She passed by a bevy of ancient television and radio transmission towers, the first harbingers of the coming of virtual worlds, now rusting and silent. There was a small lake on the flat near the towers and she took the opportunity to refill her sports bottle. Then, she remounted and pedaled into a nearby parking lot. The sign at the entrance indicated the lot was for Buffalo Bill’s grave, whoever that was—she hadn’t ever bothered to break into the ancient cabin, snack shop, museum, and information center next to it to find out. Whoever he was, his final resting place had a great view.
She avoided the obvious perch of the flat, concrete observation deck, with its vista of Golden, and, instead, followed the short path toward the black wrought-iron fence surrounding a gravestone made of chunks of white quartz. To the southeast of the silent grave, there was a viewpoint nestled in the trees. Here she could look past the television towers and beyond the dome of the Jefferson County courthouse toward downtown Denver. The wide lanes of 6th Avenue pointed straight away from her position, vectoring toward the tall buildings of the city.
The sun warmed her back as she looked out over the plains for any sign of her enemies, just as the natives had many, many years before.
* * * * *
Derek pulled into a park of some sort near a big, domed building on the southwestern edge of Golden, making sure to leave the truck parked in a patch where the sun still peeked between two nearby hills, so it could soak up solar energy during their break. After more than three decades, the photovoltaic cells were nowhere near as efficient as they had once been.
High on the hillside above them, a huge letter “M” made of crushed, white rock stood out from the dark vegetation, even in the shadows of the dwindling day. Derek knew from his briefings on the area that it had been constructed long ago by students of the nearby Colorado School of Mines as a manifestation of school pride, but it always said something else to him as he passed it on his travels with the squad. It was a sign of possession, a monogram of ownership of the very hills themselves. This, the giant mark taunted, is the realm of the “Mals,” with a capital “M,” a people of pride and dignity and worth. A people that deserves the respect of a proper noun, not the dismissive disrespect of being referenced by a lower-case contraction.
Despite the many years since the letter’s construction, no weed intruded on the uniform whiteness of the stones forming the giant mark. The edges of the letter were straight and true, apparently undisturbed by erosion or gravity. No doubt the mark was maintained by the mals, much as it had been maintained by decades of students at the school. On moonless nights they would pull the emerging weeds and straighten the loose rocks along the edges of the line.
Pride never died.
Only soldiers died.
Soldiers like Derek and Maria.
All too often they died for pride. Pride was easier to drill into a recruit than understanding and, thus, the basis of more killing than any cause or belief, itself.
Apparently, Derek had not been drilled enough. Here he was, traveling with the enemy, just trying to find away to get along . . . and understand. Maria, he hoped, was doing the same.
The two companions stretched their legs a bit and used the restroom facilities, which to their surprise, still had running water, apparently fed by a lake or cistern of some type up in the foothills and, therefore, not dependent on electricity or pumps for water pressure.
Derek wet a kerchief and began to wipe the dust from the dull black solar panels to increase their efficiency. Maria took his cue and did the same, concentrating on the passenger’s side, while he worked on the driver’s side. It took a while, but they got the job done.
* * * * *
Having finished their task, Maria started to open the passenger door to climb back in to continue their journey.
Derek waved her off. “Hold up, there.”
Maria stopped, her hand still on the latch for the door. “What, you want me to drive?”
“Nah,” replied Derek. “I just want to let it sit in the sun as long as we can, before we head out. The route hugs the hills pretty tight, so we won’t be getting much power, even though it will be twilight for quite a while.”
“We could stay here for the night. After all, running water is not something we should let go to waste.”
Derek shook his head. “Not safe.”
“Too near the city? It’s been quiet for quite a while; I think the gangs have moved on . . .” She stopped speaking mid-sentence, practically mid-word. She regretted her statement; it revealed too much about her and Sanctuary.
Derek seemed not to notice her counter-intelligence faux pas, wrinkling his nose a bit and shaking his head again.
“The gangs have . . . moved on. Nah, too near I-70; we’ll be crossing it in just a couple miles.”
“I suppose you want to go into the city, then,” Maria said without enthusiasm. Even though there were a zillion houses on a zillion little side streets in which to hide, she knew she could never, ever feel safe in the city.
He looked at her with a sudden sharpness, his head snapping up to look her square in the eye. “Never, never go into the city, any big city. It’s certain death.” His tone backed off as he continued. “We’ll skirt along the foothills until we get well south.”
* * * * *
Nothing moved in the city as far as Kelly could tell. But as she brought the binoculars down, her eyes caught movement closer in, at the bottom of Lookout Mountain itself—two people in a patch of sunlight next to an old SolarFord pick-up.
They might or might not have information. But a working SolarFord, that was a prize worth having by hook or, God forgive her, by crook.
She grabbed the mountain bike and started pedaling.
It was all downhill from here.
* * * * *
Maria looked at Derek, confused by both his information and his tone.
“I thought you agreed that the gangs had moved on.”
“Actually,” he said, sighing, “they’re all dead.”
Maria had no particular sympathy for the gangs. Before she had joined the Believers in Sanctuary, she had actually had a number of unpleasant and violent encounters with several of the urban gangs, particularly one led by a psychotic warlord that went by the name of Greco. But whenever her feelings about Derek, as a person, started to soften, something, usually something he said, would remind her that he was a professional killer—an obedient minion in the government’s methodical genocide of all mankind.
“Killed them all?” she bristled. “Must have been quite a fight.” She looked him straight in the eye. “What was your personal body count?” she sneered.
“I wasn’t there . . . It wasn’t a fight . . .” Derek stammered. His eyes showed shame.
“Then how did they all die?” she replied, uncertainly.
“Let’s just say that if Rocky Flats bothers you, downtown Denver should fucking scare you to death . . . to absolute death.”
Maria’s mind raced. She let go of the truck’s door latch and began to pace furiously back and forth while she worked through the ramifications of what she had heard, what a ConFoe had voluntarily revealed to a mal, a mal he knew was a member of a military force of some sort.
“You nuked Denver?” she finally blurted out.
Derek motioned toward the skyline of the now-empty city, the windows of the higher floors still gleaming, unbroken, reflecting the reddish hues of the sun low in the western sky.
“Does it look like we nuked Denver?”
“There’s some kind of bomb that leaves the buildings standing, but kills the people.”
“Yeah, neutron bombs, they call ‘em. Some people say we did use some of those in the really big towns. New York, Mexico City, Beijing. I dunno. Maybe. Either they didn’t have enough bombs or they didn’t want to use them all. You see, a neutron bomb, that’s temporary radiation. You use them when you want to kill a population, then move into the area with your own personnel later.”
She stared
at him, mouth agape. How could he be so nonchalant, so scientific about killing so many people?
Derek continued his clinical explanation of yet another incident of ConFoe atrocity.
“If you want to radiate somebody and you don’t care if the territory is useful later, you just over-fly it with a crop-duster and let loose with a load of pulverized nuclear waste. That high-level stuff, that’ll be hot forever. Fifty-thousand-year half-life or somesuch.”
She looked at the skyline in shock, tears falling silently from her eyes. It wasn’t enough that they wanted to abandon the world, the real world. It wasn’t enough that they believed they had to take everyone with them. No, they had to poison the world for anyone that might escape their clutches and attempt to rebuild, to booby-trap the earth for anyone, man or animal, that might innocently wander into the spires of grandeur and progress that mankind had once erected.
Derek looked at her sheepishly. “I probably shouldn’t have told you. It’s against regulations . . . and, well, probably pretty awful from your perspective. From mine, well, it was a relatively clean way to deal with what for us was a pretty big problem—no muss, no friendly casualties, no house-to-house urban warfare. Just dump a load of garbage and move on.”
Maria said nothing. Tears continued to flow as she paced, now more slowly in the fading sunlight.
“I’m told it’s a pretty fast way to go.” He shrugged slightly in embarrassment. “Not really painless, I know, but not . . . torture, either.”
She hated what he was a part of, but knew that he was just an instrument of others. She wanted to stalk away, run away into the woods, and warn Sanctuary of this latest ConFoe treachery.
No wonder the ConFoes were more prevalent in the mountains in the last few months. The cities had been quelled. They were just mopping up the hinterlands before they won.
At the same time, she longed to redeem him and she knew that she could not safely leave him here. She owed that much to Sanctuary, if it still existed. More importantly, she was becoming reluctant to abandon what was proving to be a gold mine of intelligence data. Sure, he could be spreading misinformation intentionally, but what he said had the ring of sincerity and plausibility to it.
It smelled of truth—hideous, awful ConFoe truth.
Maria sat down on a concrete and wood park bench and cried, not just for the lost city-dwellers, but for the increasingly hopeless situation that Sanctuary faced—cut off now from scavenging the city and bearing the full force of the ConFoes’ devastating attention.
She didn’t know how long she sat sobbing, just that Derek let her, without rushing her or trying to comfort her—as if he instinctively knew that a ConFoe couldn’t comfort her from this bleak pain. Finally she looked up in the dimming light and saw Derek unnecessarily wiping the solar panels again to keep his anxiousness to move out in check and to distract himself from the pain his organization had surely caused.
“It . . . wasn’t your decision,” she finally stammered. “J-just give me a few minutes.” She motioned with her thumb back towards the cinder-block restrooms with the real running water.
“Don’t take too long,” said Derek, gazing southeast at the last rays of the sun bouncing off the buildings downtown. The delay had obviously made him antsy. “We’ve lost the light and should be heading out.”
Maria gazed with him for a moment at the lost city, then turned to go and freshen up—to start again.
* * * * *
Kelly could have taken the hairpin turns of Lookout Mtn. Road down the hill for maximum speed, but the rapid movement of the bike on the exposed right-of-way would have given her presence away, even though the bike had been painted charcoal gray by the Believers to help hide it from their enemies. Instead, she dropped downhill, southward along the backside of the hill’s ridge, to access the old hiking and riding trails. The Apex Trail, along the path of an old-time covered wagon track from the settler days according to a faded Forest Service sign, led down along the creases between the ridges of Lookout Mountain and behind an old cluster of touristy shops at the bottom to the edge of the park where she had seen the vehicle.
Kelly raced as fast and as heedlessly as she dared toward the location of the SolarFord. The downhill trek was at a bone-jarring pace that compressed her spine and left several cuts on her hands, face, and ankles from branches and vegetation that encroached upon the winding path.
She ditched the bike in the last of the bushes and tall buffalo grass at the edge of the park, as soon as she spotted the vehicle. She hunched down and approached as quickly and as quietly as she could, moving from cover to cover while the two individuals were both turned toward the fiery reflections from the tall buildings in Denver’s central valley. Neither the truck nor the clothing of the individuals were typical for ConFoes, but, then, the bastards probably had mal spies and confederates. It would be best to listen in before she revealed herself.
Suddenly, the nearest individual, the woman, turned toward her and headed for some kind of nearby cinder-block building. Kelly had been trained to be still in such situations, in the professional military manner of all scouts. But the training was quite unnecessary in this instance. She froze in shock as she saw the woman’s face.
It was Lieutenant Maria Casini.
* * * * *
As she strode toward the restroom, a slight motion caught Maria’s eye. Without revealing her attention to Derek, who stood mere yards away, watching her retreating back, she fixed her eyes towards it as she moved deliberately toward the restrooms. Motionless, mostly covered behind a tree, was the shape of an individual. Maria’s training in observation and her familiarity with her home quickly revealed the situation to her. It was a Believer scout of some sort dressed in the same type of gray jumpsuit she had been wearing earlier. A rubber band around the leg at the bottom of the exposed trouser leg clearly suggested to Maria that it was one of the mountain bike messengers and spies that they occasionally used for forays into the city or to communicate with other mal contingents.
She entered the restroom, winking in the direction of the agent, but unsure whether her signal had been seen. She couldn’t converse with the operative, not with Derek so close by awaiting her quick return. She had ample information to convey, but no way to quickly do it. Worse yet, if she did nothing, the scout might go into the city and die of radiation poisoning.
What could she do? She had a map in her pocket, but no writing instrument and no time. Her gaze whirled around the room, frantic for some implement or some inspiration.
She grabbed up a small sharp stone, thinking she could scratch on the mirror or prick herself for some blood with which to write in some garish and grisly manner on the cluttered color map she held in her hand.
Outside, Derek called to her. “Hey, Maria. We need to get a move on.”
Maria’s gaze fell upon the map, ringed with advertisements and coupons from days long past. With a quick motion she ripped off a large coupon on the back, the sound of the tearing paper reverberating like gunfire in the small cement structure. She quickly stuck the coupon in the crack where the frame held the mirror. Taking her small stone she coughed as cover as she scratched a hurried arrow in the glass, pointing to the coupon.
Fearing that Derek would investigate or, worse yet, her compatriot would take some foolish pre-emptive action if left to her own imaginings for too long, she quickly strode out of the building, the torn map clutched visibly in her right hand—the hand toward the scout. She moved purposely and quickly toward the SolarFord, her index finger tapping deliberately on the obviously torn map in signal as she moved.
“Sorry,” she said, more loudly than she really needed to, “they were out of toilet paper.” She opened the door to the truck. “I know we’ve got a lot to talk about and a long way to go, but we’ll get there.”
* * * * *
Now what? Kelly was pretty sure that the Lieutenant had seen her before she entered the building, but she didn’t dare move. The male—the Lieutenant’s capt
or?—was pacing and staring toward the small building the Lieutenant was in, straight past the tree with which Kelly was desperately trying to meld.
Maybe she could rush him—he didn’t appear to be holding a weapon, but it was hard to tell. The ancient SolarFord blocked her view. Maybe she could sneak forward and clamber under the black tarp in the bed of the truck before they left. Then again, maybe the Lieutenant was depending on her finding a way into the building, apparently a park restroom, to communicate.
A rip of paper and a sudden coughing convinced her that the latter was the case. The Lieutenant was signaling communication—paper—and impatience—coughing. She had just determined to chance moving back and around to the men’s entrance to the same building when the Lieutenant suddenly strode out of the building and quickly into the SolarFord, talking and tapping on some kind of brochure or map in her hand. She did her best to memorize the Lieutenant’s words exactly, so she could analyze the communication later. She got the gist of it immediately, though, and abandoned any hope of clambering under the tarp, as the truck fired up and headed off.
She had been left a message of destination in the restroom, she was sure. And she was expected to be there to receive further communication.
As soon as the truck was out of sight, Kelly rushed into the women’s restroom, which was quickly darkening in the fading light. An arrow scratched hastily on the mirror pointed at a piece of paper.
She grabbed the paper and quickly turned it over, looking for any message, any writing.
There was none.
On the one side was a map segment, too fragmentary to identify quickly. On the other side was a coupon.
She turned the paper over and over again, rushing outside, into the last remains of twilight to see if she could discern something else dimly writ or scratched upon the paper’s surface, but there was nothing.
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