Marching As to War: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel

by Justin Watson

  Though I wouldn’t know how, I wanted to be there to help the old man with the great fish. I had trouble imagining being on the ocean in a small boat, floating above all that dark deep water. I had never seen an ocean. Maybe I never would.

  The great fish pulled the old man out into the ocean through a night and a day, another night, and into the morning. He brought the fish closer and closer to his little boat. Finally, and he stabbed it in the heart.

  It made me think of seeing my father kill a black bear in the woods near our farm. My father shot once, and the bear went down. As we skinned and butchered the bear, we were very happy. The meat would feed us for a long time, and the skin would be very good for trading. My father cut off one of bear’s big claws and gave it to me. I kept it to remind me of that day. I remember looking at my father and wondering if I could ever be so strong and skillful. So far, I had never killed a bear. Only men.

  The old man tied the fish to his boat and began to sail home. I was happy for him until I read about the first shark.

  “Damn!” I said.

  By now, Riley was awake, sharpening his knife. He asked what was wrong. I told him something bad had happened in the story. I guess Riley could tell I didn’t feel like explaining and he let me alone.

  The shark came, and the old man fought it. I put down the book, feeling bad for the old man. There would be more sharks, and the sharks would ruin everything. I remembered Mary had told me it was about a man who didn’t give up. But now I knew the old man wouldn’t get the fish home. Maybe he wouldn’t get home either. I put the book down because I didn’t want to face all the bad things.

  The sorrow inside me came back.

  Then I heard a loud tap-tap-tap coming through the ceiling. This was our signal to hide behind the shelves in the cellar. It meant either soldiers were nearby, or a stranger was coming toward the house. Riley and I moved fast. We hid our things, got in the chamber, and closed the shelves. We stood in complete darkness, pistols ready.

  I could hear only two sets of footsteps above us. One set was familiar, Mary’s. The other set wasn’t heavy like the boots of a soldier, but light. We were safe, and Mary was safe, as long as we remained quiet. I forced myself to be still, but I couldn’t relax. The air inside the dark chamber got hot. I began to sweat and thought of the old man in the book. He had gone through so much, and then the sharks came. I thought of Jane, chained up, maybe in some dark and airless place like this chamber. I thought about my parents and Maggie. I had just disappeared. That was bad, but I didn’t know what else I could’ve done. The chamber grew hotter. Sweat rolled down my face. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, we heard Mary’s voice, calling us.

  I pushed on the back of the shelf, and we stepped out into the fresher air of the cellar. Mary was waiting for us.

  “Sorry,” she said. “A woman from down the road. She’s lonely and likes to visit.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Riley said.

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “Dinner will be soon,” she said. “By the time we’re done, it’ll be dark.” She went upstairs.

  The last bit of day light was coming through the kitchen windows when we came up for dinner. John was sitting at the table waiting for us.

  “Ready?” he said.

  We nodded, and Mary put our food on the table. We ate and said nothing. When we finished, it was full dark.

  John put his plate aside. “Get your things.”

  Riley and I went downstairs and got our pistols. We hid our bedrolls and Riley’s rifle in the chamber behind the shelf. When came back upstairs, John put the lamp out. “Let your eyes get used to the dark,” he said. “We’ll wait a few minutes.” So Riley and I stood still and waited.

  I wondered where Mary was, but after my eyes had adjusted, I saw she was sitting in a chair in the kitchen. She was looking at me.

  “One at a time,” John said. “I’ll go first. Wait a minute. Around the house to the front. Across the road. Meet you in the thicket.”

  Then he went through the back door and was gone.

  After a minute or so, I said to Riley, “You go.”

  He hesitated. Glancing toward Mary, he said to me, “Don’t be long now.” Then he went out.

  I got Mary’s book out of my coat pocket and said, “Your book.”

  “Did you finish it?”

  “No.”

  “Then I want you to keep it.”

  “Thank you.”

  I got the feeling you have when you’re right on the edge of a cliff, with your toes hanging out into the empty air. If you lean forward just a little more, you’ll be gone.

  “It’s time,” she said.

  I put away the book and went out into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 29

  John led us south and then east, by way of overgrown roads. Soon there were more houses and more people. But no one seemed to notice us.

  After an hour, we came to the edge of an overgrown field behind a large building. John squatted amid the weeds. Riley and I did the same.

  A few minutes later, a horse-drawn wagon came around the corner of the building. It stopped, and two men got down. One had a rifle, and the other a shotgun. They stood looking across the field.

  John took a deep breath and let it out. “Follow me. Don’t do anything sudden.”

  He took another deep breath, and we all stood up. The men across the field saw us, but they didn’t aim their weapons at us. John led us through the weeds and bushes. When we reached them, John said, “Do what they say.”

  The shotgun man said, “You armed?”

  Riley and I nodded.

  “Hand them over.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Hand them over,” the man said.

  “Do it,” John said.

  Riley and I looked at each other. He didn’t like this any better than I did.

  “What if we don’t?” Riley said.

  The shotgun man didn’t answer. Then I heard movement behind us, and I knew someone was back there, ready to start shooting.

  I looked at Riley and nodded. He looked angry, but we didn’t have a choice. Moving slowly, we gave them our pistols.

  They had us climb into the wagon. Then they bound our wrists behind our backs and gagged us. Someone put a cloth sack over my head. I couldn’t see a thing, and the sack smelled of rotten apples. I felt the muzzle of a gun press against my cheek and heard the voice of the larger man saying, “Lie down.” I lay down. The gun pulled away, and he said, “Stay still. Be quiet.” I felt something, probably a canvas tarp, cover me. Then the wagon started moving, jolting over uneven ground.

  I don’t know how long we rode that way. Maybe half-an-hour, maybe more. Every second of it, I had to fight off panic. I kept remembering Hobbes lifting his pistol to shoot me. The dark, the heat, the sickening smell of the sack over my head almost over took me over some edge. I kept telling myself, if they had wanted to kill us, they would have already done it. I kept telling myself it would be over soon. And when it wasn’t over, I told myself again. And then finally, it was.

  The wagon stopped, and the tarp came off. I felt many hands pulling and pushing me off the wagon. When I was standing, a hand grabbed my left arm and led me up a set of stairs and down what I guess was a hallway. I could hear the rumble of many pairs of boots on wood flooring. I think we went through a doorway and into a room.

  “Sit,” a voice said, and hands guided me down until my ass hit a chair. Things got quiet. The memory of Hobbes lifting the pistol came again. I pushed it away.

  Then someone removed the sack and the gag. The fresh air felt wonderful, and I pulled in a deep breath. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the light. I was in a workshop with carpentry tools, half-completed chairs and cabinets. Sawdust everywhere. Riley was in a chair next to me, his hands, like mine, were still tied behind his back.

  Facing us sat a man, perhaps 50 years old, wearing the clothes of a carpenter, but he didn’t have a carpe
nter’s hands. He was smoking a pipe and waiting for us to be ready to talk. Patient.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Who are you?” I said, not expecting an answer.

  “Never mind,” said the man. “Names are not important.”

  “You know what we want,” I said.

  “No, we don’t. That’s why you’re here.”

  “We want to help Jane,” Riley said.

  “Do you know how difficult that’ll be?”

  “No,” I said. “And we don’t care.”

  “Tell me about Jane,” the man said, “about the war, about how you came to be here.”

  I explained. Riley threw in details when he thought I had forgotten something.

  The man sat smoking, watching us. I felt he knew what we were going to say, but he wanted to see how we said it.

  When I was done he said, “You two are a problem. You could be soldiers trying to get inside our organization. But you want to rescue Jane Darcy. That’s a suicide mission. So far the Government hasn’t been that . . . clever.”

  “If you ain’t gonna help us,” Riley said, “we’ll do it alone. Let us go.”

  “No,” said the man. “Either we help you, or we kill you. You know too much about us. If you’re captured, they’ll make you talk.”

  “But we don’t know anything,” Riley said.

  “You don’t know much, but you know enough to get John and Mary captured. And they know a lot.”

  Riley and I said nothing. I felt the fear begin to leak down through me. We sat in silence until a tap, tap, tap sound came from the wall behind the man. He was being summoned.

  The man put down his pipe, stood up, said, “Excuse me.” He went through a doorway in the wall and closed the door. Behind that wall, I thought, someone is deciding if we live or die.

  I had never been the type to beg God for my life or to try to make some foolish bargain. I hadn’t done that when Hobbes was about to shoot me and I didn’t now. But I did ask God for Jane’s life. God, I prayed, we’re all she’s got.

  The door opened, and the man came out. He sat down and picked up his pipe. “We’re going to help you.”

  I realized I had been holding my breath.

  Someone behind me untied my hands.

  “When?” Riley said.

  “Tonight. We’ll get you to someone who can help you.”

  They let us have a drink of water before putting the sacks over our heads again.

  Someone was helping me out of the chair when I heard the man with the pipe say, “Good luck. You’ll need it.” Then someone led me back to the wagon. As soon as I was under the tarp, I pulled the sack from my head. Riley did the same.

  When the wagon stopped this time, someone lifted the tarp, and Riley and I crawled out. I saw we were on a dark little street, but I could hear many people nearby. There was music and now and then a drunken shout. A fat man I had never seen before handed us our pistols. We checked them and put them in our belts at the front.

  “Follow me,” he said. As we walked away, the wagon drove in the opposite direction.

  After a couple hundred yards, we turned a corner and saw a good-sized road. The sound of people and music was much louder than before.

  “You won’t see soldiers here,” the fat man said, “but there are informers everywhere. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Just follow me and keep moving.”

  We headed what I took to be east on the road. There were many people all around us, both men and women. They were standing in little groups, talking, laughing, and drinking from bottles or wineskins.

  None of them paid any attention to us except for some of the women who called out things like, “Y’all looking for some fun?” It took me a moment to realize the women were whores. I had heard men talk of going to such women. To me, such things had always been part of another world. Yet there I was, in the middle of it.

  We stayed on the road and came to a stretch where the old storefronts were crowded with people. I heard guitar and piano music, as well as loud conversations and laughter. The milling crowds of men and women smelled of whiskey, tobacco, and sweat. A lot of them were crazy drunk. We even had to step over a man passed out on the ground.

  As we moved along, I looked at Riley. He smiled and said, “My kind of place.” That was Riley.

  But I didn’t want any part of it.

  Just when the crowd started to thin out, the fat man went into one of the old storefronts. Riley and I followed him into a rectangular room. It was dark and filled with smoke, but not crowded or noisy. There were a few tables with chairs along one long wall and at the far end. Along the other long wall was a bar, where men stood drinking, smoking pipes, and talking. Behind the bar was the largest mirror I had ever seen. A few people glanced at us as we came in, but nobody paid much attention. I had a feeling it was the sort of place where folks minded their own business.

  The fat man led us to the bar and asked for three glasses of whiskey. The man behind the bar had a blank hard face and a big shiny revolver in a holster on his belt.

  When the drinks came, the fat man put some government paper money on the bar. We stood with our drinks and looked around. Riley gave me a little smile and moved his eyebrows up and down. He was enjoying his first whiskey in God only knew how long. I was about to remind him of what Jane had said about drinking when the fat man whispered to us, “Stay here. Don’t come until I call you.”

  Then he walked toward a table at the far end of the room. A black man sat alone with his back against the wall and his hands hidden beneath the table. A rifle leaned against the wall next to him. I watched all this in the big mirror and put my hand inside my coat on the grip of my pistol. The two men talked, and then the fat man turned, saw me watching in the mirror, and nodded.

  Riley and I walked to the table. The black man nodded toward two empty chairs. We sat down. I noticed his clothes were neat and clean. He didn’t wear a beard.

  The fat man turned and left.

  I kept watching the black man. He was smiling at us. Then he stood up and grabbed the rifle. He walked to a door in the back wall, opened it, and looked back at us. Riley and I followed him.

  He led us down a short hallway to another door. Then he opened it a crack and called out, “Longman. It’s me. Everything’s OK.”

  “Come ahead,” a voice from outside said.

  The black man went through the doorway, which opened to a dark alley behind the building. The smell of rotting food and piss. When I went out, I saw a tall man with a big shotgun. The tall man didn’t smile or greet us.

  “Let’s go,” said the black man. He led us eastward along the alley. The tall man walked behind us. After a hundred yards, we turned right and went out to the main road. But we were well past the crowd. Anyone who had been watching us would still be looking at the front door of that bar.

  The black man led us east down the road. He was alert and held his weapon ready, but I could tell this was his home territory, just as the mountains had been ours. In fact, they nodded or waved to people we saw along the way. Rather than bars, there were just a few storefronts with traders offering food, clothes, and other goods.

  Soon we came to a bridge. We stopped and looked over the side to a much bigger road that crossed below. There were a few of the old automobiles, rusting and stripped hulks, sitting where they had been left in panic during the Plague. But some of the hulks had been pushed aside to clear a path on the road big enough for government trucks.

  In the distance, I saw a single bright light moving toward us. But the light didn’t shine in all directions like a lamp. It was like a long finger that moved back and forth, searching across the road and the land around it.

  The black man said, “A search light on an army truck. Has a .50 caliber. You don’t want to fool with that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve seen what one can do.”

  He looked at me for a moment, maybe gauging if I was telling the truth. Then he waved us forward, and we cro
ssed the bridge and cut south through narrow deserted streets. Many of the houses along these streets were empty, stripped, and gutted, but a few seemed occupied. As we moved south, I felt hopeful. Jane was south of the city. We were getting closer to her.

  The street sloped downhill until it ended where a wider street crossed ahead. Then the black man signaled for us to stop, and get behind some bushes. He went on ahead and poked his head over a rickety wooden fence behind a two-level brick building. He called out, “Hey? Jeffers? You there Jeffers?”

  I heard the faint clack of someone working the bolt of automatic rifle, putting a round in the chamber. A voice said, “Who’s there?”

  The black man said, “It’s me, Biltmore. I got Longman and two more.”

  “Come on then,” the voice said.

  We followed the black man forward along the fence, through a gate, and to a door on the side of the building. We went through the door and up some stairs to a small room. Longman didn’t go with us.

  The black man turned up an oil lamp that was sitting on a table and looked at us. “So you two want to rescue Jane Darcy,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You gonna help us?”

  He said, “We are.”

  Riley and I looked at each other and smiled. Finally, I thought, finally.

  “Everybody calls me Biltmore,” he said. “What’ll I call you?”

  We told him our names, and I said, “Your name is Biltmore?”

  “Everybody calls me that because I lived in the Biltmore House.”

  “You lived there? Wasn’t it a rich man’s palace or something?”

  “Here’s the short version of a long story,” he said. “A rich man built it as his house a long time ago. After he died, his family let people come in and see it. For money, of course. People came from everywhere, all over the world, to visit the ‘Biltmore Estate.’ They had also had a big farm and made wine.”

  “It must’ve been something to see,” Riley said.

  “Yeah, I suppose it was,” Biltmore said. “Anyway, when the Plague came my parents were working there. The workers who survived the Plague just started living there, planted crops, kept the looters and squatters away. I was born in the House, grew up there. I lived there until the fucking Government took it away, and ran most of us off.”