cliffs on either side became rocky and barren in places. He knew the fire was traveling faster than he was.

  Dawn greeted him by the time he pulled to a stop before the barricaded gate. The gate was 10 feet tall, made of chain link, with concertina wire on top. It was old and sagging but still intact and Harley peered at it through the windshield of the semi. There was a large, faded sign standing on drunken posts on the other side of the fence that read Dugout Canyon Mine. A no trespassing sign hung beneath it. Both signs had been the object of target practice over the years.

  Harley backed the semi up and turned the wheels, pointing it toward the jagged tree line and the rocky slope below. The river trickled at the bottom and Harley climbed out of the truck and put it in gear and stood aside as it crawled to the edge and slid down the cliff. Trees cracked and groaned as the truck crashed its way to the bottom. He went back to the fence and followed it as it stretched down to the river. A section of the fence had bowed back, leaving a large gap. He wasn’t the first person to crawl under the fence over the years, but he hoped that he might be the last.

  His boots echoed in the box canyon as he made his way to the mine. Many of the old mine structures were still in the canyon, including the tipple and many of the conveyors and as Harley walked deeper into the canyon he felt that he might be walking with ghosts. Not the ghosts of those who died here, but the ghosts of dreams and hopes and a way of life. Once men and women had worked here, worked and sweated and strained to follow a coal seam under a mountain and bring it to the surface.

  As his boots followed the path that they too must have walked, he wondered what kind of people would do such a thing. Were there any people like that left in the world? He looked up into the sky where he knew the Wheel must spin. Perhaps there were some like that up there, but he didn’t know that there were any down here anymore. Humanity had moved on and whether they had lost something or gained something Harley had no idea.

  He had explored the old mine years earlier while hiding out after a little theft and more than a little killing. The mine had been closed for decades, far longer than he had been alive, but it still held treasures and he was gambling that some of the treasures he had found while exploring here still worked. He had bet his life on it.

  There was no vegetation as you went further into the canyon, any soil that might allow it to grow had been stripped away or concreted over years before. What wind there was swirled up and out of the top, so he hoped the fires might dash along the cliff face and sweep over them and the smoke might funnel out of the canyon. But in case it didn’t, he had a couple of other hopes that he hoped might be realized.

  While the ancient relics of the mine lay scattered across the site, there was little sign of coal. The mine owners had hauled it all away as they started a reclam
ation process never completed. Harley thought he knew why. The Rages had come and the Exodus had begun. A coal mine in a remote area of eastern Utah was of little concern when you were trying to return entire cities to the Wilderness. Fences had gone up and the mine forgotten, along with the people who had toiled there.

  He made his way to the mine portal and stood looking at it with his hands on his hips. Someone with time and explosives on their hands had blasted open the capped portal. Now a jagged hole large enough for men to walk through two abreast led into the darkness of the abandoned mine. Harley stepped closer and looked into the darkness and the breath of the mine whispered softly. He did not want to go into that darkness but knew he had to be ready to do just that.

  He walked back toward the mine offices and went inside what had once been mine rescue. Lined along one wall were a dozen self-contained breathing apparatus tanks and respirators. They were ancient, but three of the 12 still showed a full tank of oxygen, even though the masks looked to have rotted to the point they were useless. There were also boxes of self-rescuers and while the code date had come and gone decades before, they gave him some sense of comfort.

  They might be protection should carbon monoxide contaminate the mine. That might be the least of his worries, but he grabbed a half dozen of them and took them to the mine portal, along with the three oxygen tanks. He walked 25 feet into the mine and deposited them, feeling in the dark for a likely place. Once inside he was blind and a trickle of fear danced up his spine as he wondered what he had been thinking. But it was too late to turn back.

  Once the SCBA gear was stowed, he rummaged through the offices until he found several plastic garbage cans and he carried them to the stream, washed them out and filled them with water he sloshed into the darkness. He scoured the mine but could find nothing that ran off a powerband. The only light he would have in the mine would be from his lighter. He sat down on the rubble outside the mine portal and smoked another cigarette. That left him with four. Four cigarettes, dirty water in a trash can and a hole in a mountain that he dearly hoped did not have dead air waiting to snuff out his life.

  Maybe it wouldn’t come to that.

  He heard a crackle from the canyon and looked down to see fire licking at the trees.

  “Maybe it would,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Trapped

  Jodi watched through her scye while Harley Nearwater calmly smoked a cigarette outside of an abandoned coal mine with the wildfire creeping ever closer. She shook her head softly.

  “You’re a different breed Harley Nearwater.”

  His ploy to hide from them had almost worked. She had sent her scye down the highway as far as Green River and then doubled back, searching for where Harley had left the main road. The fact that there were few arterial roads did not help the drifter very much, but even so there was an awful lot of territory out there to cover. Orrin searched with his own scye, and she had been close to giving up on finding him. The smoke from the fires limited the use of the Link. She traced the road leading toward the burning mountain because it occurred to her that if it was anyone else she would never think they would seek shelter on a burning mountain. But Harley was not anyone else. Zipping above the treetops, she caught a twinkle of light on the ground. It had been the sun reflecting off one of the SCBA tanks Harley was dragging into the mine. It had signaled her like a beacon.

  The fires were drawing closer and she was going to call up her wing and go after him but Orrin would not hear of it. There was an issue of trust between the two of them that was growing tiresome.

  “He might die in the fires.”

  “Then he’ll die in the fires.”

  “Hmmm. Smoked drifter. Sounds tasty,” Nina was grinning at Jodi.

  Jodi stared. “I hope you die soon.”

  They were standing outside of the buses at the mouth of Nine Mile Canyon Road, waiting for the wildfire to burn what it was going to burn and move on. It looked like it might burn everything. While they waited, Jodi sent her scye to Price and found the city all but consumed, but there was no one left there to care. The mountains above the city smoldered and it looked like there was little in the way of vegetation left.

  Orrin’s little helper had come back to the hotel with six school buses and the Wrynd had piled inside and headed south. The first bus held Orrin and his chosen, 50 zombies who carried pulse weapons and guns in every assortment, from shotguns to hunting rifles and a few AR-15s. One grinning middle-aged man with a potbelly and bigger breasts than Jodi brought a grenade launcher. She shook her head and wondered what kind of people lived here. She hoped they knew how to use the weapons they had gathered. Those in the first bus who didn’t have guns carried everything from swords to bows, to pitchforks and shovels.

  “So we just wait for the fires to do our work?”

  Orrin spat. “Do you really think the fire will get him?”

  As a matter of fact, she didn’t. “It could take a couple of days for the fire to burn out enough for us to get through.”

  Orrin nodded. “We will need more ink.”

  Jodi laughed. “Sure you will.”

  “It has been days since most of us flared. We will start to go through withdrawals soon and what use would we be to you then?”

  “What use are you to me now? My deputies and I could finish all of this without the aggravation.”

  “Are those your orders?”

  Jodi faced the big man and smiled sweetly. “My orders are to kill. Harley, the old man, the Gray Walker and you and all of your Wrynd. Kill you all.”

  “Yet you haven’t. Do you think you and your deputies could kill us so simply?”

  Jodi snorted. “Deputies? I’d just call them in because I would grow bored with the slaughter.”

  “Then why don’t you?” Orrin stepped closer and Jodi fought the temptation to run her scye against his meaty temple. “I will tell you why. Because you don’t want them to know about this. You don’t want them to know about Harley or the Gray Walker and you especially don’t want them to know about me. Some of your deputies were once my deputies. If they were to come here perhaps I would remind them of the marshal they once served.”

  “It wouldn’t make you any less dead.”

  “No.” Orrin clapped her on the shoulder good-naturedly. “No. It wouldn’t. But if I were dead the Federation would have need of another Wrynd King, wouldn’t it?” He grinned broadly and his teeth were like daggers. “Or perhaps a Wrynd Queen?”

  Jodi looked away involuntarily and Orrin laughed. “You can kill me soon enough Marshal Tempest, but let’s finish our business together first.” He turned to her smugly and folded his arms. “Ink, if you don’t mind.”

  “You have nothing to feed on Wrynd King. The animals have fled and the city is burning.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we’ll find something.”

  In the end, they did. They found each other.

  Jodi ordered enough ink for every Wrynd in the tribe. When it arrived, she handed the case to Orrin and climbed on top of one of the buses. Orrin disarmed his Daggers and the weapons were put in one of the buses and locked away and then he distributed the vials of ink. They stood as a group and injected the poison as one. Orrin was staring at Jodi as the ink entered his bloodstream and then the flare had him and he attacked. The massacre began and the screams of the dying and the killing echoed through the night.

  Jodi considered calling her wing and leaving until it was over, but she couldn’t stop watching as the Wrynd attacked and killed one another, ripped and tore and bit and ate. Three times Wrynd tried to climb onto the bus and get to her and she cut them down with her scye. They fell on the ground and were consumed by the others.

  When dawn came, it was over and of the 302 Wrynd that had left Price only 78 remained. Her work was all but done. Of those left two were Orrin’s Daggers. They gathered up their weapons and clapped each other on the shoulders and licked the blood from each other’s bodies and Jodi tried not to watch
anymore but found she could not look away.

  The fires had shifted and raced across east and south and while the mountain still smoldered, it looked like they might be able to reach Dugout Canyon. The Wrynd piled into the two buses and started out. Jodi stood in the doorway of the lead bus and watched as Ralph drove up the canyon. He was grinning and licking blood off his lips and she wondered what kind of a young man he might have grown to be if he had not become what he was.

  They were going to be of little use she knew, but perhaps, just perhaps they would be enough of a distraction that she could do what she must.

  Harley made it through the night better than he had anticipated. The fires came and encircled the canyon and for a time the smoke was thick and he was forced to step inside the mine, but the air inside was good and he could look out at the canyon from within and not feel quite so blind.

  The wind scooped the smoke from the canyon and he was soon able to step back outside. The fire had passed him by and he lit a cigarette to celebrate. He had two left, but if he was lucky he could start walking out in a day or so and if he went cross country he could make his way to his truck in a day or two at the most and be home safe and sound.

  He fell asleep under the stars, warm from a mountain that had burned but somehow spared him.

  He woke to the sound of vehicles coming up the canyon and his hope of the evening before washed away. They had found him after all. He had no weapons, no food and no way out of the canyon.

  “Things just keep getting more and more intrestin.”

  The mine portal stood above the rest of the mine and standing at its entrance Harley could see everything below, the tipple, the old conveyors, the load-out and the mine offices. He could hide among the old buildings, but it would not do him much good. It would be only a matter of time before they found him. The only place to go was inside the mine itself and there was nothing in there but darkness and death. It had served its purpose to save him from the fire but in the end had not been his salvation at all. It had become his tomb.