Summer Of The Apocalypse Part 11

"Where's the town?" Eric had said. A few foundations poked up, and a bank and small office building still stood. After a long afternoon of nervous hiking, convinced that at any second they would run into more of Federal's patrols, he'd been looking forward to sleeping with a roof over his head on a comfortable mattress.

Teach chuckled. "We've been walking through it for the last half mile." He pointed to a small hill they'd just pa.s.sed. "Got several families there."

Eric saw nothing man-made at first, then he picked out the shape of a wall. Unmortared, rounded stones slumped to one side. Partially hidden by a boulder, the house was practically invisible.

"Looks small," he'd said.

"Much of it's excavated. Warmer in the winter. Some of the homes have tunnels running back seventy, eighty feet. If they have another kid, they dig out another room." Teach pointed to a pile of rock chips. Eric had a.s.sumed it was mine tailings. "Takes a long time, too. Soil's thin. Mostly they're carving into solid mountain."

More people sat at the fire. They moved silently, soft on their feet. Even the children were quiet, muted. He saw one poke another and a woman put a hand between them. They looked up and she shook her head gently at them.

Teach said, "What's different about an M-16? You sounded frightened."

"Not really," said Eric. He shifted so he sat closer to the fire. After the sun set, the temperature dropped quickly, not at all like the late-June conditions they were probably enjoying in Littleton. "It's a powerful gun, though. I saw a few in the year of the plague. Some National Guard units had them, and the people who lived got to be real good at h.o.a.rding items like that. I read up on them." Eric noticed that the people around him were listening. He spoke a little louder for their benefit.

"An M-16 is a small calibre weapon, only a 22, but it has a high muzzle velocity... uh, the bullets come out very fast. And the way it's designed, the bullets don't fly smoothly like an arrow. They tumble. When the bullet hits, it tears or smashes. I read that one could be shot in, say, the leg, and it still might kill. The shock of the impact would be so great that it could stop the heart."

A man behind Eric said, "Tears the flesh you say?"

"Oh, yes, very ugly wounds."

"Wouldn't want to hunt with one then."

"No. They're designed to kill people. Weapons of destruction."

Another voice, a woman, said, "They're part of Gone Time sickness." Teach leaned toward Eric, "That's Ripple. She's a deep one."

The woman looked at Eric intensely, a full eye lock, as if she were challenging him, and it took a second for him to break the stare and to see that she was young, maybe fifteen, like the Earth Dancer. Her face was skinny, and even by firelight Eric could see dark circles under her eyes.

"Yes, I suppose, but the world was dangerous, and America needed an army to keep itself safe." She scooted forward on her bench, bent down and put her hands on the dirt. "No," she said to her feet.

"Gone Time sickness had many symptoms. An army was one of them. M-16s were a symptom."

"But you never lived there. Much was good then, too. A lot." Eric felt tense, defensive. "It was a magic time. We could fly, don't you see. We had great learning. Man knew things."

"He'd forgotten all that was important."

Eric thought, she's so young. She knows nothing of me or my time.

As if she'd read his mind, she said, "I know myself. I know my time, and I've heard the stories. I've walked through the cities." She drew a design in the dirt at her feet. Eric found it odd that she spoke to the Earth, and then he thought, she's like the Earth Dancer, drawing designs, and he wanted to leap up and look at what she was making, to see if it were a noose.

"None of you were native," she continued. "The sickness came from not belonging. All the symptoms. None of you belonged."

"Go on," he said, suddenly eager to hear what she might say.

"None of you were native. You had no place you knew of as your own, and because of that you lived in all places as if you didn't belong. You made an army because you feared being thrown out. You were always temporary."

"You mean we weren't Indians? My family had lived in America for several generations."

"No," she said, shaking her head, sitting up and looking at him again. The rest of the people, surely the whole population, listened intently. All the benches were filled. Eric guessed maybe sixty people sat around him. A log popped sharply in the fire sending a shower of sparks up with the smoke. "Birth doesn't make you native. It's a matter of life and mind."

People nodded around her.

"Gone Timers, most of them, lived on land they didn't know. It's true, isn't it, that most Gone Timers didn't build the houses they lived in?"

"That's true, but our technology freed us from . . . from . . . some tasks. We could devote our lives to learning."

"You could, but did you? What you did is what counts, not what you could have done. You didn't build your own houses, but you lived in them. You didn't make your own clothes, but you wore them. What's important though, what's important is that you didn't know where anything came from. Your house, your clothes, your food, your light, your medicine, your entertainment, even your water. You turned on a tap, and water magically poured out. You flushed a toilet and wastes disappeared. You put your garbage on the street, and others took it away."

"Well, yes, you could look at it that way, but what does that mean? What does that have to do with being native? How does that make the Gone Time sick? We were advanced; we could go to the moon. We could cure sicknesses."

She said, "Not the last one."

Pushed by a breeze, smoke watered Eric's eyes. He turned away from the fire. She said again, "Not the last one. But it doesn't matter. The real sickness was in life and mind. Gone Timers lived in the world like the world didn't matter. They took upstream and disposed downstream like upstream was forever and no one lived below. The sickness was in metal and coal, in gasoline, in things that could not grow back. The end was inevitable, one way or another." Eric wondered if Troy and Rabbit were bored. Ripple was preaching, he realized, and a sermon is often a bore, but they were listening too.

Ripple said, "There isn't a rock here that I don't know. Every tree, as far as I can walk, I have seen and touched. I place my hands in the stream and I feel the connection to all the water everywhere, to the liquid in my veins. Everything I eat, I know. I am careful with my wastes. I read in a book the saying, 'Don't s.h.i.t where you eat,' but Gone Timers always s.h.i.t where someone else ate, and ultimately, because it's all connected, in their own plates."

A child giggled. Someone hushed it quietly.

"I share ..." she said, "... s.p.a.ce with all the living things. If I take a deer, I pray for a deer somewhere to be born to replace it. If I harvest a plant, I see that I leave the ground ready for another. When I die, I will leave a place that another can live. I am native. I belong."

"That's a nice idea," he said. "But people couldn't live like that, not in Gone Time numbers. Mankind was successful. We learned how to make the work of a few feed and clothe many. We spread out, like gra.s.s; we covered the ground, and what we made was beautiful. You said you walked through the cities. Did you look? Did you really look? And what did you see?"

A vision of Denver at night rose in Eric's head. He said, "Lights everywhere: street lights, lights in homes, advertis.e.m.e.nts blinking on and on into the darkness. Cars hissing the pavement dry on rainy nights. Laughter. People laughing, coming out of theaters. And concerts, 70,000 people in Mile-High Stadium on their feet feeling music pounding in their chests. Heart-stopping rock-and-roll so loud your skin hurt. That was beauty, human beauty, and there was nothing sick about it. A good time, my father's time."

"Knowledge too, pure knowledge. We were close, so close to knowing everything. I've seen the books. I know. Scientists could study particles so small that an atom was their universe." He knew most of the people around the fire would have no idea what he was talking about, but he continued. "We studied the galaxies. We looked out with telescopes and electronic measuring devices and saw the face of G.o.d. Mankind reached up and in. Backwards and forwards. Our science traveled everywhere, and that's what we're losing now. Our children, my own son, are forgetting the heights we reached. My dad . . ." he said, ". . . my dad's world, my world, was about making people live. We lived longer and healthier. We took care of our teeth. We helped the nearsighted. We reached out, the Americans, we reached out and helped people thousands of miles away in other parts of the world. Technology and science made us more compa.s.sionate, more human."

Ripple looked at him sadly. "The beauty you're talking about is denial. It was terminal, the false color of fever before death."

Taken aback, Eric said, "Where do you get words like that? Those are Gone Time terms. How old are you?"

She blushed. "Books. I've read and talked. I've thought. I'm sixteen." Teach said, "She has, too. Ferocious memory." He turned to Ripple. "A little overpowering at times, too."

Ripple said, "He's been there, Teach. He knows that it's true." A voice from behind Eric said, "What do you think about the Jackals with M-16s?" He p.r.o.nounced the name of the gun carefully, making it three words. "They seem more Gone Time than now."

Eric said, "Teach, you said the roads were closed. Your parents dynamited them."

"They did, but foot traffic has no problem going over the blockade. This is the first they've come this far in force, though."

Eric thought for a minute. "The only reason I can think of that they are coming this way must be the same one why we are going their way. They want to get around the Flats."

"What about the guns, the uniforms?"

"A military base somewhere north, perhaps. I can't imagine they're manufacturing the ammo. There must have been a well protected cache of it. Maybe if it stays cool, it lasts longer." He considered some more. The fire crackled softly. "If M-16s still work, I wonder if they have other munitions, grenades, napalm." Teach sighed. "I guess we'll have to find out. If they're going to tramp through Highwater." Silently, Eric stared into the fire. Twists of flame danced along the edge of a log, the heat baking his face and shins. The trip to Boulder seemed almost impossible now. First, the wolves, then Phil and his odd museum, then the Flats, now an army between him and the library. He thought about turning around. Troy would be glad to see Dodge again, of course, and Eric could imagine explaining why he'd left. Maybe the illnesses will pa.s.s, thought Eric. There are seasons of bad times. The crops grow rich one year and they grow thin another. People might be that way too. What could make facing men with M-16s worthwhile?

A small voice asked, "Could you tell us about the Gone Time monsters?" Eric looked for the questioner. A girl, maybe ten years old, lifted her hand shyly. She said, "My grandma used to scare mea"I remembera"about the Sudden Death Playoff and the Twilight Double Header. Were they terrible? Did they really come for little kids?"

Eric laughed. For two hours he answered questions, and the people listened. They hung on his words, and all the time Ripple sat quietly, her head c.o.c.ked to one side, intent. Eric was convinced she'd not forget a word that he said. And while he was speaking, while the fire burned low until it was just embers and the cool breeze swept gently past his face, he thought over and over again, maybe she is right. These are the natives. I am an alien in my own land.

"What are they doing, Grandpa?" Eric slid over on the stone ridge so that Dodge would have a better view into the canyon at the camp below. Eric looked for Rabbit again, but the boy had taken a different path once they started climbing, and Eric knew that saying anything to him would do no good.

"Keep your heads still," said Teach. "They might notice us poked up like this, but only if you move. Motion's the key." He lay on Eric's other side. Beside him, Ripple slowly moved into a position where she could see too. Now that it was light, Eric got a better look at her. Her short, cut red hair framed a serious, pale expression. Freckles sprinkled across her cheeks only made her seem more frail. Her eyes were green, and intense. Her movements, deliberate. She might be sixteen, he thought, but I wouldn't have put her at twelve. He looked back at the camp.

Sixty yards away and fifty feet down, a handful of drab, green tents stood in a small clearing beside the highway. Thin, gray streamers of smoke stretched straight up from a pair of campfires. Beyond the tents, farther down the valley, the rocky sides of the canyon covered the road and choked access. A shallow lake at the rock wall's base reflected clouds and sky.

Three soldiers were unpacking bulky metal pieces from green chests and a.s.sembling them on the other side of the road from the tents.

"Looks like a gun emplacement," said Eric. "That's some kind of heavy machine gun they're putting together."

"It's the Gone Time sickness coming back," said Ripple. "The head has died, but the body still twitches."

"What do you mean?" asked Eric.

"The guns and technology are irreplaceable. They can't be remanufactured. Their ammo fires now, but even stored in perfect conditions, it will become inert."

"Why can't they make new sh.e.l.ls? All the equipment exists." Annoyed, Eric rolled to his side so he could face her. "The Gone Time is not gone, just forgotten. If the children will learn, then the machines will run again. Our great-grandchildren could live in cities under the lights. We aren't starting from scratch you know."

Below, the men had nearly finished their work. A black, swiss-cheese-looking sleeve covered the barrel, and twin, heavy kegs rested at the b.u.t.t end. One of the soldiers reached into a keg and pulled out a bullet-lined strap. The leading end he clamped into the gun.

Ripple said, "The delivery system is gone. No more mining. It's high tech and there are too many missing pieces. We'll never be able to do what the Gone Timers did. Their ancestors had it easy. Metal ore was easy to find. It was on the surface. As they made better tools from the easy metals they mined, they could dig deeper, work less productive ore, extract using more complicated processes . .." Eric could hardly believe that a person as young as Ripple could talk the way she did. She's not just a prodigy, he thought, she's a genius.

"... but now the knowledge and tools are gone. We can't start from scratch again."

"What about the metals that are already out, cars, buildings, all the stuff that won't work but are already processed? Wouldn't it be easy to use them as our raw material, even easier than the easiest mines for primitive man?"

Ripple glanced at him. "They're not raw. Even if you could melt them, they're blends. I'll bet we couldn't find pure iron anywhere, and the more time pa.s.ses, the more difficult it will be. But even if we could do it, we shouldn't. We'd start the sickness all over again. What would be the point?" The soldiers at the gun flurried into motion. One picked up an M-16 and strode across the road into a tent. The others swung the gun around so it pointed at a large boulder thirty feet from them. Then, from the tent, the soldier backed out. A older man followed him, not in uniform, his light hair catching the sunlight. Then a second man came out, a younger one with the exact shade of hair. They could have been father and son. The soldier gestured with his gun and the two men walked across the road. As they approached the machine gun, Eric realized their hands were tied.

"They're prisoners!" said Eric. "Do you know them?"

Teach said, "No, but Federal has all the roads into Boulder blocked. They could be from the city." The soldier said something to the men. From this distance, Eric couldn't tell what it was, but the tone was angry, commanding. The older man held his head high and said something back. The young one looked frightened and defiant.

"Does he take a lot of prisoners?"

"I don't know," said Teach. "This is the first I've seen them on this side of the blockade. They're moving up canyon, that's for sure. Maybe they're trying to get into south Denver."

"I could go down and talk to them," Eric said, "and find out what they want." But even as he said it, he knew he wouldn't. Something felt bad about the men. His urge was to run.

The soldier pointed to the boulder. The older man sagged. His head dropped, as if all the life had been taken from him. He turned and walked toward the rock. The younger man hung back until the soldier prodded him with his M-16.

"What are they doing?" repeated Dodge.

A swell of sickness rose in Eric. He could feel it pushing against his ribs. "Oh, G.o.d," he said. Teach said, "They wouldn't."

Keeping his M-16 trained on the two men, the soldier directed them to stand with their faces to the boulder, their backs to the machine gun. One of the soldiers manning the gun put his shoulders into a yoke on the gun and aimed the barrel at the men.

Eric's jaw dropped. Even as he watched, horror filling him up like ice water, he thought, I'm not going to see this. I can't, and he reached out to cover Dodge's eyes. In the distance, crows cawed loudly. Someone yelled, "No!" The soldier beside the gun buckled to the ground, his limbs loose. "No!" yelled the voice again. In the bushes at the base of the cliff, Rabbit stepped forward and threw a baseball-sized rock. It zinged off the barrel of the gun. The other soldier swung around his gun and let fly an angry rip of sound. A line of dirt jumped up in front of Rabbit, and he ducked into the bushes. Firing stopped. The soldier pounded on the clip of his gun, cursing. Rabbit burst from the bushes, running low away from the men. Eric could see the cleft he must have climbed down to get into the valley. Ponderously, the muzzle of the big gun swung around toward Rabbit.

"Run!" shouted Eric. He was standing. He didn't remember getting up. A hand grabbed him and yanked him back.

"Don't be a fool," said Teach.

The big gun opened up, slamming explosions. Eric scrambled to the ridge and looked over. Dust hid the base of the cliff. He couldn't see Rabbit.

The gun quit firing. Smoke obscured it for an instant, then cleared. The soldier Rabbit had hit still lay on the ground. Gesturing angrily, the soldier with the M-16 directed the two civilians back to the boulder. A minute later, the big gun fired again, briefly, a short burst. Eric watched the execution, dry-eyed. Then Rabbit joined him, a long scratch across the non-scarred side of his face, but otherwise unharmed. Ripple lay next to him. Long after the smoke had cleared and the blood had quit running off the deeply pocked boulder she said, "The Gone Time is gone, but it's not forgiven."

Chapter Fourteen LOOTING.

The four lanes of Hampden Avenue stretched before them, empty and still. To their left, a tall chain link fence separated them from a deserted cross-street lined by long rows of brick tract houses. A waft of smoke burned Eric's eyes as he strained to see through the haze. He had this vision that at any moment a lone figure would resolve itself out of the distance. His father. Eric almost whistled with the relief of it. He wiped wetness from his cheeks with the back of his wrist. Like a pall of wispy ghosts, smoke drifted between the houses. On all sides, up and down Hampden, at each side road, gray swirls floated over the lawns, among the houses and above them.

We're finding Dad, he thought. Leda's wrong about him. I can feel it. He's out there, just ahead, looking for me. I know I'll find my dad.

Leda said, "Whoops. We're in trouble."

Before Eric could answer, he glimpsed a shadow rushing through the air above the street, then it slammed over them and was gone. He was sprawled on the pavement. "What was that!"

"Maybe he didn't see us," she said, voice steely calm, her face a foot from him. "It's a gunship." Eric could see it now, maybe a half-mile down the road and a hundred feet up, a beige and brown camouflage-painted helicopter. It turned nimbly and headed back.

"What does he want?" Roaring past, the copter's prop wash kicked up dust. Eric tried to melt into the asphalt.

"I'd heard that some of the pilots went crazy in the last daysa" this was a couple of weeks agoa"and that they were strafing people on the streets." The copter turned again. Eric watched, amazed. It was so fast!

Leda continued, "A rumor said a copter pilot shot up St. Joseph hospital. Went back and forth pumping bullets into the building. Lots of people dead."

This time the craft came slower, its blade a blur, a cloud of dust beneath it. Eric said, "He knows we're here."

They stood. The copter hovered just off the road, twenty yards away. Bits of sand stung Eric's cheeks. The mirrored c.o.c.kpit gla.s.s revealed nothing. He didn't feel scared, really, but he stepped in front of Leda, putting himself between her and the ship. She moved beside him.

"What's he going to do?" asked Eric.

"He's doing it." She pointed to a multi-barreled device that hung on a mechanized swivel arrangement below the c.o.c.kpit. The barrels were whirling around and around. She said, "He's shooting us." After a minute, the copter howling on the road, the ineffectual guns spinning, Eric said, "Let's keep going," and he walked toward the copter. Leda stayed beside him. As they approached, the craft moved aside, and the guns swiveled so they were pointing at them the whole way. When they'd walked for a couple of minutes without looking back, the tenor of the engine changed and the copter rose and flew away.

"That was odd," Eric said. He felt like he imagined an athlete would who had just done some amazing feata"a half-court shot that touched only net, or a grand slam homer that wins the game at the bottom of the nintha"then walks away like nothing had happened, the epitome of cool and calm. Just another day. It was too bizarre to comprehend.

She said, "Glad he didn't have ammo."

He said, "Yep."

Later, as they pa.s.sed a station wagon parked on the shoulder, Leda bent at the driver's window, cupped her hand on the gla.s.s and peered in. It was the third car she'd checked.

His heart still racing from the close call, he noticed her torn shirt drop away from her side, flashing a long stretch of white skin from her belt to just below her bra. This time Eric didn't glance away. She's pretty fit, he thought. Good looking for a twenty-five-year-old. He remembered his ex-girl friend at the high school, a sallow-faced blonde plagued with a band of pimples at her hairline that she could never clear up despite her most dedicated efforts. Last winter she'd decided to attack them with heat and cold and Eric had watched her wash her face with snow, then rush into the house to steaming hot hand cloths that she'd drape across her forehead like an Indian head dress. Twice they'd made out on her living room couch. The second time, Eric had experimentally tried to French kiss, and she'd said, "Don't. That's gross." They'd broken up a couple of weeks later. "I can't get into this pimple thing," Eric had said. It all seemed so childish now.