“Crimson is red?” interrupted his granddaughter.
The Stranger nodded emphatically and continued.
“They shall be as wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.”
The Old Man stood. He was shaking.
I am angry and I do not know why!
You are angry at this man, my friend, because he will not answer a simple question.
Yes, that is why I am angry.
“What is your name, sir?”
When the Stranger did not immediately answer, the Old Man began to turn and walk away. A few steps and he heard the Stranger say, “Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. I am as one crying in the wilderness.”
When the Old Man turned back, there were tears streaming down the Stranger’s sunburned cheeks.
Don’t be angry with him. He can’t help…
He’s crazy.
The Old Man sat down next to the fire again.
If you’d watched civilization go up in flames. If you’d watched what came after and had to survive any way you could through all those years alone. How could you not be crazy, my friend?
I did. I watched. I survived. I’m not crazy.
But you had the village. Your wife. Your son. Your grandchildren. Maybe he had no one.
The Old Man sighed and sipped his tea again. He had another piece of bacon.
“I think you understand me,” he said to the Stranger.
The Stranger nodded.
“But for some reason you speak in riddles and I don’t know why. So I will tell you that we are headed east to find some people who have asked for our help. We need fuel. Were you part of the people who lived up here?” The Old Man pointed toward the abandoned hotel that had been the center of the outpost.
The Stranger shook his head in the negative.
“Did you know them?”
The Stranger nodded.
“We need their fuel. Do you know where it is? Is there any left?”
The Stranger nodded again.
Chapter 38
“And they shall be desolate in the midst of the countries that are desolate, and her cities shall be in the midst of the cities that are wasted.”
The Old Man watched the Stranger as he worked at pulling up the grating that covered what must have once been a pool inside the skeletal remains of a gym.
That is his answer to what lies east?
Yes, my friend. That is his answer.
When the metal cover was pushed back, the hint of kerosene bloomed in full. Inside the empty pool, salvage-fashioned fuel tanks lay along the bottom.
My eyes are burning from the fumes.
The Old Man waved the others back and dropped down into the shallow end of the dry pool. He tapped his scarred knuckles against a tank and heard the hollow echo of a half-filled volume.
Will it be enough?
It will have to be.
They brought the tank in through the shattered remains of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It crushed ancient fitness machines beneath its treads. Above them a barn owl screeched incessantly, refusing to flee into the daylight.
He has been here for some time.
If he waits, we will go away. But he must wait until we have taken all their fuel.
When they had maneuvered the tank as close to the pool as they could, they stretched out the pump hose until it barely reached the farthermost tank.
The fumes could ignite in a moment so we must be very careful.
“Go out and look for some salvage,” he told his granddaughter. “See if there is anything we can use.”
“Food would be good, Poppa.”
“Yes, food would be good.”
When she was gone he breathed a little easier.
If we explode she will at least be safe.
She will be all alone.
Yes, but she won’t be dead.
The Boy took charge of the fueling once the Old Man had shown him how it was performed. Now they waited in the silence of the ancient pool area, the APU droning like the pumps of the pool must have once done.
The Old Man turned to the Stranger.
His words are church words.
As though he will only speak what he has seen or read. As though it is his punishment or his penance. But he understands. I know he does. How has he made it all this time? What is his story of salvage?
“What is your… what is your story?”
The Stranger who had been watching the fueling process with both amazement and amusement turned back to the Old Man with laughing, mirthful eyes.
The Stranger seemed to want to say something. Then stopped himself and simply shook his head. When the Old Man seemed to accept this, the Stranger turned back to watch the fueling.
The map.
The Old Man climbed up into the tank and retrieved Sergeant Presley’s map, though he thought of it only as the Boy’s.
Again he was amazed at the information contained in its markings.
It’s the story of someone’s life.
Is that not true of all maps, my friend?
True. And also, our stories are the maps of our lives.
The Old Man stopped.
Our stories are the maps of our lives.
Yes, my friend.
He spread the map out on the ragged rubber floor of the gym, in a space between crushed pieces of fitness equipment.
“Excuse me?” He spoke loudly trying to get the Stranger’s attention.
The Stranger turned.
He saw the map. If the look in his eyes when he’d watched the tank drink up all the fuel had been one of amazement, the look in his eyes when he saw the map was one of awe.
He fell to his knees and a moment later his short thick fingers were tracing the roads. Tracing them back east. Tracing them to New York. Landing on Brooklyn.
And he wept.
His shoulders shaking.
Sobs gushing forth in tremendous heaves.
“By the rivers of Babylon,” sobbed the Stranger. “There we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
The Stranger hung his head and tears splashed down onto the map. The Old Man stood, frozen.
