by Clary, LeRoy
Without question, she veered off into the trees along a path narrow enough to fit us without room on either side. The footprint had been far too small to be from the huge man in the cabin. That meant there were at least two people alive besides us. When it had been left beside the puddle, I had no idea.
There were too many things neither of us knew about the surface of our world. That was our major problem. Things that everyone else on the surface did know and understand. It eluded us. Simple things they would take for granted. We were at a huge disadvantage.
The path turned and went up a gentle hill, but neither of us had the legs to continue. We slowed. Mayfield held out her arm to slow me as she gasped, “The barking is farther away.”
“That doesn’t mean we should stop.”
“Why not?” She said between pants.
I was as winded as her and wanted the dog chasing us to stop, but an idea had entered my head and wouldn’t go away. “What if the dog and man are more behind for now, but keep coming at a steady pace?”
“I see,” she said.
“He might even let the dog loose and let it chase us and then he’ll be along later to clean up the scraps.”
She stood, turned, and stumbled ahead. The path continued upward, and our legs were burning more with every step. I could barely breathe. Near the top, we crossed a wide clearing filled with green grass and tiny blue flowers.
When we reached the other side, she dropped to her knees, exhausted.
I said between gasping for air, “We have to go on.”
“No,” she said and pointed to the trees to her left. “You go over there twenty paces.” She took a few more breaths and managed to continue in a gasp for words, “I go there.”
She pointed to her right. It didn’t make sense. We were on our knees trying to recover and the barking of the dog echoed in the hills we’d come from.
Mayfield finally said, “If the damned dog comes into the clearing, we shoot it. Then we run again.”
“The man might get so angry he will chase us for days.”
“Do you want to shoot him also, Danner? Do you?”
“I do not. Just pointing out reality.” Instead of arguing, I turned and made my way to where she had told me to hide. A log lay there, large enough to hide behind and be out of sight. She went the other way.
I slipped the strap on my rifle and sighted where the path emerged into the clearing. The indicator told me a shell was in the chamber, ready to fire. I thumbed the safety off and waited.
The barking seemed a long way off but continued for another ten minutes. My breathing returned to a normal pace. Mayfield was out of sight.
I braced the rifle across the top of the log. The barking changed in pitch to be less excited and finally quit.
My imagination told me the man had either recalled the dog or used the leash to pull him off the hunt. He had chased us far enough he wouldn’t worry about us returning. We had been warned.
Mayfield stood as she shouldered her rifle. I did the same.
She pointed to the ridge behind us and we met at the trail. She said, “I didn’t want to shoot that dog, you know.”
“It was just doing its duty,” I agreed.
She said, “We were taught about the bombs, radiation, deformities, and the rest. There was supposed to be an empty wasteland out here. Instead, we find a lush forest and a world filled with people.”
“Not exactly ‘filled’ with people.”
“No? Our first day, in what we suspect to be far from civilization, we saw one person and the footprint of another. That’s quite a tally for a rural area near a mountain pass.”
I saw her point. “So, what now?”
“We pause. Take a break. Not from running, but to reconsider everything we thought we knew. Find a place to make a camp for the night and set everything up. Test it out. It might take longer than we expect. Then we plan. And look at the map. And plan some more.”
She had it all scoped out, so I knew what she’d been thinking about while we lay in wait so we could shoot the first dog either of us had ever seen except in pictures and stories.
The path topped out with a view of a much larger valley. Ahead were flat areas with rectangles marked by the crops they grew, or the animals within fences. They were farms.
The two people we’d identified as living on the surface were a small portion of the total number. In the valley below must be hundreds, more than we’d ever seen. I said, “If we make camp here and build a warm fire, we can use the binoculars to watch the entire valley.”
With another of those infuriating eye-rolls, she said, “Up here, our campfire would be a beacon to lead anyone below right to us. Remember how the smoke took us directly to the man and dog?”
“Then, what’s your plan?”
“We make a camp on the backside of this ridge where they cannot see us. No fire tonight because of smoke. We learn how to set up the tent and do as we have discussed. We make plans instead of stumbling into danger.”
Maybe she was smarter than me, after all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It didn’t take long to find a good place to set up our tent. Right over the backside of the ridge and a few hundred steps off the path, we located a small depression where anyone using the path probably wouldn’t see us. If we were quiet, they might walk right past and never notice. The ground was flat and covered in deep, lush grass, but no trees.
Remembering Sarge’s classes, I moved along the path searching for footprints and found ones left by animals, but no people. While I couldn’t identify the animal prints, none of them were large enough to be lions, bears, or elephants.
In the depression, we spread the tent on the place most level and stretched it out. Fiberglass poles fit logically together and formed hoops, one for each set of loops sewn on the tent.
In five minutes, we had it set up. The hoops maintained the shape, and when we stored our things inside one end, the weight held it in place. There was no danger of it blowing away. We unrolled our sleeping bags at the other end.
I went to the top of the ridge and used the binoculars in the late afternoon sunshine. There were cows, sheep, and pigs on the farms. All familiar animals from books. Two-rutted roads went on past the fields to reach farms or houses. Around the houses were gardens, neatly rows of planted items I assumed was food.
It seemed every house/farm had two or three horses as well as other animals. And they had at least one dog, usually two or three. When a rider traveled the road, the barking of dogs drifted up to us, a new chorus of barking as the riders passed each house. The dogs often raced to the road to yip at the rider and horse, and the men on the horses often cursed them or lashed out with their feet. It all seemed very confusing.
Mayfield came to lay beside me and watch. She had the maps with her. They were printed, but not on paper, and were coated with a waterproof substance. She pointed to one and said, “That’s Deep Hole.”
Her finger indicated a rose icon on the map and then started to move across the other features. The river in the center of the valley was clearly where we’d been. Where it widened and wound through a larger valley was where we sat. To the lower far-left edge, marked with an arrow, in bold letters, it said, Seattle.
Our location was nearer to what was labeled Stevens Pass. Everett was west, almost parallel to our location, and Seattle to the south, although not featured on this map, it was on another. However, there was a large rose east of Seattle and a smaller one in central Everett. Another was east of Everett, not far from us. The latter was the nearest sanctuary to us, located on Highway 2, which was the same road we believed we followed.
It was the only large road that traveled east and west and passed right by Deep Hole, which was only a mile off the road. Another road labeled I-90 paralleled ours, and along it was the larger rose symbol and a smaller rose to the north. The other pages of the maps detailed Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia, and the next page showed Portland. Subsequent pages were of the easter
n sides of Washington and Oregon, where the land was desolate and dry. There were a few more roses there, but the distances were enough to require a couple of weeks to travel on foot.
Another horseman rode down the road below us. We watched as a pair of sturdy horses pulled a plow in a field and the farmer waved to the one trotting past.
“No cars or trucks,” Mayfield said. “Makes sense.”
“It’s sensible not to use cars or trucks?” I snorted in a way that always drew her ire.
She remained calm. It looked like she forced herself. Our tempers were barely hidden and controlled despite us not fighting since leaving the sanctuary. “Cars take gasoline that has to be refined from oil. Do you know how to do it?”
“Somebody down there must.”
She said, “Maybe. How about building a tire from raw materials? Where do you get the rubber to make it, Danner? Or a spark plug? Can you make one of those? Do you think anyone in the valley down who raises cows or pigs knows how?”
“Probably not.”
“Probably not, to a hundred similar questions, too. The infrastructure to make complicated machinery is gone. When one critical part of the car fails, the car can’t go.”
“There must be warehouses full of spare parts.” I liked my quick, intelligent response.
“Not likely. Parts wear out and spares wear out. Besides, the warehouses may be hundreds of miles from here. But look at it this way. Horses will get you where you want to go, they are self-replicating, and all you have to do is feed them grass.”
The revelation made me sad. Our kind, a society that had reached for the stars, had plunged back into the eighteenth century. In a way, it made me feel worse than if there were no people at all. “What’s our next move?”
“The underground shelter east of Everett. It’s the closest.”
“Not what I meant. But while we’re talking about the shelters, are we going to keep that as our main goal? I thought you hated what they did to us.”
“The shelter near Everett did nothing to us. It was ours that banished us. We should keep an open mind.”
She had a point. Still, did we want to put our lives in danger so we could go ring the doorbell of another Deep Hole? If we did, they might not even answer. Or, they might betray us as ours had. I kept my ideas to myself and peered into the binoculars.
Mayfield said, “If we had a pair of horses, travel would be easier and faster.”
“If we had wings, we could fly.”
She punched my arm again.
I said, “Listen, people on those farms are probably used to people trying to steal their horses. That’s why they have dogs and maybe other alarms. My point, and one I should have made in a more civilized manner, is that until we know a lot more, we don’t want to interact with people.”
“Civilized manner? Did I just hear an apology of sorts?”
“You did,” I muttered without taking my eyes away from the binoculars, although they were centered on nothing of importance. The glasses were just a way for me to hide my emotions. “The people in the farmhouses in the valley are just like us, right?”
“We don’t know that. We don’t know anything!”
That was the smartest thing I’d ever heard her say. We knew nothing of the world we’d emerged into and to stay alive, we had to act our part. The dog at the cabin in the woods that gave chase to us was a perfect example. Since our knowledge of dogs was minimal, we’d gotten too close to the cabin. The dog had smelled us.
I leaned closer to Mayfield and sniffed. She smelled of substances from the army clothing. So, did mine.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked as she pulled away.
“Our clothes smell like plastic and other chemicals. Our backpacks and tent do too. I noticed it when we set it up. No wonder that dog knew we were there.”
“Not much we can do about that,” she grunted.
Despite that, I noticed she was sniffing herself and trying not to be obvious about it. I said, “We can wash our things in a stream or river. All of them. That should get rid of the worst smells.”
She said, “I’m sorry. I smelled it too, but let it go. Now that you mention it out loud, you do stink.”
“Not as bad as you.” I grinned.
She didn’t.
We’d as much as shouted our presence to the dog at the cabin. That had been a major error. How many more of the same magnitude could we make before being killed? Not many, I suspected.
I rolled over to my side and let the binoculars rest on the ground as I spoke. “You were right when you said we know nothing about living up here. But we don’t have Sarge or our teacher with us to advise us about the best way to do things. Knowing nothing is a good way to get killed. We are going to have to be much more careful.”
“Do you have a solution for that problem?” she asked in a tone that lacked her usual caustic undertones.
“Maybe. I sort of already said it. What we need is a teacher here on the surface to teach us what’s what. Since we don’t have one, I think we should try to find a candidate.”
“And how would you go about doing that?”
A small shrug suggested I wasn’t sure. “Kidnap a person and make him tell us what we want to know.”
“Do you think that is a good idea? Is that what you truly think?” The caustic tone was back as much as ever.
“I think so.”
“Where would you get this kidnapped teacher?”
“From somewhere that a person is living alone. If others are living with them, they will chase and kill us. A loner, widow, or outcast, is what we need. We won’t hurt them. Maybe we could trade, knowledge for something we have.”
“What do you have that a person might want to trade for? A few of those tasteless power bars?”
“No, but we might have something of value. Right now, I’m not too fond of this stinky army suit and would let it go cheap.” I kept my chin high and locked eyes as if I believed everything I said. While the clothing smelled of odd chemicals and newness, the item that might be worth trading was probably ammunition. By now, those with guns had probably used up most of the bullets in the country. The rub was, I didn’t know what Mayfield would think about giving away ammo when we might eventually need it.
She bought my explanation—or pretended she did. It was hard to tell with her because she was so intelligent, and she regularly outsmarted me. I might lift more weight than her in the gym, but her mind was always quicker than mine and her grasp of detailed information was better. It was easier to just accept she was smarter and deal with it.
I was more deceptive and intuitive when dealing with people, everyone but with her. She seemed to be able to sense anytime I lied, which had been often in the past. I probably had a tell, like Matt, the welder in Deep Hole that I played poker with. In his case, I had to intentionally lose hands, so I didn’t win so many he wouldn’t play with me because I could tell exactly when he had a good hand.
Perhaps Mayfield was doing something similar to me. If she knew I was lying and concealed the method, it put me in an awkward position.
“How are we going to make the selection of the person we contact?” She used the word contact instead of abducting, kidnap, capture, or hostage. She was peering at me in the way that demanded a response.
“Well, there are two things that seem critical. The right person must live alone. And that place must be isolated.”
“Why?”
She was pushing. Making me think too hard. I said, “Like we talked about, we don’t want others coming after us when the person turns up missing. That’s true for both things.”
“I see. Are we going to hurt this person?”
I shook my head.
“If they fail to talk or provide the information we need, will we release them so they can run back to family and friends and then all of them pursue us?”
She was doing it again. Using my words against me. However, I wasn’t about to back off. There are many ways to play a
hand of cards, and there were ways to play Mayfield. Placing her in a position where she had to deal intimately with others was always useful. She didn’t do that well. The additional item was placing her in authority, meaning in charge. She didn’t like that.
I said, “Mayfield, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. You ask such penetrating questions, but what is going on is that you think me a little thick-headed—and you’re right when compared to you. I apologize for not thinking of you earlier. With your intelligence, you should be the one leading our mission, and I should have recognized that from the beginning. What do you want me to do?”
“W-what?”
“So, let me get out of your way and let you think. Tell you what, I’ll just lay here and watch the farms below while you devise a plan. I won’t talk or disturb you until you need to tell me what to do. I’m ready to do whatever you need.”
With that, I rolled to my stomach and put the binoculars to my eyes and forced my lips to keep any trace of a grin away. That necessitated gritting my teeth until my jaw hurt. Despite the danger of the situation we were in, old habits die hard.
The odd thing was that Mayfield didn’t try to argue or attempt to best me. She settled with her back against a tree trunk and remained quiet. I feared that she was considering my suggestion. That meant that if she came up with an idea, I was sort of obligated to accept it.
She had silently and efficiently turned the tables.
I watched the farms. People went about doing obvious chores, and other chores and activities I didn’t understand at all. Some chopped wood or gathered hay and drove wagons pulled by horses and delivered it to barns. Those were understandable. Others were not. A woman hung clothing on thin ropes for no reason I could decipher. A farmer, a young woman perhaps, attached a horse to a horizontal railing and the horse walked in circles. She tapped the rump now and then with a thin stick to speed it up. She turned in circles along with the horse as she watched it.
I used the extreme magnification to discern whether the center of the contraption had a pivot point that turned a water pump or a turban to create electricity. There was none. It was a simple attachment to a pipe that allowed the horse to walk in endless circles with her guiding it.