by Nick Cole
The Boy climbed down the side of the bell tower using the wooden slats exposed after the attacks of the lions. At the bottom, he began to remove the debris blocking the entrance as the man returned to skinning the dead lions.
“It’s bad.” The man spit again as he ran his hands across Horse. For a moment Horse grew skittish, but the man talked to him in a friendly manner and Horse seemed to accept this as yet one more thing to be miserable about.
“Not the worst. Best we can do for him is get him up to the river, the other side of Reno. Good water there. We can clean the wound and get him ready for the fever that’s bound to be come. If he can survive that fever, then, well maybe. But fever it’ll be. Always is with them cats.”
I’m not ready to lose Horse, thought the Boy. It would be too much for me right now. First you, Sergeant, and now . . .
Ain’t nothin’ but a thang, Boy! You do what’s got to be done. Without Horse you’ll be finished in a week.
“Name’s Escondido. I’ll lead you up to the river—goin’ that way myself and I’ll show you the path through Reno. Now get to work and help me with these hides, then we’ll be movin’ on out of this forsaken planned community of the future.”
The Boy stared at the ground.
“That’s what you was holed up in when I found you,” said the man called Escondido as he pointed first to the bell tower and then the rotting timber. “Someone was building a neighborhood here on the last day. Never got finished. See all that rotten wood? Frames for houses. This bell tower was probably the fake entrance. Make it seem like something more’n it was. They would’ve called it some name like Sierra Verde or the Pines. Probably something to do with the bell tower. Bell Tower Heights! Yes siree, that’s what they woulda called it. Old Escondido knows the old people’s ways. I was one of ’em, you know. I lived in a house once. Can you believe that, boy? I lived in a house.”
I’ve got to do whatever it takes to save Horse.
“How far is this river?”
“Be there by nightfall. We don’t want to be in Reno after dark, that’s for sure.”
“Reno wasn’t nuked?” “Nuked” was a Sergeant Presley word.
“No. But it looks like a big battle was fought there out near the airport. So the city might as well have been nuked. Strange people live in them old casinos now. Had a partner used to call ’em the Night People, ’cause they get crazy and howl and cause all kinds of havoc at night. Last two or three years when I crossed over the Sierras I liked to avoid Reno. Got into a bad spot there one time about dusk. It was a bad time, even with my guns.
The Boy followed Escondido’s gaze to a bent and broken horse. Its hair was matted and lanky, and it cropped haphazardly at what little there was to be had, as if both tired and dizzy. In the worn leather saddle, the Boy saw two long rifles.
“That horse ain’t much to look at. But best part of him is he’s deaf, so when my breech loaders go off he don’t get scared and run off.”
The Boy worked for the rest of the morning scraping the hides of the lions as Escondido finished the skinning and then cut steaks from the female. He built a small smoky fire and the meat was soon spitted and roasting in the morning breeze.
“We got to eat these now. It’ll be a long day gettin’ through Reno. Then we still got to ride up into the hills to reach the river.”
Once the mule, Danitra, as Escondido called her, was saddled with hides, they sat down next to the fire and ate.
“How much water ya got?” asked Escondido through a mouthful of meat.
“Not much. I’ll save it for Horse.”
“There’s no water worth havin’ between here and the river, so keep that in mind. Don’t go gettin’ thirsty. I’ll trade you some for that old Army rucksack you got there on your horse.”
The Boy continued to chew, putting Escondido’s offer away until later, hoping the heat and dust would not force him to trade Sergeant Presley’s ruck for a mouthful of water.
THEY RODE OUT of the bloody camp. Escondido’s nag could do little more than trot and so the pace was slow. Escondido filled the silence of the hot afternoon with conversation and observations, all the while watching the crumbling remains of the world for shadows and salvage.
“Was tracking them lions for three days before they got onto your big one. I heard him roar and I knew I’d lost ’em. Couldn’t get a shot off on ’em all night. But I knew I had to find ’em before they got into that fight. Hides’ll be ruined and Chou’ll make his usual fuss ’bout it and all. Still I got ways and means. What tribe did you say you was with?”
When the Boy didn’t answer, Escondido continued on.
“My family came from out of the South. I had another name. Prospero, my mother used to call me. But, in the little refugee camp we started out in, they called me Escondido. That’s where my family had been before the bombs: a place called Escondido. Tried to ask my papa where that might be. All he said was that it was gone now. A fantasy place.”
And . . .
“I cross over the mountains beginning of summer every year. This year I got a late start. Mountains is gettin’ weirder every year. You know about the Valley? No, don’t make no difference, you don’t look like them people. Say, was you born that way or’d you get bust up when you was little?”
And . . .
“What was you doin’ out here? This part of the desert ain’t safe. Though for that matter, what part is?”
Don’t tell anything about ye’self, Boy.
“You don’t say much, do you? Is that your tribe’s way? Don’t say much?”
It was afternoon by the time they crossed onto the dusty streets of Reno. Buildings lay collapsed or shattered to little more than rusting frames that groaned in the sudden gusts that came in off the desert.
In the silence of late afternoon, shadows turned to blue and Escondido continued to talk in a low whisper though he would stop when they passed piles of rubble and twisted metal that lay across the wide thoroughfare leading into the heart of the darkened city.
“The people, the tribes, savages all up in the mountains, everywhere I’ve gone, they wear hides to show what mighty hunters they are. Now up at the trading post in Auburn, everybody wants hides so they can trade with them savages. Them lions, if’n they’d been perfect, woulda fetched a high price from old Chou. That’s a shame. A perfect shame.”
Ahead, each of them could see the rising pile of bleached casinos crumbling around a bridge that rose over the wide avenue they would follow. A bridge that connected two of the ancient palaces and seemed to loom over the road like the wingspan of some prehistoric dead bird.
Escondido withdrew one of the rifles from its saddle holster and rested the butt on his thigh as he gave a soft chick, chick to his nag.
Then he looked at the Boy and drew his finger to his lips.
11
CITIES AIN’T GOT nothing left for you, Boy.
And yet, Sergeant, I’ve always wanted to go into them. To know what’s in them.
Places where you might have lived, Boy, had things been different.
Sergeant Presley’s voice seemed to ignore Escondido’s whispered commentary and remembrances as they led their horses through the dust and rubble.
I try to find myself in them, Sergeant Presley. I try to find who I might have been.
Why, Boy?
It might tell me who I am, Sergeant.
“I come through here must been something like five years ago with a partner. Dan was his name.” Escondido’s face looked gray and dusty in the last orange light of day. His mouth, full of crooked teeth, hung open, sucking at the dry desert air.
The Boy could hear Escondido’s heavy breathing.
They entered the long, crumpled stretch of casino row. Hollow-eyed windows gaped blindly down on them from along shell-dented walls.
“Said he might go in and jes’ take a look around. I tells him it’s jes’ not done, Dan. Jes’ not done.”
They passed a burned U.S. Army tank pokin
g its melted barrel out from a storefront whose sign had long since been scoured to meaninglessness.
M-1 Abrams, thought the Boy.
“Toughest hour of my life was waitin’ for Dan to come out. I sat there holding that horse of his for the longest time. We’d had a good haul in lions that year. What was the point of going in?”
Ahead, a sweeping bridge spanned the gap between two casinos like a broken arm reaching out from the wreckage of a terrible accident to touch another victim.
“Worst part’s just ahead,” muttered Escondido.
Escondido cocked back the hammer on his long rife.
This is what I mean, Boy. Told you not to get caught up in things and here you are, caught up.
I could answer you, he thought to Sergeant Presley. But you would tell me I was crazy. You would tell me that you are dead and the problems of this life no longer concern you. Wouldn’t you?
“I waited an hour and he never come out,” whispered Escondido.
The laughing started.
One voice cackled, clear and very near at once.
Moments later two others responded, as if only politely and at a mediocre jest.
Then another burst out, hysterically almost.
Finally the rest were laughing uncontrollably.
Sniggering.
Guffawing.
Giggling.
Snickering.
Hooting.
Wailing.
Sobbing.
Moaning.
Crying.
Laughter careened across the broken casino walls.
Laughter was everywhere.
“Keep straight on!” yelled Escondido over the echoing din.
For a moment there were almost-shadows within the recessed gloom of the buildings high above. Not quite, but almost.
Leading Horse, the Boy pulled his tomahawk from his belt.
“They won’t come out. Never do. But you don’t want to go in after ’em all the same,” warned Escondido.
They crossed the shadow of the broken bridge and a sink crashed to the dusty pavement behind them.
Horses reared and snarled fearfully.
The Boy held him around the neck, whispering softly.
“I know. I know. I know,” he said over and over.
Once they were almost out from underneath the broken walkway, Escondido muttered, “I think that’s what all the silliness is about. Tryin’ to get us to come in and take a look.”
A scabbed face, pale and haunted, appeared for a moment behind dusty shards of broken glass three stories up. Whether it was a man or a woman, who could say.
They passed on and the laughter seemed to fade in quiet increments. Finally there is a single painful scream.
In the hours that passed between the ruins of Reno and the river, Horse began to favor his unhurt legs, limping with the left hind leg. The Boy knew a powerful infection had already set in.
“He can’t go much farther,” said the Boy.
“He’ll have to. Another few hours to the foot of the mountains and then the river. I won’t sleep down here tonight.”
They rode on, passing through lonely crumbling hills in the weak last light of day. When the sun finally fell behind the lowest of the Sierra Nevada, the land turned to purple and the smell of sage hung heavy in the shadows.
“Another hour and we’ll be alongside the river. Once we’re to it my hunting lodge won’t be much farther on. I won’t waste a bullet on your horse. Load ’em myself and there’s precious few left now. Understand?”
The Boy said nothing as darkness settled across the lonely spaces that surrounded them. They heard the river long before they saw it, babbling in the moonlight. Its wide curves followed an old broken highway off to one side. Long, flat swathes of calm river erupted, burbling, over stones, and beyond that, small waterfalls marked their climb up alongside the river’s fall.
Horse was badly limping when Escondido stopped. They were on a wide turn below a small pass. The river, off to their left, was little more than soft noise. Escondido seemed to rise for a moment off his horse’s back, smelling the wind. The Boy tasted the night air also and found charred wood.
When they came to the river crossing that led to Escondido’s lodge, the Boy could see the charred remains of wood and stone from across the rock-filled river.
On the other side Escondido said nothing and climbed down from his nag. He walked into the midst of the burnt timber and ash. “Still warm.” He laughed. “Thought they’d burn me out, they did.”
The Boy got down off Horse and began to inspect the wound again. When he touched it, Horse dances away from him. He removed his pack and led Horse down to the river. The water was cold, startlingly cold as he washed Horse’s wound. At first Horse wouldn’t stand for it, but as the cool water numbed the heat in the wound, the big horse tolerated the cleansing.
By the time the Boy led Horse back up to the clearing where once the lodge watched the creek and the highway beyond, Escondido had built a fire.
“I’m gonna tell you something you don’t want to hear,” said Escondido above the clatter of a pot he set on the fire. “I’m lit out at first light. I’m done with this side of the mountains. It ain’t safe and it’s gittin’ a lot more dangerous. Time was it was just me between here and the Hillmen. Now all them southern tribes is comin’ north, just itchin’ fer a fight with the Chinese. This is my last hunt. Tomorrow I ride for Auburn. After that, who knows? There’s a widow for me somewheres, I guess.”
They watch the fire. Escondido cuts branches from a sapling and roasts strips of lion meat.
“This part’s the part you ain’t gonna like. So here it is. That horse needs to rest and even if he does that, ain’t no guarantee he’s gonna make it. In two days or sooner we’ll have snow and if his infection is gonna come, it’ll kill him before we make it within the gates o’ the outpost.”
They were silent, each watching the meat and fire, the wood turning to ash, the orange coals beneath.
Escondido rose to turn the strips of lion and settled back down onto an old blanket.
“I come here twenty seasons musta been. Every summer I’d cross them mountains above us and come down here to hunt. First few days I got the place in order, then I had a whole operation to set up. Shoulda seen it. Hides tannin’, big porch I like to set on of an evenin’.”
“There was no trade in hides with the Hillmen ’fore the Chinese set up the outpost there in Auburn. Hillmen coulda cared less about lion hides. The whole bunch of ’em was different in every way. Lived out in the woods and only came together once a year when they’d get up a hunt or needed to fight one of the other tribes. I finally figured out why they called themselves the Hillmen when me and Danitra set up camp near the old school the year before it burned town. One night I was havin’ a look for anything useful and I saw that their old football team was called the Hillmen. Now they live alone out in the deep woods mostly, but they still think of themselves as some old football team from before the bombs . It was how they told the difference between them and strangers. Crazy, huh? But not really—makes more sense than some of the other tribes.”
The fire popped and the aroma of roasting meat caught the night’s breeze as sparks rose into the dark sky.
“Not much fat in lion,” noted Escondido.
Then . . .
“I’ll miss this place for the rest of my days.”
The mule honked at some ground squirrel. Escondido watched the forest for a long moment, his coal-black eyes wide in the dancing light of the fire.
“So, if you could ride with me, I don’t think you’d make it. Or more to the point, I don’t think yer horse’d make it. So I’m leavin’ you. Sorry. That’s the way it has to be.”
When the Boy failed to protest, his face calm, almost asleep in the firelight, Escondido said, “I’ll show you a few things in the morning, maybe even some bushes that’ll help with the healing. If you get to work on a shelter, you’ll be ready if them tribes come back l
ookin’ for me. Most likely they’ll take to you more than they ever did me. They’re tribal like you. Don’t like city people like me. Hate the Chinese, they do. Hate ’em. But you, you’ll be fine I suspect.”
They ate the lion and fell asleep near the fire. The night came on cold and the Boy dreamed of faces in windows. His last thought before he closed his eyes beneath the broken crystal of night was of faces. He remembered faces, though he did not remember who they belonged to. What was Sergeant Presley’s face like? He wondered and for a moment he could not remember its shape. But when he thought of the Sergeant’s rare smile, the face came back to him. And he was asleep.
12
SNOW FELL AND had been falling since they first woke. Now it was coming down steadily. High above, white clouds had replaced the startling blue of morning. Escondido, on the far side of the river and rounding the curve of the old highway that wound its way up across the pass, did not turn to see the Boy one last time, and then he was gone.
The wind rushed through the pines and made the only sound of the place where once Escondido’s hunting lodge stood.
You got to prioritize, Boy!
And he did. The Boy knew he had to get moving. There were three things to do.
Make a shelter.
Gather healing herbs for Horse.
Find food.
But for a long moment he stood there. It was so quiet in between the thundering gusts of wind that shook all the pines at once that he could hear snowflakes landing on the ground all around him. Or so he thought.
Escondido left him with a simple knowledge of the area’s herbs and inhabitants. The lions wouldn’t come up this far and they didn’t like the cold anyway. There were some wolves. But wolves were wolves. There was a way to handle them. Then there was the bear: a mother brown bear, one of the worst kind. Two seasons ago, Escondido related, she had two cubs. This year he didn’t see the cubs. But the bear lived in a cave upriver at the top of a small conical hill. A small mountain even.
“You’d be wise to steer clear of her altogether. The brown are the worst. Man-eaters.”