Hereafter

by C. K. Crigger

  No surprise. She viewed them in exactly the same way, and felt only relief when they disappeared in the distance. She slept very little that night. Bogeymen appeared whenever she shut her eyes, not all of them with the brown mottled skin and sharpened teeth of Mags.

  Her sense of aloneness kept her staring into the dark corners of the camper, around which she never failed to set the bells. Who was there in this world to care for her? Easy answer. One smallish dog—and maybe the three horses who whickered and nuzzled her when she gave each a handful of oats.

  She rose that morning thankful to open the door and let a fresh breeze blow through the wagon while the dog barked at the horses.

  Occasionally she spied columns of smoke rising into a clear blue sky marking the fair weather Nate had promised. Up until now she avoided any meeting with whoever lit those fires, but then at last, and pretty much according to the schedule he’d worked out, she came down out of the hills into what had once been the rolling farmland of the Coeur d’Alene country. Almost home.

  Excitement built inside her as she rounded the last bend leading into the little town she’d grown up in. She’d gone to grade school here, in a burg already shrunken to barely more than a tribal smoke shop, a post office, a restaurant just skimping by, and a grain elevator.

  An involuntary moan escaped her lips as she reached the outskirts of town, sadness welling up to clog her chest.

  “Damn,” she breathed. “Damn.”

  Blizzard climbed onto her lap and licked her chin.

  The town was gone, except for a few dangerous mantraps the gaping old basements had become. They were scattered amongst an emerging hardwood forest of maple and oak, no doubt grown up from seed scattered by shade trees from the past. Like so much else in this long changed world, it appeared fire had once destroyed everything that would burn.

  Of course, basements didn’t burn, or not the concrete or rock walls anyway, although most had filled with debris over the years. A closer look showed a few were occupied. So, the old village wasn’t quite a ghost town. She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. Glad, because not everyone was dead. Sorry, because as she saw furtive movement between the scattered ruins, she trusted no one. Who knows what these people had become? Not Mags, at least, because she saw where roofs had been thrown over the basement walls, with chimneys rising above them. A reinforced door appeared likely to keep strangers, like her, at bay. A few had log palisades thrown up around them. Patches of land dotted with standing corn stalks and wheat stubble showed where the occupants had grown crops over the summer.

  Definitely not a Mag hive, then, she noted with relief, although without damping down her watchfulness. Nate had told her about those, that they were no better than a bear’s winter lair, and smelled even worse.

  Blizzard, limping only slightly, ranged over to investigate the new odors, until she called him back. Even then no one came to meet, or even question her, though she was aware of eyes tracking every move. Once the hair on the back of her neck rose, and she was certain she came close to death in that moment. Only at the last second did something change the hidden watcher’s mind. Maybe the fact that she turned the horses and the camper wagon onto what memory told her was the road to her grandparent’s farm.

  This area had been part of the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation. In 1909 homesteads had been apportioned out via a government lottery, the land, mostly timber, cleared. Lily’s grandfather’s family had been one of the original homesteaders, a point of great pride. There’d been Turnbow’s here for over a century—or could she make a claim for two?

  Anyway, in the years since the Event, the timber had started to come back, forcing Lily to steer the wagon on a zigzag path, finding her way. The road, never great to begin with, had disappeared in time. But she knew the number of hills to the home place. The first long rise to where Mitchell’s place once stood, then Drummond’s, also gone without a remaining trace. Restor’s, a vestige of the house still, then Schulman’s, burned to the ground, their big barn a mossy heap of rubble. Then, and at last, she made her final stop.

  There’d been a fire here, too, she saw at once. The ranch house had been brick, already sixty years old in her day, though built to last forever. It hadn’t, but the remains still littered the ground like the blackened bones of an old corpse.

  She’d guessed as much, hadn’t she? This was not so isolated a country as the Poundstone’s, now O’Quinn’s, Kettle Creek Ranch had been, and had suffered accordingly. There’d been no one left to preserve or rebuild here. Lily swallowed, and swallowed again, trying not to let weak tears blind her.

  “Whoa,” she called softly to the horses, tugging them to a stop where an asphalt driveway had once circled the big front yard. Blizzard, running beside the wagon, sat and looked up at her when they stopped, his head cocked questioningly.

  “This is it,” she told him. “End of the line. No more traveling, baby dog. Time to rest your weary feet.”

  There’d always been tall pines in the yard, scattering a hailstorm of pine cones every time the wind blew. Kept Grandma busy, picking the cockeyed things up and her cussing like a trooper the whole time. It was almost as though Lily could hear her voice in the susurrant whispering of the old trees.

  “Gran, Grandpa, I’m home,” she called.

  She sat there for a moment, listening, but then the sound faded and she took a deep breath. The voice wasn’t real. The wheel of time had turned and only ghosts remained. She counted herself one of them.

  A hollowness invading her core, she set the brake on the wagon and climbed down from the high seat. A rotting snowdrift left from the big storm barred the way to where the back door to the house had been, just as drifts always had. Heart heavy, she waded through it and stood looking.

  Nothing to see really. It’d been too long.She had taken too long to get home. Reaching down, she picked up one of the bricks, hardened nearly to glass by the destroying fire, and threw it hard into the middle of the house. Some small, living things scrambled away.

  Blizzard, instead of chasing them, leaned against her.

  “It’s pretty damn sad, isn’t it?” Her voice was thick, as though her throat would swell shut. “I don’t even know if they got buried. If they were in the house when it burned. Or if the crazy ones got them. Jesus!” The exclamation came out a croak. Maybe it was a prayer. “What if they turned into crazy ones? Into what became Mags.” But she didn’t believe it. Couldn’t.

  The dog sat on his haunches and pawed at her knee.

  “It’s all ours now, Blizzard. Yours and mine.” The pines, in their whispering, mocked her and she looked up and stared at the sky. “Who else’s?” she asked with a bitter little smile. But there was no answer to that.

  The short afternoon was already waning when Lily set about unhitching the horses and giving them each a good drink from the water barrel on the wagon. Their muzzles dripping, she led them over to a sugar maple grove sprouted up where the corral had been and hobbled them, patting each on the rump. There’d been no trees before, except a lone shade tree at the corner of the barn.

  A vision flashed in her mind’s eye, of Heathen lounging hipshot, drowsy-eyed in the sunshine, right about there, where grass stood tall among the trees, and her heart ached.

  She thrust the hurt aside. But at least there’d be no worry about feeding these animals for the next few days. After that?

  The thought served as a reminder. “C’mon,” she called to Blizzard. “Let’s find us something to eat. Tomorrow we start cleaning up around here. Grandma and Grandpa would be ashamed.”

  ***

  Dark came early in November, a constant even in this changed world. Lily had gone to bed soon after a meager supper and fallen into exhausted slumber. Hours—minutes—the timing escaped her, Blizzard startled her awake with a ‘sub voce’ growl. The dog jumped from the cot where he’d been warming her feet, and padded to the door, sniffing at the fine crack.

  “Hush, boy. What is it, Mags?” Tossi
ng the blankets aside, she reached for the crossbow, better for close up work than the regular bow, cocked it and inserted a bolt.

  Although the mutants leapt first into her head, further thought indicated the dog wasn’t making enough stink for him to have scented Mags. Nor lions. She listened with all attention, head cocked identically to Blizzard’s. Nothing pointed to the horses having been disturbed.

  “It’s those people from town, isn’t it? Has to be.”

  Well, and who could blame them for checking her out? Hadn’t they as much cause to distrust her as vice versa? At the same time, give them an inch and who knows what else they’d try to take. Life, apparently, didn’t have much of a price tag anymore. And, by golly, the hours of darkness were not a good time for friendly visiting. Not in this age. Not in any age.

  What to do?

  Time for a little hoodoo, she suspected, if not for all out war. Kill one and she would probably have to kill them all. Damn. She didn’t want to do that. For better or worse, they were her neighbors and true human beings.

  Slipping into her coat and boots—she always slept in her clothes nowadays, wrinkles be damned—Lily admonished Blizzard to guard the camper. Then, pulling her handy little illusion of “you can’t see me” about her, opened the door and stepped to the ground outside.

  The silence was almost heavy enough to feel. Breathing softly, just at the top of her lungs, Lily listened, her superlative hearing soon picking up traces of alien presence.

  A nervous intake of breath revealed someone over by the horses, a muffled cough at the corner of the old house another. Beyond them, a pair of people hiding behind trees spoke in low tones. And then there was the brush of feet on the ground headed her way.

  She stood still, a smile touching her lips. They’d seen the door open, then close, but they hadn’t seen her. Nor would they. Not quite yet. Let the anomaly work on their nerves while she gained the high ground. Soft-footed and keeping close to the dark side of the camper, she moved around to where a skinny man, shivering a little in a thin coat, stared nervously around, his eyes blind to her.

  Slow and easy, that was the way to go about things. She was two feet away from the guy and he couldn’t see her.

  Knife in hand, the guy flailed out once as though sensing her, but she slipped past him and mounted the stair to the wagon seat.

  “See anything?” the man by the horses whispered to the person closest to him.

  “Nothing,” the woman at the house replied. “Just…” But her voice trailed away.

  Showtime.

  Standing on the bench, Lily flicked her fingers at the sky, quick, quick, quick.

  Glowing balls of witch light shot up, blazing in the dark sky like the Fourth of July.

  Gasps, a couple cries, an arrow loosed by an archer shaken at the spectacle, gave her an adequate response.

  While they were all looking upward, Lily spoke, her voice carrying and deliberately unearthly in the still night. “Who are you?”

  Dead silence. The witch light died.

  “What do you want?” she called.

  The two in the trees, women, she saw as they moved, cried out. “Cross-up!” one said. “Run!” yelled the other.

  A finger motion sent another display of fireworks into the sky, breaking above their heads in a shower of sparks, freezing them in mid-motion.

  “Answer me,” she shouted at her loudest volume, which, she noted with satisfaction, sounded very loud indeed given the cold and darkness. Although the visitors seemed mesmerized by the show, she prepared to duck in case they loosed their arrows in her direction.

  But they didn’t. After a while, the man below her cleared his throat and said, his voice quaking. “We’re from town. Had to see where you was headed. Had to see who you are.”

  No need to lead them astray. “I am Lily Turnbow,” she said. “This is my grandfather’s farm.”

  “Fah,” said one of the women. “Ain’t nobody lived here ever.”

  “Oh, I assure you they did,” Lily said.

  “Ever for a long, long time.” The man below her was looking up, finding her location by voice, but she kept the illusion of invisibility in place.

  She forced a chuckle. “You seem to be right about that. But I claim this land as mine. My inheritance. Does anyone have a quarrel with that?”

  “You gonna magic us? Take our steads?”

  “I only want what’s mine. You keep what is yours. Simple. Honest.”Honest.Would they even recognize the concept?

  A pause showed they were wondering if they could accept her word—or what to do about it if they could not. Finally, the man nearest to her, apparently their spokesman, lowered his knife. “No weapons,” he instructed his people, and to her relief, arrows were reclaimed, bows reslung at their backs.

  “Where you hiding,” he asked then. “Come out. We ain’t gonna shoot you.”

  So she came out, enjoying their awe when she materialized in front of them and they realized another of her powers. Another burst of light reinforced their opinion as open-mouthed, they stared up at her standing tall on the wagon seat.

  “Go home,” she said. “Come back in daylight if you want to visit. You’ll be welcome then.”

  So they did. And no one was more amazed than she.

  ***

  In the midnight hours, ghosts came to haunt her sleep—preaching to her about the practicalities of the situation. She couldn’t stay here, surrounded by these desolate ruins. Grandpa’s voice got into her head and told her so.

  “No water here, kiddo. Always did have to pump it uphill from the well. And without electricity or a generator? Guess you know that ain’t gonna fly.”

  Yes. She remembered the inconvenience even short power outages caused. But she also recalled how the draw where the well stood in its rock pump house was always sub-irrigated, and that they got two, sometimes three cuttings of hay from there during the summer. Putting up the crop for winter feed was always damned hard work. Many a time she’d drawn the job of stacking bales in the big barn loft. Yeah. The same barn that now was only a bump of debris out by a non-existent corral.

  “Oh, that well.” Grandma joined the ghostly conversation. “Did we tell you that an entrepreneur from Seattle wanted to buy us out and set up a bottled water facility? Said it was the best water in the west.” She laughed merrily at the idea.

  The west-side entrepreneur had been right. Lily could almost taste the water, icy cold to cut the dust when they were hauling hay.

  “The well, the well.” Words that echoed throughout her restless sleep remained in her mind in the morning. They meant something more, she thought, something that lay beneath the surface. And so, after a quick breakfast of oatmeal sweetened with honey, she tied Blizzard to one of the camper’s wheels with a length of rope long enough to allow him shelter under the wagon. She set a pan of water within his reach and optimistically instructed him to watch the horses and gear. Arming herself with bow and arrows, she set out to check over the next hill.

  In the years before rural electrification, Grandpa had told her, there’d been a windmill there with a mechanical pump. Surely something as simple as that could be resurrected, parts found or manufactured.

  Grandpa had laughed, calling the pump house his fortress. Said it was built to last three hundred years. He even built a small room at the front, a handy place to rest during harvest or haying when the work got a little too much for him. He wasn’t—hadn’t been—getting any younger, after all. But even as he joked, he made certain to keep the little building in good repair. The farm’s only source of water, they would’ve been in a pickle if the system failed.

  Speaking of pumps, the one in Lily’s chest beat faster as she topped the hill. A breeze blew through her hair; sunlight once again warmed her shoulders, the familiar hills rolled off into the distance.

  A pleasant day. If she closed off her mind, she could almost imagine a world untouched.

  At first she thought her short hike would turn out to be
mere exercise for her nearly healed leg because at first glance the wide draw was empty of everything except a bunch of young cottonwoods flourishing between rotted stumps of older trees. The cottonwoods hadn’t been there in her day, but the tree was notorious for its weed-like qualities, taking root wherever enough moisture allowed, apparently seeding itself by magic.

  Squinting, she saw a small mountain of rocks grubbed out of the fields over the years punctuated the whole. She had contributed to the pile herself, helping her grandfather clear the land each spring. Freeze and thaw cycles always threw a new crop of rocks up during the winter. God knows where they came from, sprouting from the dirt like weeds.

  But then she took a closer look. That mound of rocks. The placement didn’t look right. Hadn’t it been closer to the fence row to the south? And what was that poking out from the middle of the heap? It looked like a vent.

  Joy broke over her like a starburst. Of course. The pump house had been hidden in plain sight, covered by an artistic arrangement of rock mortared over the original building. Grandpa would’ve done that, when the world failed. Her grandparents’ last resort.

  She heard his chuckle as she hastened down the hill, anxious now to find out if anything had survived the century as she…slept.

  Caution borne of recent experience slowed her steps as she neared the disguised pump house. Snow still blocked the door on the north side. Grandma had always complained about a north side opening, making Grandpa grin. “Now, Helen,” he’d say, “what difference does it make to you? You haven’t been down here in fifteen years.”

  Lily smiled. Lack of information had never kept Gran from having an opinion.

  No tracks showed in the snow in front of the building, nor, she found as she scouted an ever widening circle around it, had anyone been there since the snow began. Or only a couple deer who evidently called the draw home.

  “Enough,” she whispered to herself, retracing her steps to the pump house. Time to see what was there, if only her heart would quit pounding in her ears.