“Why do you call her Trash? She’s very beautiful. I know I’m old but ‘Trash’ doesn’t mean…”
Kyle picked up his chest armor and began to examine it.
“No,” he said almost to himself. “It means the same for us too.”
“Then why such an awful name?”
Kyle put down the armor, bent to take up another piece, and seemed to let go of the idea halfway through. He straightened and stared at the Old Man.
“She won’t respond to anything else.”
The Old Man said nothing, his blue eyes searching for meaning.
“She and a trader we did business with for years came out of the North. We knew the trader long before she came with him. She didn’t say anything ever. We thought she was just shy. The trader just referred to her as his girl. Maybe a daughter we thought. One night the trader got a little drunk, which was his way, and he told us how he’d rescued her from a bunch of hillbillies up in the mountains. They, the hillbillies, they’d called her Trash. They’d also removed her tongue. Treated her pretty badly, I guess.”
Kyle looked toward Trash. She worked intently with dirty blackened rags cleaning her gun.
“We kept trying to give her new names. Normal ones like from Before. Jenny. Susie. The trader said he’d even made ones up that he thought she might like from words that used to be beautiful before the bombs. But she wouldn’t have any of it. She wouldn’t respond. Not unless he called her Trash. He explained to her it wasn’t such a good name for good people. But she wouldn’t have it. He said one day they were high up on a pass and the snow was coming down. He started building their shelter, said it was like to turn to a blizzard more than not. He decides he’s gonna call her this name he thinks is real pretty whether she likes it or not. Aria. Weird name if I ever heard one. Aria. So he starts using it and she just won’t help. It’s getting cold and their mules are freezing but she just stands there in the snow. The trader’s still callin’ her by that weird name and it’s gettin’ dark and the snow is fallin’ sideways. But she stands there in the snow. Won’t do nuthin’. Night falls. She won’t even come in to his little tent. Finally he said he just laughed to himself and gave up for good. Trash it was. I remember I thought that was the end of his story. People got up and left the cantina. Saul, the guy who runs the place, he turned the lanterns down. He always did that when it was time for all of us to go home.”
Kyle fell silent for just a moment, and in that moment there were memories and thoughts of good things from home. Lanterns. Cantina. Home.
“That trader stands up. He was a big man. Big like a bear almost. We’d been drinkin’, and he says to me, ‘You know what the name Trash means to me?’ I didn’t say nothin’, just listened. He says, ‘It means valuable. Like somethin’ so valuable, there’s no piece of salvage or skin or meat you’d trade for it. ’Cause if you did the world just wouldn’t seem right anymore. When I say that word I see her. And that’s a good thing to me. It’s one good thing that’s still left in this burned-up old world. Maybe the last piece of good we all got left.’ About a year later she came back alone. We don’t know what happened to the trader, but it wasn’t good. So we took her in.”
The Old Man watched her. She was cleaning her gun. Cleaning it as though it was the most important work left to her in a burned-up old world.
Trash.
Chapter 28
The tank followed the three dark figures through the dust storm. Ahead, the ruins of Las Vegas hovered in and out of the skirling grit that sent sheets of brown and gray across the dark sky and swept the crumbling highway.
There should be a good moon out tonight but the dust is too thick to find it.
Ahead, the superhighway that once cut through the desert and the city had long ago collapsed into rubble. The Old Man could see oil drums filled with fire and belching black smoke from atop piles of fortified concrete. Stakes and spears and tattered banners jutted and flapped madly in the storm.
Who are these people? This Army of Crazy. King Charlie’s advance force Kyle called them.
They’re different from the Horde. More organized. More dangerous. They’ve made traps and they have flags and lines of defense. They’ve come to rule, not like those I faced at Picacho Peak. They were little more than locusts. These are like wolves.
Yes.
Ahead of the tank, the three figures lit their four torches. Grayson on the right. Trash on the left. Kyle holding two in the center.
The Old Man checked the case again, making sure it still rested on the floor of the tank.
The Boy sat in the loader’s seat, watching the Old Man.
His granddaughter was in the driver’s seat, forward and buttoned up.
“Are you all right up there?” he said to her over the intercom.
“Yes, Poppa. Can I drive now?”
“No. Not yet. Maybe on the other side.”
The bobbing torches descended off the freeway, following an off-ramp down into the ruins of the ancient gambling palaces.
Crumbling casinos like canyon walls rose up dirty and dusty on both sides. Debris skittered wildly down the side streets. Ahead, the Old Man could see the broad thoroughfare they must traverse.
Kyle’s father and mother and all the old ones of the Dam had told of the day when the airliner, taking off from the airport south of the city, had been crashed directly onto the Strip.
Terrorists.
It wasn’t until hours later that the authorities, and then everyone else, realized the plane had also been carrying a dirty bomb. A low-yield nuclear dirty bomb. That was when the panic started. When everyone fled.
Like you did in Los Angeles.
Yes, like we all did.
Kyle said the plane and its dirty bomb were why they’d been told to avoid the main road through the casinos. Because of the dirty bomb. Only the bravest kids claimed to have seen the actual wreckage of the plane, lying halfway up the Strip in the middle of the street.
That must have been a bad day.
There were a lot of bad days back then, my friend.
The Old Man turned to wondering if the Radiation Shielding Kit would indeed protect them.
He looked at the radio.
Concentrate on the path through the rubble. If you get stuck in this city, you’ve made things worse for everyone, and for no reason at all.
Yes.
He followed the jumping torches onto the main street.
Fractured monuments fell away into the dusky gloom behind them. Alongside the road, a million darkened and shattered windows looked down upon them. Crumbling walkways crossing the street resembled strands of moss draped over swampy water. The torches guttered in the blasting wind, their oily fuel barely illuminating the ground beneath the feet of their guides as the flames fought desperately against the storm.
Those torches won’t last long.
Frozen buses lay on their sides, thrown across the road, while petrified cars littered the streets in haphazard directions. A clear reason why they’d stopped on that last, long-ago day seemed just out of reach, and in the end, unknowable.
Their procession of torches and armored tank began to weave through the wrecks, occasionally crushing a smaller vehicle, its rusty destruction blossoming for an instant like a sickly rose, suddenly carried off by the storm.
Ahead, a cluster of dust-caked and ashy gray emergency vehicles, fire engines and ambulances from that long-ago lost day of an air disaster turned terrorist attack, walled off the street ahead.
On that day, those firefighters must have thought the downed aircraft was the biggest tragedy they’d ever seen, were likely to ever see.
