his companion was.”
“I don’t know if every camel’s as ornery as she is,” said Tovar, “but we get along more or less. I figure she must have escaped from a zoo or something; I found her a few years back, just wanderin’ around.” He ushered the group through the doorway and closed it behind them. “I went through a lot of trouble to keep this fire invisible from outside,” he explained. “Chimney still works, too, so with a storm like this to hide the smoke, you can’t even tell I’m here.”
“We followed the tracks,” said Marcus, pulling off his coat.
“The tracks don’t lead here,” said Tovar. “At least not directly.”
“I heard you,” said Jayden, a small smile creeping through the corner of his mouth. “Dolly needs a few lessons in stealth.”
Tovar shook his head. “She wanted more sugar. Figures you folks’d be passin’ by for the two seconds she decides to argue the point. Most folks — meanin’ those folks nosy enough to be lookin’—never find this place at all. They just follow my tracks down around the next house, back through the woods, and then give up when they hit the creek. Turns out the bridge is fallen down, if you’ll believe it, and the planks I use to get across are pretty well hidden on the wrong side.”
“You’re a drifter,” said Jayden.
“I’m a salesman. That makes me a target for all kinds of unsavories, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a target of opportunity.” He moved a pile of blankets from the couch nearest the fire. “Best seats to the ladies, naturally. This place is pretty cozy with just me in it, but we’re going to get downright neighborly with this many people trying to sleep.”
Kira watched the man as he sorted out the blankets, squeezing between the dusty couches to arrange sleeping space for ten people and a donkey.
The drifter handed a blanket to Brown, who stared at him suspiciously before yanking it gruffly from his hands. Tovar smiled and stepped back.
“This is going to be an awful long night if we keep not trusting each other. You really think I’m a Voice?”
Brown said nothing, and Tovar turned to Gianna. “How about you?” He turned again, stopping in front of Jayden and opening his arms. “What about you, do you think I’m a Voice? Is risking my own life and sharing my dry blankets all part of some larger plan to destroy the last human civilization?”
“I think you’re ex-military,” said Kira, inching closer to the fire.
Tovar cocked his head to the side. “What makes you say that?”
“Some of the words you use,” said Kira, “like ‘intel’ and ‘target of opportunity.’ The way you stowed your gun when we came in. The way you and Jayden are standing with absolutely identical postures right now.”
Jayden and Tovar looked at each other, then at themselves: feet shoulder-width apart, back straight, arms folded loosely behind them. They moved away from each other awkwardly, shifting their weight and shaking out their wrists.
“Being ex-military doesn’t mean he’s not in the Voice,” said Brown. “A lot of them are soldiers, too.”
“If being a soldier is proof of guilt,” said Tovar, “seven out of ten people in this room are looking awfully guilty.”
“So tell us about yourself,” said Marcus, settling into a couch. “If I’m going to spend the whole night waiting for you guys to stop flirting and shoot each other, I want to at least be entertained.”
“Owen Tovar,” he repeated with a bow, “born and raised in Macon, Georgia. I played varsity football for two years, graduated, joined the marines, and blew off four of my toes in the war — this would be the Iranian war, not the Isolation War, the one with the Chinese that you kids are probably thinking of, the one we sent the Partials to fight for us. Though I suppose most of you are what, late teens? Two or three years old when that war ended, five or six when the whole world ended a few years later? No, when I say ‘war,’ you’re probably thinking of the Partial War, things bein’ what they are, but I hate to break it to you that that wasn’t no kind of war at all, just some fightin’ and some dyin’ and some ‘that’s all she wrote.’ War, see, is when two sides fight, maybe not evenly, but at least they both get a few swings in. What we call the Partial War was mankind gettin’ mugged in an alley.”
“I remember the Isolation War,” said Gianna. “We’re not all plague babies here.”
“Not my place to speculate on a lady’s age,” said Tovar, sitting down by the fire. He looked relaxed, but Kira noticed that he was still in quick, easy reach of his shotgun. Jayden sat across from him, but most of the soldiers stayed standing. Kira sat by Marcus, pulling his arm over her shoulders. He was warm and reassuring.
“Doesn’t matter which war it was, I guess,” said Tovar. “I lost four toes, left the marines on medical leave, and went home to Georgia to play hockey.”
“They couldn’t have played hockey in Georgia,” said Sparks. “That was one of the southern ones, right? Georgia? Hockey was an ice sport.”
“Hockey was ice-skating,” said Jayden, nodding, “and there’s no way you could do that in Georgia. Especially with no toes.”
Tovar smiled. “This is where you plague babies start to show your ignorance.” He turned to Gianna. “You remember ice rinks?”
A small grin crept into her face. “I do.”
“An ice rink,” said Tovar, “was a giant room, like a whole basketball court, inside of a refrigerator. Just imagine — a whole building so cold the ice stays frozen. And then you fill it up with people, hundreds of people sometimes — we were only the minor leagues — and they’d all start cheering and yelling and getting worked up, and that room would heat up like this one is now, all those bodies packed in there like logs in a fire, and that giant refrigerator would keep chugging away and cooling it down and that ice would stay so frozen that all they had to do was spray it with water between periods, and a few minutes later it was as smooth and as flat as a Tiger Sharks cheerleader.” He grinned maliciously. “I beg your pardon. Old rivalries.”
“That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Sparks. “You could power a whole city for a year with the kind of electricity you’re talking about.”
“A little place like East Meadow, sure,” said Tovar, “you could power that town on a good-size corporate air conditioner. For the old cities, and the old ways, even a tiny little place like Macon could swallow East Meadow whole, and with all those hundreds of thousands of people driving cars and watching movies and surfing the Internet eighty-seven hours a day, we still had enough juice left over to run an ice rink in the state of Georgia — one of the hot ones, like you said, where we didn’t have no business freezing anything at all.”
“I still don’t believe it,” muttered Sparks.
“We’re talking about minor league hockey in Macon, Georgia,” said Tovar. “I didn’t rightly believe it myself. You know what we called the team? If you’re not believing anything else, you’re sure not gonna believe me on this one: We called our team the Macon Whoopee.” He cackled with laughter. “That sounds like the biggest lie yet, but it’s true, the Macon Whoopee.” He slapped his knee; several of the soldiers were laughing, and even Kira couldn’t help but chuckle. “We were a minor league team that didn’t feed into any majors, in a town that loved just about every sport but ours. We were going nowhere and we knew it, so why not have fun? In the forties, when I was playing, we were officially the most violent team in the country, and that means probably the whole world, and by the way, that’s why I could skate with no toes. A figure skater, a speed skater, an NHL forward, sure, you need your toes for control, but all that finesse takes a backseat when all you’re trying to do is slam somebody into a wall and break all his teeth.”
“Hockey,” mused Marcus. “The sport of kings.”
Tovar paused, his eyes focused on a distant memory. “Sometimes I think that’s what I miss most about the old days. The old times. We had so much of just about everything, we could waste it all on stupid junk that nobody needed. ‘The Golden Age of Man.’” His smile returned, wry and sour. “Pride cometh, as they say, before the fall.”
Jayden nodded, smiling faintly. “I can’t say as that story makes me trust you any more than I did, but it does make me like you.”
Tovar nodded back. “Very kind of you, under the circumstances.” He pulled a flask from his back pocket, took a drink, and offered it to Jayden. The soldier took a swig and passed it back.
“I must admit,” said Marcus, “that as a medic I am still waiting to get to the good part of this story.”
Tovar looked surprised. “Excuse me?”
