Summer Of The Apocalypse Part 10

Meg pulled Jared close and pressed her forehead to his cheek. "He was a bad, bad man." Gently, she kissed him. "And he died too soon." The bed shook and Eric thought, she's crying, but the shaking went on and Meg convulsed into a fetal position, never releasing Jared, and Eric realized she was silently coughing. He watched for a minute, then the coughing stopped and she relaxed, painfully straightening her legs until once again she lay full length beside him.

Leda mouthed, "Let's go," and they started to back out of the room. Meg hugged Jared tight, partially pulling herself onto him and said into his ear, "You'll never get to be a father."

They walked south through disturbingly quiet neighborhoods. Four houses in a row were burned to the ground, only pipes and chimneys poking from the smoking beams and rubble. An old couple sat on a porch in rockers, faces shrouded in flies, their hands hanging between them like the last thing they did was to lot go of each other. Toys littered the yard of a house with a Wee Care Day Center sign over the door, the windows closed tight and draped inside.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

Ahead rose a house-covered hill. Eric leaned into the climb. Sun bleached the street. Flattened gra.s.s on unmowed lawns lay brown and beat. Last night's storm had done little to revive it. We, Eric thought. We are a we? Most of the b.u.t.tons were gone from her blouse, and one sleeve was almost torn off. Her slim shoulder glistened with sweat. "Following my dad," he said. "I think he's gone home."

She opened her mouth as if to say something, then shut it. She shook hair out of her eyes and looked up at the sun. "Hot, isn't it?"

"Yeah." The road flattened and they were at the hill's top. Before them, the city fell away, houses on houses, streets pleasingly parallel and neat. Here and there, plumes of smoke leaned with the breeze. To their left miles away, the Denver downtown pushed its buildings high into the skyline.

"Are you religious?" she said. "I'm not. Seems to me that the end of the world would be more dramatic if there were a G.o.d. There'd be some sign."

He thought about it. More of the city was visible now. He slopped. "What is that?"

"What?"

He pointed. Directly in front of them at the bottom of the hill, a narrow streak of houses two blocks long and a block wide was completely flattened.

"Jesus," she said.

Eric thought, it looks like somebody stepped on that spot, and he remembered the dream about King Kong, about how Dad talked for hours about King Kong while Mom died in the cave. She said, "There's another one." A half-mile farther on, another block of houses were down. "And another." She pointed. He saw three other spots of flattened houses leading away from him to the south. A trail! he thought. We're following his footsteps. And for a second he thought he had a sign. G.o.d does exist, and he walked right here.

"What could have done that?" he asked, and he half expected her to answer, "It must be supernatural," but she shook her head in puzzlement.

When they reached the first spot, Eric as if he crossed a boundary. Untouched, the last house he pa.s.sed looked like all the houses on the street, but the next one was gone, the foundation stood out of the lawn, and lumber littered the yard. Wood shards stuck out of a tree trunk broken off like a match stick at hip height.

"This wasn't a fire," he said, levering up one end of a ceiling joist. "No charring." She stepped carefully over a nail-studded section of roof, the shingles covering one side. "The destruction is so complete." Bending over, she picked up a round object and held it to him. "Dinner plate," she said.

"It's not cracked."

Next door, the story was the same, but the next lot, one wall remained, family photos hanging from it. The roof and all the other walls were gone. Just the roof was missing from the next house, but all its windows were broken out, the gla.s.s fanned across the lawn from each.

"Explosion came from the inside," Eric said. "Somebody planted a bomb in these houses?"

"No sign of fire, remember?" She put the plate down she had been carrying and winced when she stood up.

"Are you hurt?" Eric asked.

"Just a bruise," she said and gingerly ma.s.saged her shoulder, the one under the untorn sleeve.

"Let me see." He walked around a pile of brick between them.

"It's nothing," she said, but she stopped and faced him. Suddenly, he felt awkward. The only way to check the bruise would be to move the blouse off her shoulder, and he wasn't sure how to do it. Taking a deep breath he pinched the lapel of her blouse and pulled the cloth aside. She pressed her hand against her chest so her bra wouldn't be uncovered, and turned her head away from him. She was shaking. She said, "Don't touch it."

"Oh, G.o.d." Beginning at her collar bone, a deep purple mark ran to the top of her shoulder, part way down her back and all the way to where her hand rested on her chest. "Are you sure nothing's broken?"

"Just stiff," she said, rearranging her blouse.

"Was it Jared?"

"Yeah."

"It looks awful."

She smiled. "You say the sweetest things, but you shouldn't be talking."

"What do you mean?"

"If you could see your neck, you'd think I was fine."

Eric touched where the rope had dug in. Pain flared and he s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand away. "Pretty ugly?"

"The worst."

They'd reached the end of the destroyed houses and walked through another undisturbed neighborhood. Most of the homes now were old, brick duplexes with twin sidewalks leading to twin doors.

"My father died last year," she said. "Liver cancer. I didn't know him too well. He and Mom separated when I was little and I mostly got to see him in the summers. He lived in St. Louis." They crossed a street. On this block, three or four yellowed, folded and rubber-banded newspapers were piled before the doors. Eric shivered at the thought of the dedication of some newspaper boy delivering papers to homes where the subscribers had died. Leda followed his gaze.

"They kept the paper going until ten days ago or so. Guess they thought a newspaper would keep people believing things would get better."

Eric asked, "Did you love your dad?"

"I didn't know him, I said."

"That isn't what I asked. Did you love him?" "Well, sure. I had to." He thought that over. A new area of destroyed houses began, much the same as the last one. "This is weird. What do you make of it?" He stood beside a telephone pole. The cross arms at the top were snapped off and the wires were wrapped tightly around the shaft, like giant children had used it as a maypole, "Don't know. Maybe there is a G.o.d. While the people are away. the G.o.ds will play."

"Sounds good to me."

Dad might have come down just this street, he thought, and glanced at the lawn, thinking he might see a mark, a sign that had pa.s.sed this way. How would Dad have seen this?

"When my father died," she said, "I didn't accept it at first. I told my best friend that he was sick, but not that he died. It took me a while to believe it myself."

Eric thought, why does she keep talking about this? "My dad's not dead."

"Of course not," she said quickly.

"He didn't come back to the cave, so he must have gone home. He wouldn't have just left me there." Eric clenched his hands into stone. We could be standing in his footsteps! "He would write a message and tell me where he went." His face screwed up. He could feel the muscles by his eyes pulling in, his jaw tightening. He breathed in hitches.

"Of course. That's what happened."

"That's why I'm going home. I've got to find Dad. We've got to go together and bury Mom."

"Yes, that's what we'll do."

Eric sat on the ground in the midst of the flattened houses, in the middle of G.o.d's footstep, or King Kong's. "My dad . . ." He gasped. "My dad is a survivor. He's too strong." Everything was letting go inside of him. He could feel the unraveling, and inside he tried to stop it, to hold back the wind. He put his face in his hands and he could feel his skin on his skin. Why do I feel this way?

Why am I acting this way? She'll think I'm a fool. Dad's fine. I'll find Dad and everything will be like it was. We'll live in the house. We'll play catch. He'll teach me new bird calls. Dad's okay.

"No, it's all right," she said. "I believe you." Her arms were around him and they were both sitting on the ground. She rocked him quietly while he shook in her arms.

After a long while, after he had quit sobbing and the muscles in his back relaxed, she still held him. He felt her chin resting on the top of his head.

"Look at that," she said.

He lifted his head and blinked away tears. "What?"

They were sitting near another broken tree trunk. The trunk itself leaned and roots hung in the air on one side, clods of dirt still clinging to them.

"Sticking in the wood."

He followed her finger. Protruding from the tree trunk, four inches or so of silver glittered in the sun. He pushed himself off the ground, then pulled on the metal.

"Jammed in there pretty tight." He worked it back and forth several times before it pulled out. He held it to her. "A spoon. What would do that to a spoon? You couldn't do that without bending it." Taking it from him, Leda turned it over in her hand. "A tornado," she said. "That's what it was." He gazed at the scene of destruction, and it seemed familiar, like news footage he'd seen before. "You're right. Only thing it could be."

"They skip," she said. "They touch down, destroy everything, lift, then touch down again."

"Darned regular. I've never heard of one leaving a trail." "Strange storms. Leave some stuff, ruin others. If anything's unusual, it's how much it destroyed. Colorado tornadoes are generally narrower than this." She gestured to the block-wide path.

"A year ago," Eric said, "this would be the top story. Denver would be cleaning itself up. It'd be in mourning."

She dropped the spoon. "Small potatoes, now, a tornado." He smiled. It was incredibly hard to make that movement with his face. The muscles felt weighed down from frowning. "Does a house falling in a city make a noise if there is no one to hear it?"

"Come on," she said, "let's find some food. I'm starving."

"I'm sure we'll catch up with Dad soon," said Eric. "He'll be glad to meet you." She didn't say anything, and Eric glanced at her. "Sure," she said, "I'll bet he will be."

Chapter Thirteen.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

Teach said, "Keep your hands underneath you. Don't look up. Don't separate your feet. Be a rock, and that's what they'll see."

Eric scrunched his face into the gravel on the hillside above the road. The rest of Teach's boys had scattered, and when he'd last looked, he could only pick out a couple of them in the same posture he was taking now, folded on themselves, faces down, practically invisible. Their leather skirts and wool shirts blended perfectly into the background.

"Where's Rabbit and Dodge?" Eric whispered.

"They're okay. Don't move and you'll be fine. Unless they're expecting to see something, they won't." Teach broke a branch off a nearby juniper and jammed it into the ground by Eric's head. He braced the bottom with a couple of rocks. "There, that'll give them something to focus on if they do look this way." Teach climbed a few feet up the slope and lay down, hands underneath him, feet drawn up, the back of his gray-haired head to Eric.

Eric pulled his limbs in even tighter; his back crawled under the heat of the sun. A bit of sand he'd sucked up when he put his face in the dirt gritted uncomfortably between his teeth, and chunks of gravel dug into his cheek, but he didn't move. They'll be able to see me, he thought. I might as well stand and shout. Before the point-man had whistled the warning that sent them scrambling for cover above the road, they had been walking up-canyon, crossing a slide that hid the asphalt for hundreds of yards, Eric was hiking gamely, trying not to slow the pace. Teach said, "You've got two problems." Eric panted, put a foot on a stone, placed his hand on his knee and pressed to help himself up. One of Teach's boys carried Eric's pack, but even without the extra weight, the soreness in his legs and the incessant buzz of pain in his hips reminded him of his age. "What's that?" he said. The mountain air smelled of pine and creek water, of sun on hot rocks, but it didn't fill the lungs.

"First one's easy, but important. Our last Gone Timer died seven years ago, and most of the young ones haven't heard about Gone Time from someone who's seen it. So you're the featured speaker at the town talk-around tonight."

"Okay." Eric almost did a skip step but didn't. The dirt and sand footing was slippery. "You want to hear old Gone Time stories?" n.o.body in Littleton listened to him. The kids would gather at the hunters' feet and wait for each word about finding elk or killing a bear, but when Eric said anything about Gone Time, they ran off, except for Dodge and Rabbit.

Eric looked for them. He spotted the dark-haired Dodge on the black-top beyond the slide. Rabbit walked in the tall gra.s.s on the road's shoulder, as always looking as if he were ready to bolt. "I can do that."

"Talking might not be that easy. We've got a girl up therea"name's Ripple, a kind of, I don't know, child prodigya"she's got some strong ideas about Gone Time. You can bet she'll ask some tough ones. Might have some things to say of her own. She was my best pupil, but she left me behind years ago."

"I'll watch myself. What's the other problem?"

"Getting you into Boulder. The roads aren't safe." Teach offered Eric a firm, hard hand and helped him over a slippery patch of gravel.

"You said the Flats weren't safe either. More radiation?" He stepped thankfully off the uneven surface of the slide onto the flat road. Here and there, portions of the double-yellow line were still visible on the pavement. Been a while since a car had to worry about oncoming traffic here, he thought. The long stretch of highway curved in between pine-covered hills a half-mile away.

"Nope. Federal's gunmen." Teach fell into pace beside him. Eric sighed a little to himself; the bigger man visibly shortened his stride to accommodate him. "Your library may or may not be standing, but there's a guy who calls himself 'Federal' or 'The Federal' who thinks something's valuable in Boulder, and he's got the roads."

"Really? Guns? I haven't seen a working one for years."

Teach grinned at him, his gray-flecked beard fanning out beneath the smile. "Neither had I. My dad kept a rifle, but he was down to just four boxes of ammo. Took it off the wall on his birthday and would fire one shot. Never did tell me why he did that. But the last year, it took six tries to get a sh.e.l.l that'd work, and it sound pathetic; hardly an explosion at all. Mostly smoke. Dad said the sh.e.l.ls had gone gunny-bag, said there wasn't much ammo anyway, so I'd better learn how to make arrows." Eric stretched his gait a bit; the extra effort felt good. He thought, at least I'm not hobbling. "What kind of guns?"

"Don't know, but one of my men has one." He chuckled. "Federal's boys aren't all that bright. One of them shot up a couple of deer and didn't notice Skylar sitting in a tree. Walked right under him, and Skylar dropped a water skin on his head. He got the gun and a good knife off him, and the guy probably woke up an hour later with a sore neck and a lot of explaining to do. But bright or not, they've set up camps on the roads into Boulder. Sometimes we hear shooting."

Teach spat into his hands, rubbed the palms together and wiped them on the front of his shirt. "Lousy hunters, the lot of them. No respect. Take just parts of the meat and leave the carca.s.s in the open. Worst kind of jackals."

A whistle from farther in the canyon trilled down the scale. A lark, Eric thought. Haven't heard one like that before.

"Whoops, speak of the devil, as my dad told me," said Teach. He scanned the slopes on the sides of the road. Eric looked up too. Here, the road snaked smoothly through rounded hills with few trees or boulders. Immediately the rest of the men started climbing. Teach tugged Eric's arm. "Best place to not be seen is in plain sight."

Then he taught Eric how to be a rock.

Eric's back itched. He pressed his face down even harder. A particularly sharp piece of gravel dug into his cheek. A spot of dampness slid toward his ear. I'm bleeding, he thought. Feet tramped steadily on the road below, measured, military. Metal clicked against metal. Gun swivels? he wondered. They were less than a hundred feet off.

Someone said, "Don't like this duty. Stupid way to spend a day."

"Shut your hole, private," rumbled another voice.

"Just talking. No harm in that."

They pa.s.sed. Slowly, Eric raised his head for a peek, marveling that he hadn't been spotted. Marching toward the slide they had just crossed, a line of eight camouflage-dressed soldiers moved down canyon. They wore dark green boots that reached to mid-shin, and on their backs rode small packs, and each carried the same gun with distinctive open-metal stocks, sharply curved banana clips and cone-wrapped snub barrels.

Eric sucked air between his teeth.

"What?" whispered Teach.

"I know those guns." The men single-filed it to the other side of the slide and out of sight. "They're army M-16s."

Firelight illuminated the blackened stone face of the natural amphitheater and cast flickering light on the pines that surrounded the site. Split-log benches, two deep, formed a half circle around the fire. Eric, Teach, Rabbit and Dodge had one bench to themselves, although it might easily have held a half-dozen more. The people of Highwater drifted out of the trees and started taking their places at the fire. Eric hadn't thought much of the remains of old Nederland, what used to be a mining town and then became a tourist trap in the Gone Times. Most of the buildings were gone, part of the "Naturalization Project" as Teach called it.