Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) (3 page)

The
air smells of electricity and smoke. His younger sister Pamela is crying
soundlessly. Far away, someone yells wordlessly; a feral, mad sound.

They
keep moving.

Grey
sat up and swung his feet from the cot to the cold floor, blinking at the dark.
After a moment, he shook his head and lay back down, straightening the blanket.

In
the distance a coyote called in the moonlight. He closed his eyes and slept
until daybreak.

Breakfast
was bacon, a plump venison sausage and hash browns. Doc got the potatoes from
Tillingford’s nearby farm. Grey brought him the venison.

“Where’d
you get bacon?” Grey asked.

“A
farmer up by the Forks is raising pigs. I traded Maggie Gordon for this. She
had a tooth that needed seeing to, and she traded him for some chickens.” Doc
grinned. His own teeth were even and white.

“I
gotta swing up that way again, then,” Grey said. “Maybe I can work out some
trade. I miss bacon.”

The
two men ate in silence. The husky stuck its head in the cabin door and whoofled
at the smell, wagging its curled tail. Doc gave it a bacon rind and sent it
back outside.

“So,”
Doc said.

“So,”
Grey echoed. “Well. The map tends to make me a believer.”

Doc
watched Grey and said nothing.

“These
weren’t soldiers, but they weren’t just homicidal hillbillies. Someone’s got an
organized gang going.” Grey grinned without humor and scratched his chin. “Just
like the old days, before the ammunition got scarce. It surprises me though. As
things have settled down, the assholes with guns were usually the first to get
shot.”

“You
shot a few over the years, as I recall,” Doc offered.

Grey’s
smile vanished.

“I
don’t go looking for trouble.”

“Fine,
no need to get your shorts in a knot,” Doc said, clearing the table. “So what
do you think we should do?”

Grey
rose and stretched.

“I’ll
see if I can backtrack them. Figure out where they came from, and where they
got that map. Ask people in the valley what they’ve seen.”

“Sounds
like a plan,” Doc said. “Do you need anything? Food? Medicine?”

Grey
shook his head and bent to tighten his bootlaces.

“I’ll
go pack up my camp and then start working their trail. Probably won’t be able
to follow them far anyway.”

When
Grey left half an hour later, Doc pressed a small paper-wrapped parcel into his
hands at the door. Winston whined and snuffled at it.

“Bacon?”

“Bacon.”

Doc’s
cabin crouched on a wooded plateau surrounded by scrubby dry upland. From the
forested edges of the wide top, a watcher could see for miles and remain
unseen. Grey started the morning by circumnavigating that edge.

The
land fell away steeply on all sides, cut by a few dry gullies and the single
slow trickle of a year-round spring. In the early light the bunchgrass
spreading out below was gold, the clumps of juniper black and sharp-edged. In
the distance, at the foot of the valley’s far mountains, lay the blue expanse
of Lake Okanagan. Grey saw two small herds of deer grazing and a lone bear
rolling along, headed west toward the feral remains of the orchards that still
bore fruit near the lake. The morning wind was cold. It was the end of
September and it would be hot by noon, but the nights were near freezing now.
The first light frost might come in a week, here in the lowlands.

A
few thin lines of smoke rose here and there as homesteads started the day -
faint and blue in the low sunlight. Across the width of the valley floor a few
miles to the north sprawled the green and black blotch that was the ruins of
Kelowna. Smoke rose there, too. Grey finished his circle and descended the
gully rather than the broad path leading down the north slope. An hour later he
reached the point where his path had crossed that of the three. He marked it
with a stick and continued on.

His
pack was heavier now. He’d kept various small items that he’d looted from the
bodies for trade: Hunting knives, a bottle of iodine, some tin cups and a
frying pan, a bag of coarse salt, a dozen thick silver coins. He’d grinned at
the one struck in Vancouver. It bore the port’s name and a hand giving a
middle-finger salute. There were also a handful of shotgun shells and three
coils of good hemp rope. It was heavier still after detouring the two miles to
his camp, where he’d rolled his tarp, loaded his own cookware and bedroll and
dug up the steel box that held his extra ammunition and matches. He lowered his
food bag from its perch in a pine. He filled three one-liter plastic bottles at
the creek downslope from his camp, watching the red flash of kokanee as they
fought over spawning beds in the tumbling flow.

It
got hot. By noon he’d emptied the first of the bottles and taken off his
jacket, tucking it under the left strap of his pack. He had progressed a few
miles up the trio’s back trail, noting the way they’d stayed in cover where it
was offered. That was their only nod to concealment, though. The trail itself
was plain. They either didn’t know or didn’t care to walk where vegetation
would have hidden their passage, and their boot marks were crisp in the clay
dust.

They’d
come from the south, and their trail carried on that way for the rest of the
afternoon. Grey saw no one during those hours, though he did hear the distant
crack of a rifle at one point. The trail never came too near any of the
homesteads but did manage to hit spots that overlooked each. It detoured in an
arc through the trees when it came close to Tillingford’s; a cluster of a
half-dozen houses and fields of corn, turnips and swedes surrounded by pole
fences. Past the fence lay cut fields of timothy hay.

Grey
glanced at the westering sun in the hard blue sky and turned aside from the
trail, again marking it. The soil was rocky, and he built a small cairn of
stones atop a stump.

Tillingford’s
consisted of log houses for the most part, the logs cut and hauled from the
surrounding pines and cedars, though the oldest building was a two-story rancher
that had survived the years and the fires following the Fall. It hadn’t aged
well; the two-by-four and chipboard construction was sagging and falling apart
and the house was now relegated to storage. The buildings sat in a rough
square, guarding three barns made of poles and sheet metal. At the north and
south extremities of the village rose tall three-legged watchtowers,
overlooking the fields beyond. The settlers had cut back the woods more than
half a mile in each direction over the decades, pulling stumps to open the
fields for cultivation.

Grey
slung his rifle and walked out of the trees and into the stubble of the
hayfields. By his tenth step he heard the distant clang of one of the tower
bells, followed by three more.
Three must mean east
, he thought. He
looked up, waved in the direction of the village, and carried on, not hurrying.

Once
he reached the fences flanking the fields he turned left, following them until
he reached a stile and could climb over. He had to set his pack and rifle over
first. Two young men were walking to meet him. Both were tall, dark-haired and
shared the same sharp brown eyes. Their faces were identical but for the
scarred lip of the one on the left.

“Grey,
what brings you in out of the woods?” asked the unscarred twin. He smiled and
offered a hand. Grey shook it.

“Hi,
Todd. Oh the usual. Stuff to trade, questions to ask, dinner to eat. You
keeping all right, Matthew?” His brother nodded and squinted back over Grey’s
shoulder, eyeing the trees.

“You
usually come in from the north. Why the change?”

“That’s
why I like Matthew,” Grey said. “He’s more paranoid than I am. I’ll tell you
all about it, but first I want to sit down and find out if you two will spare
an old man a cup of milk?”

“I
think that can be arranged,” Todd said. “Mrs. Genovaise has been making some
cheese, and if you’re lucky she might share.”

“If
that’s the case I may just have to settle down here and retire. I can’t recall
the last time I had cheese.” Grey paused, his eyes turning to the trees as well.
“I’ll want your dad, if he’s around.”

“Trouble?”
Matthew asked.

“Maybe.
Don’t know yet.”

“Daylight’s
burning,” Todd said. “Let’s go.”

Art
Tillingford was a bigger, balder version of his sons, with a wind-reddened face
and a limp he’d earned in a horse wreck in his youth. He invited his guest into
his house and sat across from him at the kitchen table. He and Grey made small
talk for a minute while Art’s wife Ada sectioned vegetables for canning and
pretended to ignore them. The two men exchanged local gossip and news - not
that there was much. Tina Hanson had given birth to a daughter, and Jerry was
busily adding onto the cabin for the new arrival. Tommy Sunderford had seen a
big blonde grizzly on his patch. Everyone was still talking about the meteor
that had killed Nathan’s old horse. The talk was a polite nothing. It let Grey
enjoy his milk and cheese and a slab of heavy bread before moving on to the
real news.

Grey
filled Tillingford in. It didn’t take long.

“So
I mostly wanted to know if you’d seen or heard about anyone new in the area
lately, or this Defense Force thing,” Grey finished, “and to ask you to keep
your ears open.”

“I
haven’t heard shit,” Tillingford said. “I have to tell you I don’t much like
the whole idea of someone thinking they’re in charge. That never works out.”

“It
could just be bullshit.”

“Naw,
I think Doc was right,” Tillingford said, rubbing his nose on his sleeve. “You
look at that map, someone’s got something together. But what it is and what
they want; there’s a question for you.”

Grey
shrugged, then gave a grudging nod.

“Maybe
it’s for the best. Maybe someone’s trying to rebuild?”

“Fuck
that,” Tillingford said, flushing a deeper red. “We’ve already rebuilt and
without any help. You remember what it was like as well as I do.” Ada rolled
her eyes but stayed silent.

“Yeah.”

The
two sat quiet for a minute. Grey listened to the high squeals of the younger
children playing outside. There was always a pack of kids at every homestead.
People had moved to big families fast in the aftermath, he reflected.

“What’s
got you so pissed off, Art?”

Tillingford
opened his mouth. Then shut it again and thought before answering.

“I’m
worried. I’m worried you’re gonna follow this up and find out something neither
of us want to know,” he said at last.

“I
can only find what’s there,” Grey observed.

“Yeah,
but you don’t poke a bear in the ass out of curiosity,” Tillingford said and
raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll
see if I can just take a look at the bear, then. See which way it’s headed,
maybe. I think we have to know. There’s what, maybe three or four thousand
people through the valley now? Not many of them have a layout like this. They
would be easy pickings.”

“Easy
pickings for who?”

Grey
smiled a hard little grin that didn’t touch his eyes.

“That’s
the question I want to answer.”

Grey
circulated that evening, thanked Mrs. Genovaise for the cheese, and made
discreet inquiries with the two dozen adults in the village. He traded with
Tillingford as well, swapping his shotgun shells for ten .270 rounds for his
rifle and twenty empty brass of the same caliber. The knives went to three
households, and brought in a jar of dried garlic, a wool blanket and a needle
and spool of tough olive-green thread. One of the coils of rope bought him a
bag of dried corn and another of beans. It was enough to travel on, he thought.
Besides, he had a little silver.

He
spent a dreamless night sleeping in the old rancher, listening to the packrats
scuttle in the walls. He left in the pre-dawn dark after refilling his water
bottles.

The
weather stayed dry for the next three days, and Grey followed the fading trail
that long before losing it for good somewhere just past the south end of the
lake. He’d asked those it was safe to talk to, and as he went south he began to
hear a few whispers. Nothing about any “defense force”, except as persistent
rumors from the east, but a few people had noticed strangers.

In
the summer there were always a few people moving north or south down the
valley. Traders made the rounds, hunters followed the game, and once in a while
settlers looking for a place to live came, carrying their lives in carts. The
strangers didn’t seem to be any of those things. The few times they’d been seen
they were moving in small groups, avoiding contact. There had been a few
disappearances among the migrants during the same period. A hunter or two had
not returned when they were expected; a pony cart had been found, empty, on the
old highway. No one knew who it belonged to. Grey tracked it down at a small
orchard not far north of where the border once was, but an examination told him
nothing.