Dies the Fire (71 page)

P
roblems,
Mike Havel thought.

Mother Superior Gertrude was a horse-faced woman in her early sixties. She wasn't quite what Havel had expected in a nun; she did wear a headdress, but the rest of her clothing was overalls and a checked shirt and heavy shoes of the sort once called sensible.

Now she finished making corrections on the graph paper that Ken Larsson had pinned to a corkboard supported by a tripod. They were in Sheriff Woburn's house, a painfully ordinary suburban living room—except for the lampholders screwed into the walls, and the smoke marks above them; the whole house smelled not-so-faintly of woodsmoke from the kitchen, ashes from fireplace, and burnt gasoline from the lanterns.

There were improvised stables out back, too, and you could smell the horses as well, and their by-products. Flies buzzed about, despite the screens on windows and doors. There was too much manure around, and it made an ideal breeding ground; so did the broad—and heavily fertilized—truck gardens the residents of Craigswood had put in.

Well, hello, Good Old Days,
Havel thought absently.
Eau de Horseshit and all. At least wandering about we can escape from our own crap.

Woburn caught the drift of Havel's thoughts as he glanced about. “Not lookin' forward to an Idaho winter with only the fireplace and the woodstove,” he said. “Damnit, we should be laying in wood now, but we don't have time.”

Havel nodded.
It would be even worse in a tent,
he thought.

Eric and a couple of others had suggested that they take up the wandering life full-time, herding cattle and sheep and horses for a living and trading for what else they needed. Then Ken Larsson had given a brief but colorful description of a north-plains winter in a teepee or equivalent, which had been enough to put paid to that. Plus the bit about their grandchildren being—literally—louse-eating nomads.

Susan Woburn came out with two big plates of bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches in her hands; Havel took one eagerly, with a word of thanks. They didn't eat bacon very often—pigs really weren't very practical to drive along for long distances—and they got fresh greens less often than that. There was even mayonnaise, and just eating light risen bread was a treat—on the move it kept falling and rising again, and ended up . . .
chewy
was the most charitable way to describe it.

Woburn nodded to his wife. “ Thanks, honey . . . At least we haven't been short of food, praise God,” he said. “And we shouldn't be next year, even with all the damage the Devil Dogs have done. If we can get things in order soon.”

Ken Larsson leaned back from his sketch. “This is best we can do. Combination of the original plans and the latest intelligence.”

Havel brought his sandwich over. “Damn, that does look like a fort,” he said. “All right, what about doorknockers?”

Ken fanned out a selection of diagrams. “This is what I think we can make, given the materials available.”

Havel nodded, impressed. He noted that Woburn looked a lot less happy.

“ The problem is . . . well, to tell the truth, the problem is that . . .”

“You can't get enough men together to surround the place,” Havel said. “Not after getting whipped last time. Lots of people finding excuses for not showing up.”

Woburn nodded, mouth drawn in a bitter line. “What I need is a big win,” he said. “Beating the crap out of a bunch of them. I could get the support I need after that.”

His hand—the one not holding a sandwich—clenched into a fist and came down on his knee. “And then there'd be some changes around here! We're not doing half the things we should. Too much talk, not enough action.”

I detect a certain amount of bitterness,
Havel thought.

It occurred to him that if Woburn did come out on top, things might get quite uncomfortable for temporizers and those who'd tried to play both sides against the middle.

Hereditary Sheriff Woburn the First? Not my business how things turn out here,
he thought.
I'm just passing through . . . and they could do worse. Duke Iron Rod is a chancre that needs cauterizing. Not unlike his big-city patron.

“What we need,” he said aloud, “is to cut up a couple of their raiding parties. For that we need recon. How big a gang do they send out?”

“Two dozen on a serious raid, give or take,” Woburn said. “Enough to swarm any resistance on a single farm and get away fast. Usually they set out around dawn. They probably won't try again for a while after the most recent lot. But I don't see how you can intercept them any better than we can. It's not as if we could sneak someone up onto Cottonwood Butte with a radio!”

“What we need,” Havel went on, “is aerial recon.”

Woburn snorted. “That's not funny. Why not wish for a couple of working tanks?”

Havel grinned, and saw a frown of puzzlement growing on Woburn's face.

He went on: “You're forgetting something, Sheriff; truth is, I hadn't thought of it until my last trip down the Columbia Gorge. Electricity doesn't work anymore, and guns neither. But hot air still rises. Got much propane left around here?”

 

 

 

Billy Waters sat on the curb and watched men and a few women going in and out of the tavern. It had been one before the Change, one of three in Craigswood; it was the only one left now. A sort of sour half-spoiled smell came from the buildings to its rear, and he recognized the scent—mash getting ready for the still, with an undertone of beer fermenting. The thought made him smile a bit, and he hummed a few bars of “Copperhead Road”; then the pain in his lips brought reality crashing back.

The day was bright and warm, but he shivered. Memories tormented him; the smooth heat of the whiskey going down his throat, and the sweet hiss of the cap coming off the beer bottle, the first cool draught chasing the fire all the way to his belly . . .

Just one,
he thought.
Havel wouldn't mind if it was just one. He never told anyone not to take one drink. Hellfire, he likes his beer, and a whiskey now and then.

A horse-drawn wagon made from a cut-down truck went past while he was thinking, and nursing the bruises. He touched his face gingerly, trying to summon up enough anger to get him across the street and into the tavern.

The problem was that he couldn't; all he could feel was fear.

He could feel anger at Jane, for making him hit her, and at that deceitful little bitch Nancy, and at Reuben for trying to hit his own father, but when he thought about Havel it was as if a white light filled his head, like it had the day of the Change.

All he could feel was the pain and the fear.

I
can
stand up to him!
he thought.
I
can—

“Excuse me,” someone said.

Waters looked up. The man standing over him on the sidewalk looked nondescript; not young, not middle-aged, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, cowboy boots and Budweiser billed cap.

“Yeah?” he said.

“You're the guy who can make bows, aren't you? Name of Billy Waters?”

“Yeah,” Waters said.

“I heard how you got beat up just because you spanked your kid. That doesn't sound right.”

Waters levered himself stiffly to his feet, squinting at the unremarkable man. That also wasn't how he'd heard that people in Craigswood had gotten the story, either. Most of them who'd heard anything at all had been treating him like something nasty they scraped off their shoes on a hot day. And Craigswood was small, about a thousand people before the Change, half that now. He knew how news spread in a setting like that, having spent most of his life in one small town or another; the largest place he'd ever lived was Little Rock, and that only for a few months.

“Smith,” the man said, offering his hand. “Jeb Smith. Thought I might like to talk to you about bows, and other things. Care for a beer?”

Waters's eyes flicked to the tavern, with its neon sign that probably hadn't worked before the Change and certainly didn't now. He shook the man's hand, but the white explosion of light seemed to fill his head again. Someone would talk . . .

“Ah . . .” he began.

Jeb laughed. “Not that horse piss. It's overpriced anyway, you have to trade half an hour's work for a glass, or something pretty fancy in the way of hard goods. No, I've got some home brew that isn't doing anything but filling up a crock.”

He released Waters's hand, but steered him along for a moment by the elbow. “Seems to me a man who knows how to make bows should have a better position,” he said. “And be able to sit down and have a beer when he feels like it.”

“Damned right,” Waters said. “
Damned
right. It's like being in the fucking Marines!”

They entered a nondescript ranch-style bungalow; the two on either side were abandoned; all the lawns had been plowed up for vegetables.

Jeb waved a hand at the houses on either side: “Stupid bastards are out somewhere shoveling cowshit for a rancher,” he said. “There are easier ways of making a living, even these days.”

“Yeah,” Billy Waters said again.

“Me, I swap things and, ummm, sort of arrange deals,” Smith said as they seated themselves in the dim coolness of the living room. “You need something, like say an old hand pump, or parts for a windmill, and you come to Jeb. Jeb can find it, or put you in touch with someone who has it or can make it. All for a very reasonable commission.”

A woman came out with a pitcher of beer; it wasn't refrigerated, but drops of condensation slid down the sides of the glass, and Billy licked his lips. He had time to notice how good-looking she was before she handed him the tumbler.

“Ahhh,” he said as the first glorious swallow slid down.

It wasn't like anything he'd tasted before the Change, but it was undoubtedly beer. For a wonder, he didn't feel like gulping it and going right for another, either. Maybe it was because, for the first time in months, he wasn't bored.

“Your daughter, Jeb?”

“Naw, girlfriend,” the other man said, giving her a casual slap on the butt as she went past. “Sort of. A man with connections has got more, oh, call it bargaining power, these days.”

Waters looked around. The house was well furnished; it had an iron heating-stove in one corner of the living room, with its sheet-metal chimney already installed, and he could see through an archway that the kitchen had a wood cooking range. That was wealth, these days. Waters grinned; it reminded him of the one his mother had had, and she'd grown up no-doubt-about-it
poor.

There was also a good hunting crossbow racked beside the door, and a belt with a bowie and hatchet scabbarded on it, with a steel helmet—an old pre-Kevlar Army model—and a plywood shield faced in sheet metal.

“So, you one of the sheriff's posse?” he asked.

“Nope. Not interested in getting myself killed for Woburn's benefit,” Smith said. “Any more than busting my ass playing farmer.”

He smiled and leaned forward. “Let's talk.”

 

 

 

And I thought that things would get easier after the harvest,
Juniper thought bitterly.
And surely after we beat the Protector's men back from Sutterdown.

Aloud she spoke to Laughton with patient gentleness: “Sheriff, I really
can't
turn the McFarlanes down if they want to join us. Even though it's inconvenient for all concerned.”

He was looking mulish again. Juniper fought an impulse to bury her face in her hands, and an even stronger one to grab her fiddle and head out into the woods with Cuchulain and lean against a tree and play until her nerves unknotted and she floated away on a tide of music.

Instead she took another sip of chilled herbal tea and looked out the north-facing window of her loft-bedroom-office for an instant and sighed. August was hot this year and there was a little smoke haze in the air over the mountains from the big burn further northeast, towards the Three Sisters; she worried about it spreading, too.

She turned back to Laughton, looking over his shoulder through the west-facing dormer. She could see a squared timber swinging up on its rope, running from the two-horse team through the big block-and-tackle on the ground to the log tripod at the top of the half-completed gatehouse tower. Dennis's voice rang out, calling to Sally at the horses' heads; she halted the team and then backed them step by careful step, and hands on the scaffolding around the gatehouse guided the timber down.

“I know it makes things awkward, Sheriff,” she said.

The gatehouse and nearly finished palisade were reassuring. So was Sally, with her tummy starting to bulge out over her chinos. Life went on; children got born, crops got planted, things got built. They'd get through somehow, Lady and Lord helping.

“You think it doesn't make it awkward for us, too?” she asked, tapping the map on the table between them.

That was of the Artemis Creek area, from the high hills north and east of Dun Juniper, down through the spreading V-shaped swale that held the old Fairfax place and out into the flats around Sutterdown, with the Butte beyond.

“Even out of Dun Carson”—the old Carson homestead, now well on its way to being a fortified steading—“getting our people up to work this farm will be a nightmare of time wasted traveling back and forth. What we might talk about is a swap for something closer, if any of your folk are interested.”