Dies the Fire (23 page)

Signe Larsson spoke up: “Dad, the rest of you, we should stick with Mike.”

“Yup,” Eric concurred. “I'm sort of fond of living myself.”

Astrid nodded, silent. Her father spoke: “Money's gone, the whole modern world's gone. We'd all be dead four times over without Mike. I'm for it.”

Hutton took a drag on his cigarette and spoke in his slow deep voice. “Man alone, or a family alone, they're dead or worse now. I found that out. Mike here, I've got good reason to trust him, and I misdoubt he'll get drunk with power. So if he wants to ramrod this outfit, I'm for it.”

Havel held up a hand. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. A deep breath: “We have to have someplace to go, and some way of making a living and defending ourselves once we get there. That means getting land and seed and stock and tools however we can, and I sort of suspect it also means fighting to keep it. OK, that's not something a man can do alone; and we here know each other a bit.”

He shifted his shoulders, a gesture he used at the beginning of a task; usually he wasn't conscious of doing it, but this time he noticed . . . and remembered his father doing the same.

“But I'm not going to take responsibility without authority. If you want to stick with me, well, I hope I'm sensible enough never to think I know everything and don't need advice, but somebody has to be in charge until things are settled. I think I'm the best candidate. We're going to have to pool everything and work together like a military unit, and a camel is a horse designed by a committee.”

He caught each pair of eyes in turn: “For? Against?”

The Larssons nodded, looked at each other, and then raised their hands.

“For!” they said in ragged unison.

Hutton puffed meditatively on his cigarette again and then raised his hand in agreement. “Count me in too. Think I can speak for Angel and Luanne.”

Havel nodded. “Glad you said that,” he said. “I don't deny you and your horses would be very useful; and your family were pretty impressive too, on short acquaintance. You're a horse breaker, I take it?”

“No, sir, I am not,” Hutton said, with dignified seriousness. “What use is a broken horse? I am a horse wrangler and trainer. Anything a horse can do, I can train into it.”

Then he laughed without much humor. “And it's a trade I took up so I could work for myself. Don't see much prospect of that here. I'm a stranger, and a black one at that. Might get a bunk and eats with some rancher or farmer, yeah, but not on good terms, I reckon. Sharecropping or something like.”

“We're all in that situation,” Havel said. “When there just isn't enough to go around, people will look to their own kin and friends first.”

He ran a thumb along the silky black stubble on his jaw. “I expect some refugees will get taken in, especially where there aren't too many, but Will pegged it. They'll be the hired help, and hire will be just their keep at that, sleeping in the barn and eating scraps. It'll be worse, some places—human life's going to be a cheap commodity.”

“We could all go to our place in Montana,” Eric Larsson said. “The ranch . . . we've got horses there, and there's the grazing—lots of cows around there. Or there's the summer farm in the Willamette. The ranch is a lot closer, though.”

Ken shook his head. “I don't think Montana would be a good idea,” he said slowly. “We'd be strangers there. That land used to belong to the Walkers . . . and with nobody to tell them no, I suspect they'll simply take back the property and the stock; the area's full of their relatives and connections. They were always polite when we did business, but I could tell they weren't too happy about needing my money.”

“Yeah,” Signe said. “I know I dated Will for a while, sort of, or at least hung around him, but it was me who called it quits. There's something creepy about him, and his whole family.”

Her father looked at her with surprise, then shrugged. “I'd go for the farm, if it weren't for all the people in the Willamette Valley. Going on for two million . . . it'll get very ugly.”

“What's it like?” Havel asked him. “A real farm, or just a vacation house?”

“My grandfather bought it for a country place back before the First World War, in the Eola hills northwest of Salem,” Ken said.

For a moment he smiled, then winced. “Mary liked it . . . nice big house—Victorian, modernized—and about seven hundred acres, two-fifty of that in managed forest on the steeper parts. Gravity-flow water system, about thirty acres of pinot noir vines we've put in over the last ten years—the winery is all gravity-flow too, by the way—some old orchards, and then quite a bit of cleared land, all of it board-fenced. In grass, we ran pedigree cattle on it and raised horses, but it could grow anything. Some sheds, barns, stables . . . We know the neighbors well, too, and get along with most of them; the Larssons have been spending summers there for a long time.”

If any of the neighbors are still alive in a couple of months, that might be an asset,
Havel thought.
Unless someone's simply moved in and taken over.

Ken went on: “Long-term, there's something else to think about.” He waved a hand around them.

“There's a lot of farming and ranching here in the interior, yes. For a year or two, or four or five, it's going to be better-off than most places. The Larssons made their first pile trading wheat from Pendleton and the Palouse down the Columbia to Portland. But a hell of a lot of the crops here these days depend on things like center-pivot irrigation, or deep wells . . . and the dryland farming . . . well, it only yields really well with mechanization on a big scale, where one family can work thousands of acres. That way it doesn't matter if you get a low yield, or lose every fourth crop to drought, because you're handling so many acres.”

“You mean quantity has a quality all its own,” Havel said.

Ken nodded. “If you're doing it by hand and horse, it takes just as much labor to work an acre of twelve-bushel wheat land as it does one that gives you forty. With the sort of preindustrial setup we're being thrown back on, that's the basic constraint on your standard of living. And the lower the productivity, the harder the people on top have to squeeze to get a surplus.”

Havel's brow furrowed.
You know, that makes an uncomfortable amount of sense,
he thought.
And Ken Larsson is no fool. Not any sort of a fighting man, but he can think, and he's got the best education of any of us here.

“All right,” he said. “Unless we see a better opportunity along the way, I'd say we head for the Willamette.”

“Ummm . . .” Eric was a lot more bashful than he'd been. “What about all the people, Mike? Dad said it. The farm's only fifty miles from Portland and a lot closer to Salem.”

Havel looked away for a moment, then met Ken Larsson's eyes. He gave a slight nod of agreement, and the younger man went on: “Eric, it's a long way to the Willamette on foot; and I don't intend to hurry. By the time we get there . . . overpopulation is not going to be that much of a problem.”

“Ouch,” Signe said with a wince. “Still . . .”

“Nothing we can do about it, I suppose,” Eric said; they looked at each other in surprise at their agreement.

Silence fell as they moved out onto the trail. Ken Larsson and Will Hutton were mounted, in consideration of their years and bruises; the younger members of the party were on foot, to spare the hungry, overworked horses. The only exception was Biltis the cat, who rode perched on one of the pack loads, curled up on a pile of blankets strapped across the top and looking like a puddle of insufferable aristocratic orange smugness.

Eric and Havel carried their pole arms, and Astrid her archaic recurve bow; Signe had the bandits' high-tech compound. Hutton carried a felling ax, the top of the helve against his hip and his right hand on the end of the handle.

“Right,” Havel said, swinging the spear over his shoulder at the balance-point. “Let's make a few miles before dark. Thataway!”

F
ourteen days since whatever-it-was,
Mike Havel thought, looking around the clearing just off Highway 12 where the Huttons had made their camp until the bandits came.

The Lochsa bawled and leapt not far to the north, gray with silt and chunks of ice. The smell somehow stung in the nostrils beneath the pine scent of the forested slopes that rose canyon-steep on either side. He looked at the sky, and blinked at a sudden thought:
I'll never fly again.

It struck him harder than he'd have thought; never again to feel the wheels lift, or the yoke come alive in his hands as the controls bit the moving air . . .

The whole party had arrived late last night; the Huttons had slept in their tent, the Larssons in the RV and Havel in the hay of the horse trailer. Dawn had been gray and cold, but the noon sun had broken through the clouds, and it had gotten up to around fifty.

Havel shook his head and blew absently on his hands as he and Will Hutton walked around the flatbed they'd all spent the morning unloading; it had a two-wheeled bogie on either side, and Ken Larsson was underneath it, looking at the brakes. If at all possible they wanted to rig it for horse traction; that way they could take along a
lot
more gear when they headed west.

Will glanced up and smiled at his wife and daughter; he'd been doing that all morning too, and Havel didn't blame him.

He looked that way as well. They had a cookfire going and a big pot hung over it; Angelica Hutton was cutting elk meat on a folding table, and dropping the pieces and carefully measured cupfuls of dried beans and soup-barley into the bubbling water. There had been bacon and eggs for breakfast, and toast made from bread that wasn't too stale to eat, but from now on it would be the limited dry goods from the ranger cabin and the Huttons' RV, and what they could hunt or forage or barter. The remains of the elk would last them for a while, and the luckless mule deer they'd run into on the way back here. He suspected they'd all get
very
sick of game stew by then.

Angelica wore a jacket and a long skirt and a black Stetson with silver medallions around the band; her face was beautiful when she raised it from her work to smile back at Will. Then she stirred the pot, nodded, and put on the lid.

Luanne smiled in their direction fairly often too, as she sorted clothing. She even gave Eric a high-megawattage beam now and then. Havel could hear them laughing together, and then she play-punched him in the chest. He went over backward and mimed a death rattle.

Havel blinked. For a moment he saw his own hand and the knife in it, glistening red-black in the firelight as if coated in oil, and remembered spitting out salt blood to clear his mouth. Then he shook his head and focused on the problem at hand. You had to do that, the way Larsson stopped occasionally and pushed the image of his wife's death out of his head with a visible effort of will. Acts of will repeated often enough became habit, and habit carried you through.

Dwelling on the bad stuff just made it stronger, and if there was one thing in the world he despised, it was someone who let their emotions get in the way of doing their share of the job at hand.

“You can't rig something in the way of a horse collar?” he went on to the wrangler.

Will Hutton had had a lot of spare tack, leather, cord and tools; even a hollow-cast anvil, although he disavowed blacksmith status, saying he simply did farrier work and a little smithing now and then.

“Oh, I can get somethin' rigged in the way of a collar,” he said. “Carve it in sections from wood, I reckon, pad it, then sew some leather over it. Problem is that the pole on this thing is too low. It's meant for a towbar.”

Propped on a chunk of wood to keep the trailer's bed level, the Y-shaped pole with the towing hitch was at about knee height. Hutton held his hand palm-down in front of his body at the solar plexus.

“We need a drawshaft about
this
high, otherwise the horses can't pull good and we'll chance hurting them if we load the wagon full. Too much weight on their withers.”

Ken pivoted himself on his backside, so that his face and shoulders stretched out from under the trailer. His face looked a little less doughy this morning, and he'd shaved off the silvery stubble. He looked critically at the towing bar.

“And that'll come loose; it's bolted.”

His finger sketched. “We could mount it upright instead of horizontally in the same brackets, with a little file and hacksaw work, use one of the roofing struts from the horse trailer, they're already curved and about the right width.”