by Nick Cole
She nodded again.
“Yes. In this place . . . that is the way it must be,” she said.
He thought more of the cave of the bear and all the other places he had been. Places that were not this city. Places that were not here.
She stayed too long that night.
Dawn light was breaking the top of the eastern hills. In blue shadows, standing on the dock, he held her tightly to himself.
“I must . . . go now,” she stammered and yet still clung to his chest.
“There are other places than here,” he said. “I would take you with me to those places.”
You take everything with you.
In the small boat, in the pale light, her long alabaster hands were shaking as she began to row for the point.
She heard the first birds of morning.
Her hands were shaking.
When she turned back to him, he was just a shadow among shadows along the waterfront.
Her hands were shaking.
THE HEAT OF the day built quickly. There was the smell of fresh-cut wood and fires burning out beyond the earthworks. The thick scent of the fields and dark earth mixed, and when the Boy drank rainwater from a barrel it was cold and satisfying.
A cannon cracked.
A whump followed a second later.
“They are sighting the guns,” said the general. He was looking at Sergeant Presley’s map with a large and cracked magnifying glass.
“How close did you come to Galveston, down in Texas?”
The Boy walked toward the picture he had drawn. The picture of the Great Wall of Wreckage.
“No closer than fifty miles.”
Sergeant, you said to me, on that day when we looked at the map together and the weather was so hot and the air was so thick, you said, That’s right, Boy. Never closer than fifty. Radiation.
Your voice would be a comfort to me now, Sergeant.
The Boy had been waiting all day for it. He had been waiting for it since it ceased. Since the open graves and tattered canvas. But now, of all days, on this first hot day of the year, he needed to hear it.
I need to know what to do next, Sergeant.
I need wisdom.
“What did you find there besides what you have drawn in this picture?” asked the Chinese general.
Sergeant Presley, I’m going to take the girl and run.
“What do you mean?” the Boy replies.
I don’t have a plan, Sergeant. I’ll take her and ride fast and far away from here. Is that what I should do, Sergeant?
“Were there villages or people there?” asked the Chinese general.
The Boy thought of long winter nights in the bear cave. He also thought of MacRaven and his ashen-faced warriors moving through the forests and the foothills and the swamps, approaching the bay.
Where can we go and be safe, Sergeant?
“The people there were deformed,” answered the Boy. “There was a warlord who ruled over everyone, but we never met him. The sick told us that he came and stole their children in the night and made them his soldiers. They said he ate people. They said he was a demon. They said his soldiers were demons now, no longer their children.”
There’s an army coming and they’re probably looking for me, Sergeant.
“It sounds like a terrible place. Are they deformed like . . . ?”
I would go back to the cave, but MacRaven . . .
“Like . . . me?”
Sergeant Presley, you always said north was too hard. If you weren’t ready for winter it would kill you. If we have to run for a long time, there might not be time to prepare for the next winter.
“I am sorry . . . I meant no disrespect,” said the general as he stared at the Boy.
West is the ocean, Sergeant. I don’t know how to make a boat go.
“No. They were much worse off than me.”
So that leaves south.
“I am sorry,” mumbled the general, looking back to the map. “It sounds like a very dark place.”
We’ll go south, Sergeant.
“We barely escaped.”
I know you would say, Don’t get involved. I always told you that.
In his mind, Jin murmurs in the firelight.
But I love her, Sergeant.
The Chinese general put down the magnifying glass. He hobbled around the desk and came to stand beside the Boy.
“It is all my fault,” said the general after a great sigh.
“I don’t understand,” said the Boy.
“The deformities. Your deformities.” Pause. “They are my fault. I mean no disrespect to you. I am not like . . . the rest. I see nothing wrong with a man if his body is weak. Old age has taught me that bodies fail. Even if we are successful at not dying, and doing our best to stay healthy, bodies still fail. A body doesn’t make a man strong or weak. It is the heart of a man or woman that makes them such.”
My heart is strong for Jin.
You would ask me, Sergeant, Is that enough?
“You seem troubled. I hope I didn’t . . .”
“No. What happened at the end? The end of the American army.”
The general looked away to the sketches on the walls. He looked at the broken sailboats in Detroit, piled up like toys after a flood. The general could hear the clang of the spinnakers and the knock of the weather vanes in that long-ago winter wind.
He let go another great sigh.
“In the end there were few American soldiers left. There were few of us left, for that matter, also. That last year was little more than a long stalemate that preceded our final battle, if one wants to call such a day a battle. Our scouts thought there might be influenza sweeping through the American defenses above Oakland, so we decided to attack with everything we had left.”
The general turned and hobbled back to his chair, sinking into ancient leather with a groan.
“I started the war as a lieutenant. In the end I was a brigadier general in command of forces. My superiors tasked me to lead a reconnaissance in force against the American positions. All such actions in the past had met with defeat. In fact they were little more than suicide missions. I thought it was my time to die. I said my good-byes. I kissed my very pregnant wife and my son, my granddaughter Jin’s father, and we set out in rafts lashed to the few amphibious vehicles left that still worked. It was quite a departure from the way we’d arrived ten years earlier, when we’d invaded the United States. Then we’d attacked with fighters, a carrier group, and an airborne invasion all along the western United States. Now I was being towed to my death in a leaky raft by a broken-down amphibious armored vehicle that belched dirty black smoke.”
The general breathed deeply again, gathering himself and letting go of some past oath to secrecy that no longer held him.
“I kept waiting for the American artillery to open fire as we crossed the bay. But it didn’t, and we made the beach, to our great surprise. No gunfire, no mortars. No fixed-bayonet charge. I ordered our mortar teams to set up. We advanced through the wreckage of the old city of Oakland, finding no one. When we came to the trenches at the bottom of the hill we found a ragged soldier, thin to the point of death. He was little more than the bones that held him up. He waved a white flag. From a distance he told us of the sickness. He said we should stay away.
“I withdrew and called my commanders. They told me to hit the camp with everything we had but to stay clear. We spent the day shelling it and shooting up into the heights. Shooting as though there was no end in sight to our supplies, after ten straight years of fighting in the streets amongst the rubble of San Francisco.”
It was quiet in the study. Warm sunshine made the air thick and heavy with the scent of flowers and dust.
“But that was not the end,” muttered the general after a long pause.
“I was ordered to put on chemical armor and go up the hill by myself. It was a very hot day. Earthquake weather, like today. It is always that way on hot days that follow the cold. I trudged through the t
all burning grass up to their headquarters. There was no one there, only graves and the dead, lying in their cots and trenches.
“What can one say of such things? The war was finally over.”
43
THE KNOCK AT the back door of the shack in the quiet of the sleeping shantytown was deafening and the Boy willed it to be unheard in the night.
Her entering and embrace of him were one action.
“I had a . . .”—she uses a Chinese word he did not know—“a nightmare . . . in the afternoon as I slept.” Then, “I thought that . . . you had gone away . . . and that I had lost you forever.”
She held him and he could smell the jasmine in her long dark hair.
“You had gone away,” she said breathlessly between kisses. “And I kept thinking . . . in the dream, that I must start looking for you. But there was always some house task to perform.”
She buried her face in his chest as the Boy closed the back door.
“It was . . . horrible,” she murmured and he could feel her tears.
“Come with me. We’ll leave tomorrow,” he whispered, and thought of the man who had been watching the shack all day from the other side of the alley.
Is he out there in the dark?
Can he hear our whispers?
She held him tighter.
“I will protect you,” he whispered.
“I will serve you,” he whispered.
“I will love you,” he whispered.
And with each murmuring she held him tighter and he could hear her whispering, “Yes,” over and over and over.
Involved is involved, Sergeant.
She left after midnight.
From the dock she stepped into the small boat.
“I will meet you in the ruins outside the . . . western gate, toward the bridge. Look for the house where only the fireplace remains standing, like a . . . pointing finger. When the sun is directly overhead, I will meet you there.”
THE BOY TRIED to sleep.
When he did, he dreamed.
He and Sergeant Presley were running through the night. They were running from those dogs. They were always running.
“I’ve got to find Jin,” he told Sergeant Presley. But in each moment there was some fresh terror in the old mall they ran through, the one with the corpses hanging over the central pool from the broken skylight above. The one with the dogs. The one with the bones.
“I’ve got to find Jin,” he told Sergeant Presley, whose eyes were calm and cool even though the Boy remembered that they were both very frightened that day. It had frightened the Boy even more when he’d looked at Sergeant Presley, who was starting to slow down that last summer before he died in the autumn, and had seen the fear in those eyes, which had been angry but never afraid.
In the dream, in the nightmare, he lost her. He knew it, and the look in Sergeant Presley’s calm dream-eyes told him that he was sad for the Boy. And it was something about that look that terrified the Boy more than anything else in the dream.
He awoke in the night.
“I will not lose her.”
He felt emptiness in his words.
As if he were a child saying he would conquer the world.
THE BOY SADDLED Horse that morning.
Soldiers passed in the alleyway, heading off to work along the growing wall.
He packed his things and led Horse into the lane. There was no sign of the watching man, only an old woman sweeping farther up the street.
Three cannon opened up with successive cracks and distant whumps.
He led Horse back toward the eastern wall, following the soldiers.
Great logs had been cut and lay stacked, waiting to be put in place along the wall.
They had no idea. They had no idea how big MacRaven’s army was.
The Boy mounted Horse and rode past a sentry who said something he did not understand. He seemed to want to stop him, as if only because the Boy was a stranger, but he did not.
The Boy rode through the gate and into the trees, heading east.
They’ll think I’ve gone to inform MacRaven.
You would ask me, What’s your plan, Boy?
I will ride through the hills and circle back around and come out along the western wall. They’ll send riders to head me off, thinking I’m going east. The Pacific is to the west and we don’t know about north. That leaves only one way, Sergeant.
From a small hillock just above the ruins of Sausalito and the inner city, the Boy saw the shantytown below, spreading out next to the bay, and the earthworks being cut into the fields beyond. The Boy watched the alarm being raised. The sentry was talking wildly and waving toward the east. Soldiers were gathering.
From the hill, the Boy could see the big rusting bridge that cut across the sparkling water into the pile of gray rock that was once San Francisco.
I should have checked the bridge to make sure it was safe.
But you would say, That’s all right, Boy. Sometimes you got to improvise.
HE RODE THROUGH the broken edges of the old town, casting his eyes about for the finger-pointing chimney.
If they have discovered our plan, then they will set a trap for me.
You would say, Always be think’n, Boy.
He found the pile of rubble that had collapsed around a lone redbrick chimney pointing up into the hot blue sky.
She came out carrying a bundle. Her face was joy.
Her face was relief.
Her face was hope.
He helped her up onto Horse and she held him tightly.
This was the way it would always feel from now on. To feel her holding him as they rode. As they rode into the face of the world. Into cities and wherever they might wish to go.
All their days should be such.
“Hold, boy,” came the gruff voice of the Chinese general. He hobbled as fast as he could down the cracked and broken street leading back to the inner city.
The sun was overhead and the day was hot.
“I know,” cried the Chinese general. “I know it must be this way. At first I thought it might be a trick of my old age, that I was seeing things that weren’t there. I thought I was beyond understanding the ways of the young when they are in love. But I sensed what passed between the two of you. Now you must leave and go as far away as you can. If our leaders know of your whereabouts, then they will send men after you.”
Jin speaks rapidly in Chinese. The Boy could tell she was pleading.
“It’s all right, granddaughter,” said the Chinese general, her grandfather, breathlessly. “I understand. I don’t need to forgive you . . .”
The Chinese general began to shake, wobbling back and forth. Horse reared and the Boy fought to bring him under control as Jin clung to his back. The rubble all about them began to shift in great piles.
As soon as the shaking had started, it stopped.
“It’s just a tremor, boy,” said the general. “But there will be more.”
The Boy patted Horse, whose eyes were rolling and wild with fear.
The old general came closer, pulling the folded map from his uniform.
“I have one more question to ask, boy.”
The Boy felt ashamed, as though he had stolen something from the general in spite of all the old soldier’s kindness.
“But first, take this.” The general held the folded map up with trembling, gnarled fingers. The Boy reached down and took it.
“And this.”
The general held up a small sack.
“There are American dimes made of silver inside. Most traders will barter for them. You will need to know where you are, that’s why I want the two of you to take the map. Where you have been is not important anymore. You will need to know where you are going now.”
The Chinese general turned to Jin.
“You are precious to me. Your father and mother named you well. I shall think of all our walks together, always. You have been a faithful granddaughter, and beyond that, my friend.”
There were great tears in his tired, rheumy eyes. They poured out onto the brown wrinkles of his fleshy face.
“It is I who must beg for forgiveness . . . from both of you,” sobbed the general, fighting to maintain his soldierly bearing.
Jin speaks in Chinese again, crying this time.
“No,” commanded the general. “I must. I must ask for forgiveness. I must ask you to forgive me and those of my generation for . . . for destroying the world. And you must forgive us, so that you can be free to make something new. I am sorry for what we did.”
The general turned to the Boy, wiping at tears, his voice winning the fight for composure.
“And now answer my question. We will not survive the attack of the barbarians, will we?”
The Boy wheeled Horse, still skittish after the earthquake.
“I do not think so.”
The general lowered his eyes, thinking.
“Go now. Do not look back, never return here. The world is yours now. Do better with it than we did.”
The Boy felt Jin’s hot tears on his bare shoulder.
“Go!” roared the general.
The Boy put his good foot into Horse’s flank and they were off down the old road leading to the rusting bridge that was once called the Golden Gate.
It was very quiet out.
THEY RODE INTO the forested hills above the bridge, dismounted and crawled forward to the edge of the ridge and watched the sentries below.
“There are more guards than usual,” whispered Jin of the sentries who were watching the bridge.
“It might be because of the invasion. Or us, if word has gotten out.”
They watched, hoping the extra guards would leave. The sun was high above.
“Tell me about the bridge. Is it safe?”
“It is . . . dangerous. But there is a marked way.”
“What will we find on the other side? Are there people?”
“No, not in the city. There is only destruction there. People go there . . . to salvage. There are small villages . . . away to the south.”
Horse cried, signaling the Boy.
The Boy loped back to Horse and saw the riders. Chinese cavalry—gray uniforms and crimson sashes—carrying their heavy rifles, twelve of them, following Horse’s trail up from the ruins of Sausalito.