PRELUDE
—
THE THIRTEEN YEAR THAW
Chill winds still blew. Dusty snow fell. But the ancient sea was in no hurry.
The Earth had spun six thousand times since flames blossomed and cities died. Now, after sixteen circuits of the Sun, plumes of soot no longer roiled from burning forests, turning day into night.
Six thousand sunsets had come and gone – gaudy, orange, glorious with suspended dust – ever since towering, superheated funnels had punched through to the stratosphere, filling it with tiny bits of suspended rock and soil. The darkened atmosphere passed less sunlight – and it cooled.
It hardly mattered anymore what had done it – a giant meteorite, a super-volcano, or a nuclear war. Temperatures and pressures swung out of balance, and great winds blew.
All over the world, a dingy snow fell. In places even summer did not erase it.
Only the Ocean, timeless and obstinate, resistant to change, really mattered. Dark skies had come and gone. The winds pushed ocher, growling sunsets. Fields of ice grew and shallower seas began to sink.
But Ocean’s vote was all important, and it was not in yet.
Earth turned. Men still struggled, here and there.
And Ocean breathed a sigh of winter.
THE CASCADES
1
In dust and blood – with the sharp tang of terror stark in his nostrils – a man’s mind will sometimes pull forth odd relevancies. After half a lifetime in the wilderness, mostly spent struggling to survive, it still struck Gordon as odd – how obscure memories would pop into his mind. Right in the middle of a life-or-death fight.
Panting under a bone-dry thicket – crawling desperately to find a refuge – he suddenly experienced a recollection as clear as the dusty stones under his nose. It was a memory of contrast – of a rainy afternoon in a warm, safe university library, long ago – of a lost world filled with books and music and carefree philosophical ramblings.
Words on a page.
Dragging his body through the tough, unyielding bracken, he could almost see the letters, black against white. And although he couldn’t recall the obscure author’s name, the words came back with utter clarity.
“Short of Death itself, there is no such thing as a ‘total’ defeat… There is never a disaster so devastating that a determined person cannot pull something out of the ashes – by risking all that he or she has left…
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a desperate man.”
Gordon wished the long-dead writer were here right now, sharing his predicament. He wondered what pollyannaish glow the fellow might find around this catastrophe.
Scratched and torn from his desperate escape into this dense thicket, he crawled as quietly as he could, stopping to lie still and squeeze his eyes shut whenever the floating dust seemed about to make him sneeze. It was slow, painful progress, and he wasn’t even sure where he was headed.
Minutes ago he had been as comfortable and well-stocked as any solitary traveler could hope to be, these days. Now, Gordon was reduced to not much more than a ripped shirt, faded jeans, and camp moccasins – and thorns were cutting them all to bits.
A tapestry of fiery pain followed each new scratch down his arms and back. But in this awful, bone-dry jungle, there was nothing to do but crawl onward and pray his twisting path did not deliver him back to his enemies – to those who had effectively killed him already.
Finally, when he had come to think the hellish growth would never end, an opening appeared ahead. A narrow cleft split the brush and overlooked a slope of tumbled rock. Gordon pulled free of the thorns at last, rolled over onto his back, and stared up at hazy sky, grateful simply for air that wasn’t foul with the heat of dry decay.
Welcome to Oregon, he thought bitterly. And I thought Idaho was bad.
He lifted one arm and tried to wipe dust from his eyes.
Or is it that I’m simply getting too old for this sort of thing? After all, he was over thirty now, beyond the typical life expectancy of a post-holocaust traveler.
Oh Lord, I wish I was home again.
He wasn’t thinking of Minneapolis. The prairie today was a hell he had struggled for more than a decade to escape. No, home meant more to Gordon than any particular place.
A hamburger, a hot bath, music, Merthiolate…
…a cool beer…
As his labored breathing settled, other sounds came to the fore – the all too clear noise of happy looting. It rose from a hundred feet or so down the mountainside. Laughter as the delighted robbers tore through Gordon’s gear.
…a few friendly neighborhood cops… Gordon added, still cataloging the amenities of a world long gone.
The bandits had caught him off guard as he sipped elderberry tea by a late afternoon campfire. From that first instant, as they charged up the trail straight at him, it had been clear that the hot-faced men would as soon kill Gordon as look at him.
He hadn’t waited for them to decide which to do. Throwing scalding tea into the face of the first bearded robber, he dove right into the nearby brambles. Two gunshots had followed him, and that was all. Probably, his carcass wasn’t worth as much to the thieves as an irreplaceable bullet. They already had all his goods, anyway.
Or so they probably think.
Gordon’s smile was bitterly thin as he sat up carefully, backing along his rocky perch until he felt sure he was out of view of the slope below. He plucked his travel belt free of twigs and drew the half-full canteen for a long, desperately needed drink.
Bless you, paranoia, he thought. Not once since the Doomwar had he ever allowed the belt more than three feet from his side. It was the only thing he had been able to grab before diving into the brambles.
The dark gray metal of his .38 revolver shone even under a fine layer of dust, as he drew it from its holster. Gordon blew on the snub-nosed weapon and carefully checked its action. Soft clicking testified in understated eloquence to the craftsmanship and deadly precision of another age. Even in killing, the old world had made well.
Especially in the art of killing.
Raucous laughter carried up from the slope below.
Normally he traveled with only four rounds loaded. Now he pulled two more precious cartridges from a belt pouch and filled the empty chambers under and behind the hammer. “Firearm safety” was no longer a major consideration, especially since he expected to die this evening
anyway.
Sixteen years chasing a dream, Gordon thought. First that long, futile struggle against the collapse…then scratching to survive through the Three-Year Winter…and finally, more than a decade of moving from place to place, dodging pestilence and hunger, fighting goddamned Holnists and packs of wild dogs…half a lifetime spent as a wandering, dark age minstrel, play-acting for meals in order to make it one day more while I searched for…
…for someplace…
Gordon shook his head. He knew his own dreams well. They were a fool’s fantasies, and had no place in the present world.
…for someplace where someone was taking responsibility…
He pushed the thought aside. Whatever he had been looking for, his long seeking seemed to end here, in the dry, cold mountains of what had once been eastern Oregon.
From the sounds below he could tell that the bandits were packing up, getting ready to move off with their plunder. Thick patches of desiccated creeper blocked Gordon’s view downslope through the ponderosa pines, but soon a burly man in a faded plaid hunting coat appeared from the direction of his campsite, moving northeast on a trail leading down the mountainside.
The man’s clothing confirmed what Gordon remembered from those blurred seconds of the attack. At least his assailants weren’t wearing army surplus camouflage…the trademark of Holn survivalists. They must be just regular, run of the mill, may-they-please-roast-in-Hell bandits.
If so, then there was a sliver of a chance the plan glimmering in his mind just might accomplish something.
Perhaps.
The first bandit had Gordon’s all-weather jacket tied around his waist. In his right arm he cradled the pump shotgun Gordon had carried all the way from Montana. “Come on!” the bearded robber yelled back up the trail. “That’s enough gloating. Get that stuff together and move it!”
The leader, Gordon decided.
Another man, smaller and more shabby, hurried into view carrying a cloth sack and a battered rifle. “Boy, what a haul! We oughta celebrate. When we bring this stuff back, can we have all the ’shine we want, Jas?"
The small robber hopped like an excited bird. “Boy, Sheba an’ the girls’ll bust when they hear about that lil’ rabbit we drove off into the briar patch. I never seen anything run so fast!” He giggled.
Gordon frowned at the insult added to injury. It was the same nearly everywhere he had been – a post-holocaust callousness to which he’d never grown accustomed, even after all this time. With only one eye peering through the scrub grass rimming his cleft, he took a deep breath and shouted.
“I wouldn’t count on getting drunk yet, Brer Bear!”
Adrenaline turned his voice more shrill than he wanted, but that couldn’t be helped.
The big man dropped awkwardly to the ground, scrambling for cover behind a nearby tree. The skinny robber, though, gawked up at the hillside.
“What…? Who’s up there?”
Gordon felt a small wash of relief. Their behavior confirmed that the sons of bitches weren’t true survivalists. Certainly not Holnists. If they had been, he’d probably be dead by now.
The other bandits – Gordon counted a total of five – hurried down the trail carrying their booty. “Get down!” their leader commanded from his hiding place. Scrawny seemed to wake up to his exposed position and hurried to join his comrades behind the undergrowth.
All except one robber – a sallow-faced man with salt-and-pepper sideburns, wearing an alpine hat. Instead of hiding he moved forward a little, chewing a pine needle and casually eyeing the thicket.
“Why bother?” he asked calmly. “That poor fellow had on barely more than his skivvies, when we pounced him. We’ve got his shotgun. Let’s find out what he wants.”
Gordon kept his head down. But he couldn’t help noticing the man’s lazy, affected drawl. He was the only one shaven, and even from here Gordon could tell that his clothes were cleaner, more meticulously tended.
At a muttered growl
from his leader, the casual bandit shrugged and sauntered over behind a forked pine. Barely hidden, he called up the hillside. “Are you there, Mister Rabbit? If so, I am so sorry you didn’t stay to invite us to tea. Still, aware how Jas and Little Wally tend to treat visitors, I suppose I cannot blame you for cutting out.”
Gordon couldn’t believe he was trading banter with this twit. “That’s what I figured at the time,” he called. “Thanks for understanding my lack of hospitality. By the way, with whom am I speaking?”
The tall fellow smiled broadly. “With whom…? Ah, a grammarian! What joy. It’s been so long since I’ve heard an educated voice.” He doffed the alpine hat and bowed. “I am Roger Everett Septien, at one time a member of the Pacific Stock Exchange, and presently your robber. As for my colleagues…”
The bushes rustled. Septien listened, and finally shrugged. “Alas,” he called to Gordon. “Normally I’d be tempted by a chance for some real conversation; I’m sure you’re as starved for it as I. Unfortunately, the leader of our small brotherhood of cutthroats insists that I find out what you want and get this over with.
“So speak your piece, Mister Rabbit. We are all ears.”
Gordon shook his head. The fellow obviously classed himself a wit, but his humor was fourth-rate, even by postwar standards.
“I notice you fellows aren’t carrying all of my gear. You wouldn’t by some chance have decided to take only what you needed, and left enough for me to survive, would you?”
From the scrub below came a high giggle, then more hoarse chuckles as others joined in. Roger Septien looked left and right and lifted his hands. His exaggerated sigh seemed to say that he, at least, appreciated the irony in Gordon’s question.
“Alas,” he repeated. “I recall mentioning that possibility to my compatriots. For instance, our women might find some use for your aluminum tent poles and pack frame, but I suggested we leave the nylon bag and tent, which are useless to us.
“Urm, in a sense we have done this. However, I don’t think that Wally’s…er, alterations will meet your approval.”
Again, that shrieking giggle rose from the bushes. Gordon sagged a little.
“What about my boots? You all seem well enough shod. Do they fit any of you, anyway? Could you leave them? And my jacket and gloves?”
Septien coughed. “Ah, yes. They’re the main items, aren’t they? Other than the shotgun, of course, which is nonnegotiable.”
Gordon spat. Of course, idiot. Only a blowhard states the obvious.
Again, the voice of the bandit leader could be heard, muffled by the foliage. Again there were giggles. With a pained expression, the ex-stockbroker sighed. “My leader asks what you offer in trade. Of course I know you have nothing. Still, I must inquire.”
As a matter of fact, Gordon had a few things they might want – his belt compass for instance, and a Swiss army knife.
But what were his chances of arranging an exchange and getting out alive? It didn’t take telepathy to tell that these bastards were only toying with their victim.
A fuming anger filled him, especially over Septien’s false show of compassion. He had witnessed this combination of cruel contempt and civilized manners in other once-educated people, over the years since the Collapse. By his lights, people like this were far more contemptible than those who simply succumbed to barbaric times.
“Look,” he shouted. “You don’t need those damn boots! You’ve no real need for my jacket or my toothbrush or my notebook, either. This area’s clean, so what do you need my Geiger counter for?
“I’m not stupid enough to think I can have my shotgun back, but without some of those other things I’ll die, damn you!”
The echo of his curse seemed to pour down the long slope of the mountainside, leaving a hanging silence in its wake. Then the bushes rustled and the big bandit leader stood up. Spitting contemptuously upslope, he snapped his fingers at the others. “Now I know he’s got no gun,” he told them. His thick eyebrows narrowed and he gestured in Gordon’s general direction.
“Run away, little rabbit. Run, or we’ll skin you and have you for supper!” He hefted Gordon’s shotgun, turned his back, and sauntered casually down the trail. The others fell in behind, laughing.
Roger Septien gave the mountainside an ironic shrug and a smile, then gathered up his share of the loot and followed his compatriots. They disappeared around a bend in the narrow forest path, but for minutes afterward Gordon heard the softly diminishing sound of someone
happily whistling.
You imbecile! Weak as his chances had been, he had spoiled them completely by appealing to reason and charity. In an era of tooth and claw, nobody ever did that except out of impotence. The bandits’ uncertainty had evaporated just as soon as he foolishly asked for fair play.
Of course he could have fired his .38, wasting a precious bullet to prove he wasn’t completely harmless. That would have forced them to take him seriously again…
Then why didn’t I do that? Was I too afraid?
Probably, he admitted. I’ll very likely die of exposure tonight, but that’s still hours away, far enough to remain only an abstract threat, less frightening and immediate than five ruthless men with guns.
He punched his left palm with his fist.
Oh stuff it, Gordon. You can psychoanalyze yourself this evening, while you’re freezing to death. What it all comes down to, though, is that you are one prize fool, and this is probably the end.
He got up stiffly and began edging cautiously down the slope. Although he wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet, Gordon felt a growing certainty that there could only be one solution, only one even faintly possible way out of this disaster.
As soon as he was free of the thicket, Gordon limped to the trickling stream to wash his face and the worst cuts. He wiped sweat-soaked strands of brown hair out of his eyes. His scrapes hurt like hell, but none of them looked bad enough to persuade him to use the thin tube of the precious iodine in his belt pouch.
He refilled his canteen and thought.
Besides his pistol and shredded clothes, a pocket knife, and compass, his pouch held a miniature fishing kit that might prove useful, if he ever made it over the mountains to a decent watershed.
And of course ten spare rounds for his .38, small, blessed relics of industrial civilization.
Back at the beginning, during the riots and the great starvation, it had seemed that the one thing in inexhaustible supply was ammunition. If only turn-of-the-century America had stockpiled and distributed food and medicine half so well as its citizens had cached mountains of bullets...
Rough stones jabbed his throbbing left foot as Gordon gingerly hurried toward his former campsite. Clearly these half-shredded moccasins would get him nowhere. His torn clothes would be about as effective against freezing mountain autumn nights as his pleas had been against the bandits’ hard hearts.
The small clearing where he had made camp only an hour or so ago was deserted now, but his worst fears were surpassed by the havoc he found there.
His tent had been converted into a pile of nylon shreds, his sleeping bag a small blizzard of scattered goose down. All Gordon found intact was the slim longbow he had been carving from a cut sapling, and a line of experimental venison-gut strings.
Probably thought it was a walking stick. Sixteen years after the last factory had burned, Gordon’s robbers completely overlooked the potential value of the bow and strings, when the ammo finally ran out.
He used the bow to poke through the wreckage, looking for anything else to salvage.
I can’t believe it. They took my journal! That prig Septien probably looks forward to poring over it during the snowtime, chuckling over my adventures and naivete while my bones are being picked by cougars and buzzards.
Of course the food was all gone: the jerky; the bag of split grains that a small Idaho village had let him have in exchange for a few songs and stories; the tiny hoard of rock candy he had found in the mechanical bowels of a looted vending machine.
It’s just as well about the candy, Gordon thought as he plucked his trampled, ruined toothbrush out of the dust. Now why the hell did they have to do that?
Late in the Three-Year Winter – while the remnants of his militia platoon still struggled to guard the soy silos of Wayne, Minnesota, for a government nobody had heard from in months – five of his comrades died of raging oral infections. They were awful, inglorious deaths, and no one had even been sure if one of the war bugs was responsible, or the cold and hunger and near total lack of modern hygiene. All Gordon knew was that the specter of his teeth rotting in his head was his own personal phobia.
Bastards, he thought as he flung the little brush aside.
He kicked the rubbish one last time. There was nothing here to change his mind.
You’re procrastinating. Go. Do it.
Gordon started off a little stiffly. But soon he was moving downtrail as quickly and silently as he could, making time through the bone-dry forest.
The burly outlaw leader had promised to eat him if they met again. Cannibalism had been common in the early days, and these mountain men might have acquired a taste for “long pork.” Still, he had to persuade them that a man with nothing to lose must be reckoned with.
Within half a mile or so, their tracks were familiar to him: two traces with the soft outlines of deer hide and three with prewar Vibram soles. They were moving at a leisurely pace, and it would be no trouble simply to catch up with his enemies.
That was not his plan, however. Gordon tried to remember this morning’s climb up this same trail.
The path drops in altitude as it winds north, along the east face of the mountain, before switching back south and east into the desert valley below.
But what if I were to cut above the main trail, and traverse the slope higher up? I might be able to come down on them while it’s still light…while they’re still gloating and expecting nothing.
If the shortcut is there…
The trail wove gradually downhill toward the northeast, in the direction of the lengthening shadows, toward the deserts of eastern Oregon and Idaho. Gordon must have passed below the robbers’ sentinels yesterday or this morning, and they had taken their time following him until he was settled into camp. Their lair had to be somewhere off this same trail.
Even limping, Gordon was able to move silently and quickly, the only advantage of camp moccasins over boots. Soon he heard faint sounds below and ahead.
The raiding party. The men were laughing, joking together. It was painful to hear.
It wasn’t so much that they were laughing over him. Callous cruelty was a part of life today, and if Gordon couldn’t reconcile himself to it, he at least recognized he was the oddball in today’s savage world.
But the sounds reminded him of other laughter, the rough jokes of men who shared danger
together.
Drew Simms – freckle-faced pre-med with a floppy grin and deadly skill at chess or poker – the Holnists got him when they overran Wayne and burned the silos…
Tishawn Kielre – saved my life twice, and all he wanted when he was on his deathbed, the War Mumps tearing him apart, was for me to read him stories…
Then there had been Lieutenant Van – their half-Vietnamese platoon leader. Gordon never knew until it was too late that the Lieutenant was cutting her own rations and giving them to her men. ...
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