by Nick Cole
Horse was on his side now. His large dark eyes were weak and milky. Often he would raise his head to make sure the Boy was near. But even that act seemed too much for him.
So what do you do first, Boy? Make a plan. Get moving. Get to work. Do something. Make a decision. If you don’t, circumstances will decide for you. The enemy loves to tell you what to do.
It was the voice of Sergeant Presley, heard over a thousand camps at morning, in the frosty nights of Michigan when they’d barely survived. Down South, crossing the big river, he’d heard the Sergeant plan and tell him to do the same.
It’s all you got now, Boy!
The Boy gathered herbs. He found most of them not far from the river. Most of them were dying as winter came on.
Will that affect their potency?
Don’t matter, Boy. It’s all you got right now.
He spent the rest of the morning mashing the herbs and slowly adding water until all became paste. He boiled the paste for a while, per Escondido’s instructions. He applied the hot paste after having taken Horse to the river to clean the wound once more in the icy water, in which Horse’s legs gave out for a moment and he stumbled, casting a look at the Boy as if they were both embarrassed to the point of death. After, when the paste was hot and goes on Horse’s wounded flank, after Horse lay down, his eyes resigned to the smoking fire, the Boy murmured, “I didn’t see that. Let’s just forget about that.” The Boy covered him with his only blanket.
Afternoon, thin and cold, settled across the little river. There was no warmth left in the big stones and a breeze could be seen in the pines atop the surrounding mountains.
The Boy began to hack at the burnt lumber of Escondido’s lodge, salvaging any useable beams for shelter. There weren’t many. Near the river, he found fallen trees and in dragging them, he was soon exhausted.
If I had Horse right now this would be easier.
When night fell, what he had was little more than a two-sided lean-to. The open side faced the mountain wall that rose above their camp. Moving Horse within the lean-to, the Boy built a fire. Later he gathered loose wood from the forest floor and brown grass for Horse.
It was night now and he didn’t mind the dark or the forest. He had known such places his whole life.
13
IN THE NIGHT, keeping the fire high, face burning hot, body and back cold, the Boy sat staring into the shifting flames. Occasionally he simply watched Horse. He tried to make a plan for the coming morning beyond this endless freezing night.
Fishing in the river.
Food.
Traps.
How to improve the shelter.
The snow was coming down thick and silent. It hissed as it fell into the fire.
Even with the fire, it was cold. But Horse slept and that was good. Or at least the Boy hoped it was good.
On nights like this, when it was too cold, Sergeant Presley would talk, telling him things, teaching him. Sometimes they would break camp and simply walk to keep warm. The Boy remembered walking in the freezing rain outside Detroit.
Later he remembered the heavy warmth of late summer when they finally reached the Capitol in Washington D.C..
Sergeant Presley’s Mission, he’d called it.
They’d come upon the old Capitol the day before, broken buildings overgrown by blankets of green. Cracked highways had fallen into swampy water thick with flies and insects.
“I got to go in there, Boy, and there ain’t no use you comin’ in with me,” said Sergeant Presley on that long-ago day.
It was hot and sticky in the late afternoon. Summer. It had been raining for much of the week.
“Let’s make camp and then I’ll go in and look for what I got to find—what I know won’t be there. But I’ll go in all the same.”
They’d been living well that year. They’d fought for Marshall and his men the spring before. A range war in Pennsylvania. When the war was over, they’d been granted permission to move on into Maryland. When they’d gone from the warlord Marshall and his expanded kingdom, they’d had good clothes and supplies. They’d found nothing but wild people after that—abandoned farms and shadows in the thick forest and overgrown towns. The small villages and loose power that men like Marshall had held over the interior lands between the ravaged cities would not be found along the devastated ruin of the eastern coast.
One morning, in the center of a town that had burned to the ground long before the Boy had been born, standing in the overgrown weed-choked outline of an intersection, Sergeant Presley said, “If there is anyone here, I’ll find them in the Capitol—or in the president’s bunker below the White House.” They were both looking at an old fire hydrant that had been knocked out into the road. The road was covered in hardened dirt that had once been muddy sludge.
“Who am I kidding?” Sergeant Presley had suddenly erupted into the silence of the place. “There ain’t anybody left. There wasn’t since it all went sideways and there hasn’t been since. I know that. I’ve known it all along!”
His shouted words fell into the thick forest turning to swamp. An unseen bird called out weirdly, as if in response.
“But orders are orders,” he’d said softly, his sudden rage gone. “And someone had to come and find out. Once I know, we’ll head back to the Army in Oakland. We got to cross the whole country. You up for that, Boy?”
Sergeant Presley had smiled at him then.
The Boy remembered, nodding to himself.
“Still, it’d be nice if someone was there. That’d be something,” Sergeant Presley had said.
But there hadn’t been.
Now, beside the fire in the mountains as the first big snow of winter came on, almost to the other side of the country, the Boy knew there hadn’t been anyone in the old Capitol or at the president’s bunker beneath the White House.
Sergeant Presley was gone all that next day.
In the morning the Sergeant had put on some special gear they’d found in a place called Fort. They’d spent two weeks looking through the place, scouring warehouses that had long since been looted, searching through ash and rubble. Finally, in a desk drawer they’d found the gear Sergeant Presley had been looking for.
“Some clerk probably got told to bring in his MOPP gear in case things went that way in those days. So he brings it in and his section sergeant checks it and then sends him off to do paperwork. And now I’m gonna wear it and hope the charcoal and other protectants are gonna hold out long enough to get me to the White House without getting radiation poisoning.”
When he’d left, wearing the dull green cloth and rubber shoes, fitting the gas mask and hood over his head, Sergeant Presley had looked like a monster.
He was gone all that day.
Sitting by the fire, the Boy couldn’t remember what he’d done after that. Probably exploring with Horse.
In the swarming-insect early evening, outside the Capitol in the swamp camp, it was misty. The gloomy ruins of the Capitol faded in the soft light of dusk. It looked like a dream. The Boy remembered that in the last moments of light, the Capitol, whatever it had once been, looked like a dream castle—like something that might have once had meaning for him. Like things that seem so important in a dream, but when you awake, those things seem of little value and you can’t imagine why they’d held such a place in the dream.
That was what the Capitol had looked like to the Boy in those last moments of daylight.
In the early evening of that long lost waiting-day, Sergeant Presley had finally come up the hill to their camp above the swamp. Threading his way through the tall grass, Sergeant Presley took off the bug-eyed gas mask. He dropped or threw the mask off into the sea of silent yellow grass. He tore off the suit, coughing. Crystal droplets of sweat stood out in his short curly hair.
The Boy gave him water from their bag, then some of the cakes they always made back then.
“Still hot in there.” Sergeant Presley coughed.
The Boy said nothing.
“Hot” meant forbidden. If sometimes they saw a city on the horizon, like the one by the big lake, its tall towers skeletal and bent, Sergeant Presley would simply say “still hot.” And sometimes he would add, ”When you’re an old man, if you live long enough, you can go in there. But I never will.”
Sergeant Presley drank more water and coughed.
“I woulda brought you somethin’, but it’s too hot in there. I swear I came right up on a bomb crater. Must’ve been low yield. But hell if it didn’t go up twenty degrees. I look around and everything is black ash. Even the marble on one of them old government buildings, the House I think it was called, had turned black.”
He coughed again.
He will never stop coughing, thought the Boy. That was when the coughing had started. That day everything changed, though at the time neither of them knew it.
Sergeant Presley knew it, he suspected. But he didn’t say anything.
Sergeant Presley coughed again.
“Made it all the way to the White House.”
He coughed and then drank, swallowing thickly.
“There was never anything there. It wasn’t a direct hit. See, back then our enemies were fighting unconventionally. Dirty-bomb strikes by remote-controlled aircraft launched within our borders. Terrorists. They went after Washington early on. We knew that. It wasn’t until later, when China got involved, that we didn’t know for sure what had really happened anywhere. After that it was just plain dark everywhere.”
He chewed numbly on the cake, staring at their wispy fire. The Boy watched him, saying nothing.
“The bunker was a deep hole. Must’ve used the Chinese equivalent of a J-Dam on it. I saw one of those take out the TransAmerica Building in Frisco. I’ll show you when we get there. Anyways, they must have used a ‘bunker buster’ on it. Then, whether before or after, there must have been a nuclear strike, probably an airburst. Whole place was cooked.”
He coughed, choking on the cake.
NOW THE BOY looked up at the night sky. It had stopped snowing. The stars were out, shimmering in the late night or early morning. His face was hot. He stood up and walked to the cliff wall.
He leaned against it, feeling the cold stone on his back.
You should sleep, Boy. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.
I wish, thought the Boy, that all of the days that had been were long days. I wish you were here.
He did not hear the voice of Sergeant Presley and wondered if he had ever heard it. Or if he would ever hear it again.
As he walked back to the fire, a pebble fell off the side of the cliff and the Boy turned, staring up into the heights. His shadow loomed large against the wall. He saw his powerful, strong right arm and when he moved the withered left arm, it looked little more than a thin branch.
He stared at the wall and its many shadows. For a moment he could almost see a man.
The man was sitting. Hunched over. Staring sightlessly out into the world. His hand was holding something up to his mouth.
A cake.
It was as though he was looking at Sergeant Presley on that hot, sweaty, and very long day outside the ruins of the Capitol.
Sergeant Presley, sitting, tired, sweating. Eating a cake. Alive.
He turned back to the fire after staring at the image for too long. But he wished it were true. He wished Sergeant Presley were here with him now, across the country. Almost to the Army. Alive.
He picked up a piece of burnt wood from Escondido’s lodge.
He turned back to the cliff wall.
And he began to draw that long lost day. Sergeant Presley at the end of his mission. At the end of his country. At the beginning of the end of his life.
14
AT FIRST LIGHT he checked the river. In a pool off the main channel he spotted three trout lying in the current, close to the bottom. He watched them for a long while, listening to the constant, steady crash of the river downstream.
The backs of the trout remind him of broken green glass bottles he’d once seen in a building where he and Sergeant Presley had slept for the night. “Wine bottles” Sergeant Presley muttered simply, as an epitaph over the heap of green glass. The Boy remembered holding a piece up, examining it in the wavering light of their fire. “Careful,” Sergeant Presley had warned him. “Don’t cut yourself, Boy.”
He found a long piece of driftwood waiting on the rocks by the river, left by the springtime flooding of that year. He returned to camp with the driftwood and after inspecting Horse’s wound, which looked bad and worse now in the bright light of morning, he dug out wet grass from underneath the snowfall and laid it near Horse’s head. Horse seemed not to notice.
He laid more wood on the fire, its wetness making white smoke erupt into the cold air.
The Boy sat down next to the smoking fire with the driftwood stick lying away from his body. Taking one end of the wood, he cut long peels of bark away from himself and soon the white flesh of the wood underneath lay exposed. He fed the soft peels of wood into the fire as he continued to bring the stick to a point. In the end, it became a sharp spear.
He returned to the pool and waited. There was no sign of the broken-wine-bottle-colored trout. He sat on his haunches watching the gentle current drift along the bottom of the rock-covered pool.
Later, one of the fish entered the pool. The Boy waited, watching it move first one way and then another. He got little flashes of white from off its belly as it turned. Finding the current, the emerald-colored trout settled into it. After a moment, when the Boy knew it would be sleeping, he raised up, leaning over the pool, the spear drawn back over his good shoulder, the point just above the surface of the water.
He waited.
He felt a breath enter his lungs and as he let the air go, when there was little left in him, he plunged the spear through the surface, catching the trout in the back, just behind its head. It bent to the left, sending up a splash of water with its wide tail, and the Boy hauled it from the pool, amazed at his prize. Its rainbow-colored flanks fell away from its wine-bottle back, the white belly pure and meaty. It was a creature of beauty.
When the catch was gutted and spitted over the smoking fire, the Boy made more herb paste and applied it to Horse’s wound, wiping away the oozing pus as best he could.
He’d tried to lead Horse to the water before doing this, but the animal wouldn’t even bother to raise his head, much less stand.
“Okay, rest then,” said the Boy and heard the croak in his voice against the deafening fall of water over rock.
When the fish was cooked, he walked while eating, back to the drawing of Sergeant Presley on the cliff wall. He’d worked on it late into the night, immune to the cold. When he’d returned to the fire, he’d felt frozen. The heat stung his skin as it warmed him. He’d thought the drawing had been complete, but now looking at it in the late-morning light he could see where features would need to be added—filled in and shaded.
In the afternoon he tried to improve the shelter, but other than laying green pine branches across the top, there was little that could be done.
You’ve got to find better shelter, Boy! If this lodge was here from before the war then chances are there are others like it.
The Boy had seen many buildings from Before built in clusters; the towns they had passed through and the cities he had wanted to visit. Clusters.
In the afternoon he walked upriver with his tomahawk and knife. His withered left side felt stiff, but he concentrated on its movements, controlling it, willing his leg to step over fallen logs instead of dragging as it would’ve liked to if he’d ridden Horse for days at a time.
He heard a loud twig snap underneath his feet.
Too loud, Boy! No go.
Everything Sergeant Presley had taught him had been graded. When the time had come for the Boy to perform a task, the standard for pass or fail was always “good to go” or “no go”. He’d hated when Sergeant Presley wrenched his mouth to the side and said, “No go.”
Upstream the river began to curve to the north, winding through a series of rapids. Off to the left he could see the steep, conical mountain Escondido had warned him of, where at the top a bear made its den.
It was winter now. Bears should be asleep.
There were no other lodges, or if there had been, what remained of them could not be found.
It was hard to imagine the world as a place where people could either live in cities or in the forest. What was so special about cities?
You always wanted to go there, Boy.
I did. I wanted to know what was in them.
And . . .
What would I have been like if I had lived in one?
Standing at the bend in the river, feeling his withered leg and arm stiffen in the late-afternoon cold as the sun fell behind tall peaks to the west, he thought of people he once knew and could not remember.
They had always lived in the cold plains. His first memory was of running. Of a woman screaming. Of seeing the sky, blue and cold in one moment, and the ground, yellow stubble, race by in the next.
Sergeant Presley had rarely mentioned “your people.”
Not like in tents, not like your people.
All gone over to animals, not like your people.
They don’t ride horses, like your people do.
THAT NIGHT THE temperature dropped and the snow came down in hard clumps without end. He lay next to Horse, who moved little and whose breathing was shallow. At one point, the Boy was so cold he thought he should surely die.
When he awoke in the morning everything was covered in snow.
THE BEST TIME to do something about a thing is to do it now, Boy!
We won’t last out here another night.
When Horse opened his eyes they fluttered.
You won’t make it out here like this, will you, Horse?
He laid his hand on Horse’s belly, feeling the heat both comforting and sickening at once.
He knew what he had to do. He had known it in the freezing night when the snow had stopped falling and the wind rushed through the pines, seeming to make things even colder than when the snow had fallen. Even the sound of the icy water falling along the rapids seemed to make the world colder.