The bridge they had to block if they wanted to stop the raiding.
Stop the Americans pouring into Canada, most of them so loaded down with guns and grenades and night-goggles and rolls of barbed wire that they might as well have been army platoons in some bad Hollywood movie.
Clint Heston had wondered how bad it must be in the old U S of A for them all to come flooding up into the Great White North, a place most of them “knew” just as a land of snowy mountains, growling bears, Mounties, and scantily-clad babes in beer commercials.
Or was it all those beer commercials?
Were hundreds of good ol’ boys — if there were still hundreds of good ol’ boys, that is — sitting in the ruins of America thinking Canada was a charmed never-never land of laughing, beckoning women who’d escaped the plagues and kept the beer cold and kitchen ovens hot, where supermarkets were still full of food, football games and sex-mad hospital workers and forensic hero-cops were still on TV every night, deer wander obligingly up to every porch on sunny mornings to be shot dead for dinner, and life was all still good?
The guy they’d found dying in the cab of his rig on the bridge had thought so.
Gut-shot and covered with flies, staring out through the shattered windshield at the bloody aftermath of a gun battle that had raged and literally died out before any of the farmers had got there, he’d more or less gasped out all of those things, before struggling to ask them for a beer and if “It was still safe, this side.” And then dying before hearing the scavenging farmers try to stumble through answering him.
But then, why be cruel enough to let him hear and understand the word “No” before he slid into everlasting darkness?
It was, after all, the truth.
No, it wasn’t “safe” in Canada. It wasn’t safe anywhere.
The plagues had rolled through the provinces just like the border States to the south of them, and the wild weather, too. Leaving almost everyone dead, dogs and coyotes and wolves fat and bold and roaming everywhere, and...and frontier days come again, for the fortunate — fortunate? — few who’d survived.
Were all Americans stupid enough to think wind and rain and swarming flies respected borders? With “the greatest country in the world” shining brightly on one side of a line drawn on a map and the endless gloom of God-forsaken terrorist tribesmen, or in a few places unspoiled wilderness, on the other?
McTavish had asked that, but the trucker had been too dead to answer — and Heston, who’d asked that question himself a time or two, had just shrugged back at Derek McTavish, still having no good answer to give.
Then they’d started up two or three of the bullet-riddled pickups and rigs that would still start, slammed them into each other, and let them all burn. The battle that the dead trucker had been caught in had managed one good thing: the bridge was blocked now, with great holes fire-melted in its pavement. Some of the burnt-out vehicles had sunk into those pits and glued themselves there. Nothing that would stop men with guns from clambering over them and crossing the bridge, but they’d have to walk. Only a tank could bull its way through the wreckage — and a tank, or anything comparably heavy, would fall through the bridge decking. In a dozen years, with no one repainting the steel or repairing welds and rivets, the whole thing would start to sag.
The tunnels had all flooded months ago, with no power to work the pumps and no one left to fix them. Gunfire from both sides of the Detroit River greeted any motorboat piloted by someone stupid enough to try a crossing in daylight, these days. Motors still purred by night, but they weren’t exactly quiet, and though nights were now very dark times when the clouds and moon didn’t oblige otherwise, there wasn’t much noise aside from the peepers to hide motor sounds now; landings were often deadly.
There were still plenty of people alive enough to fire guns, of course.
The plagues hadn’t been that good.
Everyone who was left probably wouldn’t die of plague until some new sickness arose, and those same survivors were much too busy trying to find food and water and safe shelter by night — shelter they wouldn’t freeze in, come winter, which was why so many Americans were seeking the endless trees they thought all Canada was thickly cloaked in, for firewood — to worry about plagues, or the fact that darned near every doctor seemed to have either died or become precious gods to, or captives of, bands of people who guarded them night and day.
Heston had shot down men who’d said they’d come across the river to find and seize doctors and nurses, and take them back.
It had been late last year when he’d admitted it to himself: the world was going wild again, with the humans who were left too few to stop it and too busy killing each other, in endless skirmishes between those who roamed taking things at gunpoint versus those who hid and cowered and crept around foraging, to care much.
Right now, all the flames across the river were giving Heston and McTavish and Breskbro — their treasure, a Cree woman who was a doctor and a better shot than either of them, with bow as well as gun, and whose dirty, sweaty curves were more beautiful than half a dozen pale, underfed cheating wives on television — light enough to see by, to loot one of the rare convenience stores on Riverside.
The flames lit up the always restless water amber bright, displaying the dark shapes of two small motorboats heading towards Canada, but the idiots in them were already shooting at each other, and slinking shadows that were either coyotes or wolves were gathering on the near bank to await the survivors’ landfall. If there were any survivors.
That was another thing that had changed. It sure hadn’t taken long for most wildlife to stop fearing humans.
“Shit,” Mary Breskbro snapped, jolting Clint out of his remembrances. She crouched down and hurled a can loudly through the glass of one of the few windows that had been intact, making sure she got the attention of both her men. “Trouble.”
Clint stopped scooping cans into one of the hundreds of blue recycling boxes they’d found in garages all over Windsor, and snatched up his rifle. McTavish was already running along the next aisle in a crouch, like some movie Marine, the submachine gun he’d liberated from a dead American raider a week back up and ready.
There were people outside, people wearing hardhats with headlamps on them, headlamps that were dark. Small wonder, that, with no electricity for most of a year and precious few batteries lasting through the freezes and thaws of a winter. Three people, two of them waving — God damn! — white flags.
The third was trailing her flag — a shirt nailed to a rake, it looked to be — behind her, and wandering aimlessly about as if she was drunk, mumbling something soft, off-key, and endless, that might have been singing.
The other two — a man and a woman, the woman clutching a motorcycle helmet as if unsure whether to swing it as a weapon, or use it as a shield — had their arms raised in “stop!” gestures, and didn’t look to have any guns. Just homemade white flags.
“Peace!” the man called through the broken front store window, sounding a little scared, a lot earnest, and American. Indiana, maybe southwestern Michigan.
“We don’t have guns,” the woman added quickly. “We don’t want to be any trouble.” By her voice, she was from the same place as the man standing beside her.
“You already are,” Mary told them flatly, not a hint of friendliness in her voice. “Whatta you want, and who else is with you?”
“N-no one.”
“No one else, creeping up on us while you talk?” McTavish snapped at them, waving his gun.
“No! There’re just the three of us!” The man cleared his throat nervously. “I’m Jim — Jim Adams — and this is my wife, Ida.”
McTavish asked a silent question by pointing his gun at the mumbling woman.
“Oh. That’s Jess. She’s...harmless.”
“Uh-huh,” McTavish told them, clear disbelief in his voice. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She...” Jim Adams ran out of words and looked to his wife.
; “She has Jesus where her brains ought to be,” Ida said flatly. “Lost her family a few months back to someone — we don’t know who — shooting from far off. She follows us everywhere, now. Nice enough. Good cook.”
“I’m sure she can fry squirrel just fine,” Mary told them in a voice like ice, “but I asked you what you wanted, and I haven’t heard an answer.”
She hefted a can back beside her ear, ready to throw, and added, “We don’t plan to spend the night standing here talking, when we could’ve been back out of here by now and heading somewhere safer.”
“Safer?” Ida Adams asked her, just a touch of a quaver in her voice. “In all this?”
“Up on a roof,” McTavish told her, “of someplace that won’t burn easily, with no buildings or trees near, when there’s enough of us to stand watch through the night. Now what do you want?”
“Help,” Jim Adams replied quickly.
“To do what?”
“Get...” Adams cleared his throat again, sounding almost ashamed. “To get to Grants Pass.”
His words fell into a little silence.
After it started to get longer than “a little,” he grounded his white flag — it trembled, all the way down, so his hands must be shaking a lot — and stammered, “Y’see, just before all the — everything went bad, Ida read this message from someone on the Internet, about meeting in—”
“We know.” Mary’s voice was still flat, but not quite as cold as before. “Grants Pass, Oregon. Someone named Kayley, wanting to meet her friend Monte there. A sort of peaceful-people rendezvous, if the end of the world happened. She was scared of tough guys with guns setting themselves up as warlords. We printed it out, back before the power went.”
Clint knew that Mary’s precious handful of printouts were far fewer than she wanted them to be. She’d made them in spare moments snatched at her job, back when computers worked and people everywhere were living lives so fast that they never had time to look up and think — so the plagues had hit them like a brick in the face, one two three, making most of them fall over dead without even having time to blink, or say more than, “Shit, now, what—?”
Not that Mary was going to tell these strangers any of that. She stood up. “But why’re you here? Oregon’s that way, a lo-o-ong way behind you, not this direction!”
Ida suddenly burst into tears. “You know!” she sobbed, “you know about it!”
“Uh,” Jim said awkwardly, putting an arm around his wife, “ah, we...I once saw a stack of maps in your railroad station here. The map was big; covered all the northern US as well as Canada. I hoped I could find some of those maps. I thought we could follow the rail lines to Grants Pass; I don’t know any other way to get there. Our library — we’re from out past Lake Orion — didn’t have a good atlas, it just used the Internet. I hoped...” His voice ran down again.
“Are you...” Ida Adams fought down tears enough to speak, her voice soaring in hope. “Are you going to go there, too?”
“Nope,” McTavish and Mary both replied, more or less together.
Ida wilted, slumping back into her husband’s arm. “But...but you printed it out, you said...”
“Lady,” Clint almost growled, “Oregon means the Rocky Mountains. Getting through them, that is. And it’s a long way, across land we don’t know, most of it not the forests — the firewood — we do know. And this Kayley was just a kid, a teen; we don’t even know if she made it there, or Monte or anyone did. You’re chasing not much more than hope.”
“Hope that might be nothing at all,” McTavish told them sourly.
“And just what’s wrong with that?” Jim Adams blazed up into sudden anger, waving his arms as if no one had guns and he wasn’t silhouetted against a burning city, with boats of armed men getting nearer behind him. “Just what the Sam fuck is wrong with chasing hope?”
“Nothing,” Clint replied. “But moving across this land, this continent, chasing it — hoping things’ll be better somewhere else, instead of trying to make the best of it right where you are — that’s the mistake we always make. The mistake we’ve gone on making for more than three centuries.”
He started to pace along the aisle, long-broken glass crunching under his boots, as if he was back in some classroom teaching to bored teenagers. “The settlers came across the Atlantic, hoping for land and food enough for a better life, then moved west. Always seeking something better, somewhere else, until they ran out of land and found themselves staring at the Pacific. Later, with banks making millions, oilmen making more, and everyone being told a lot of crap about the American Dream, we hopped on planes or packed up and moved from state to state — or province to province, up here — chasing better jobs. Or any work at all. Always ‘moving on’ to somewhere better. Instead of making ‘better’ right here.” He sighed. “That’s always been our mistake, all of us.”
“Not all of us,” Mary said sharply. “We — we natives, we Indians — we lived ‘here’ first, until the rest of you came and walked all over us. Looking everywhere for riches, and taking everything, and messing up everything you couldn’t take. Back then, we — my people — knew all about living our lives right here.”
“All right,” McTavish told her. “Not you Indians. Point granted. Now can we get back to grabbing cans and getting the hell out of here?”
As if his words had been a proverbial cue, a boat engine roared and then died out on the river, someone down by the bank cursed, there was a gunshot, more cursing, another shot, then a shriek of pain from what sounded like a wolf but might have been a man.
The crazy woman giggled suddenly, loud and high, and turned to wave her white flag at all the noise — or perhaps at burning Detroit.
Which promptly erupted in a ground-shaking explosion, as something went up over on Slug Island as the flames reached it.
Clint ignored all the tumult.
“We know all about hope,” he told the Adamses. “That’s why we printed out this Kayley person’s post, and kept it. But we’re staying here. Back where we can farm, I mean, not down here in what’s left of Windsor, where it’s men with guns roaming around day and night. We’re not, repeat not, going off on any wild goose chase to Grants Pass.”
“Y’see,” McTavish told the Adamses, “for us, nothing much has changed, really.”
Jim Adams gaped at him.
“Nothing much has changed?”
Adams was so incredulous he thrust his head forward through the big open space where the shop window had been, to try to get a better look at McTavish’s face.
Then he glanced at giggling, mumbling Jess for a moment before looking back at McTavish, making his opinion of McTavish’s sanity more than clear.
Surprisingly, McTavish chuckled. “Yeah, all right, everything’s changed, but look at it this way: for me, life is still a lot the same. I need to be with people I can trust, and to get enough to eat. To do that, and get through the days, means the usual sweating, never-ending shitload of hard work. All that’s changed is that there’s no one left to come looking for taxes — and numbers on a bank’s computer monitor mean nothing anymore. No bank, no monitor coming on, and no one left to look at it, either. Now things have value again, not...not dirty scraps of paper with dead presidents on them.”
He ran out of words, and looked at Heston. “You tell them, Clint.”
Who shrugged and said, “Oh, I think you put it pretty well. There’re a whole lot less people around, but we meet nasty, desperate ones. And wild animals who’ll kill you just as dead.”
“We’re not nasty,” Ida Adams insisted, sobbing, “but we are desperate. We hoped you’d help us!”
“We will,” Clint told them firmly. “Come back here tomorrow. Not early, but before sunset. We won’t be here.” He slammed his hand down on a freezer. “But I know where those maps that you’re looking for are — and some better ones. I’ll leave them in here.”
“I—” Jim Adams seemed to be having trouble finding words again. It sounded like he was
fighting to keep from crying. “I...thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Mary told him. “Now get the hell out of here before we all get killed!”
Not quite sobbing again, Ida stepped out of her husband’s arms to tug at the mumbling woman’s sleeve. Looking at no one, Jess turned and came with her, singing to herself of the love of Jesus for her and everyone.
“Thank you,” Ida said into the darkened shop. “Thank you so much. I thought you wouldn’t help us, after what you said, and — and—”
Jess stopped singing, turned her head to look Clint Heston right in the eye, and asked, as courteously and yet as sharply as if she’d been a Supreme Court judge, “Why are you helping us?”
Everyone was so startled that they stared at her in silence long enough for someone else to noisily and profanely shoot a wolf down on the riverbank.
Then Clint replied quietly, “Because you’re right; we all need hope. And you can be ours. If you get to Grants Pass, by damn and all you still hold dear, you find a way to get word to us and tell us who’s there and how you’re getting on, you hear?”
Jess nodded approvingly — and started singing again, turning to look at the flames of Detroit.
“We’ll do that,” Jim Adams promised. “We will get to Grants Pass, and we’ll find a way to let you know. Somehow.”
“We’d better go,” Ida said, towing Jess.
“Get away from the river,” McTavish advised them. “Find a roof you can get to, not a high one if you don’t have a rope. Stay quiet and don’t make any light.” He waved at the flames of Detroit. “And stay out of that firelight as much as you can; you can be seen a long way off. By people who’ll shoot you just to cut down on the competition for stuff — or to take what you might be carrying.”
“But we’re not carrying anyth—”
“They don’t know that,” Mary told them flatly. “Good luck.”
Grants Pass Page 14