The Wasteland Saga

droplets of sweat stood out in his short curly hair.

The Boy gave him water from their bag, then some of the cakes they always made back then.

Still hot in there. Sergeant Presley coughed.

The Boy said nothing.

“Hot” meant forbidden. If sometimes they saw a city on the horizon, like the one by the big lake, its tall towers skeletal and bent, Sergeant Presley would simply say still hot. And sometimes he would add, When you’re an old man, if you live long enough, you can go in there. But I never will.

Sergeant Presley drank more water and coughed.

I woulda brought you somethin’, but it’s too hot in there. I swear I came right up on a bomb crater. Must’ve been low yield. But hell if it didn’t go up twenty degrees. I look around and everything is black ash. Even the marble on one of them old government buildings, the House I think it was called, had turned black.

He coughed again.

‘He will never stop coughing,’ thought the Boy. That was when the coughing had started. That day everything changed, though at the time neither of them knew it.

Sergeant Presley knew it, he suspected. But he didn’t say anything.

Sergeant Presley coughed again.

Made it all the way to the White House.

He coughed and then drank, swallowing thickly.

There was never anything there. It wasn’t a direct hit. See, back then our enemies were fighting unconventionally. Dirty-bomb strikes by remote-controlled aircraft launched within our borders. Terrorists. They went after Washington early on. We knew that. It wasn’t until later, when China got involved, that we didn’t know for sure what had really happened anywhere. After that it was just plain dark everywhere.

He chewed numbly on the cake, staring at their wispy fire. The Boy watched him, saying nothing.

The bunker was a deep hole. Must’ve used the Chinese equivalent of a J-Dam on it. I saw one of those take out the TransAmerica Building in Frisco. I’ll show you when we get there. Anyways, they must have used a “bunker buster” on it. Then, whether before or after, there must have been a nuclear strike, probably an airburst. Whole place was cooked.

He coughed, choking on the cake.

NOW THE BOY looked up at the night sky. It had stopped snowing. The stars were out, shimmering in the late night or early morning. His face was hot. He stood up and walked to the cliff wall.

He leaned against it, feeling the cold stone on his back.

You should sleep, Boy. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.

‘I wish,’ thought the Boy, ‘that all of the days that had been were long days. I wish you were here.’

He did not hear the voice of Sergeant Presley and wondered if he had ever heard it. Or if he would ever hear it again.

As he walked back to the fire, a pebble fell off the side of the cliff and the Boy turned, staring up into the heights. His shadow loomed large against the wall. He saw his powerful, strong right arm and when he moved the withered left arm, it looked little more than a thin branch.

He stared at the wall and its many shadows. For a moment he could almost see a man.

The man was sitting. Hunched over. Staring sightlessly out into the world. His hand was holding something up to his mouth.

A cake.

It was as though he was looking at Sergeant Presley on that hot, sweaty, and very long day outside the ruins of the Capitol.

Sergeant Presley, sitting, tired, sweating. Eating a cake. Alive.

He turned back to the fire after staring at the image for too long. But he wished it were true. He wished Sergeant Presley were here with him now, across the country. Almost to the Army. Alive.

He picked up a piece of burnt wood from Escondido’s lodge.

He turned back to the cliff wall.

And he began to draw that long lost day. Sergeant Presley at the end of his mission. At the end of his country. At the beginning of the end of his life.

Chapter 14

At first light he checked the river. In a pool off the main channel he spotted three trout lying in the current, close to the bottom. He watched them for a long while, listening to the constant, steady crash of the river downstream.

The backs of the trout remind him of broken green glass bottles he’d once seen in a building where he and Sergeant Presley had slept for the night. Wine bottles, Sergeant Presley muttered simply, as an epitaph over the heap of green glass. The Boy remembered holding a piece up, examining it in the wavering light of their fire. Careful, Sergeant Presley had warned him. Don’t cut yourself, Boy.

He found a long piece of driftwood waiting on the rocks by the river, left by the springtime flooding of that year. He returned to camp with the driftwood and after inspecting Horse’s wound, which looked bad and worse now in the bright light of morning, he dug out wet grass from underneath the snowfall and laid it near Horse’s head. Horse seemed not to notice.

He laid more wood on the fire, its wetness making white smoke erupt into the cold air.

The Boy sat down next to the smoking fire with the driftwood stick lying away from his body. Taking one end of the wood, he cut long peels of bark away from himself and soon the white flesh of the wood underneath lay exposed. He fed the soft peels of wood into the fire as he continued to bring the stick to a point. In the end, it became a sharp spear.

He returned to the pool and waited. There was no sign of the broken-wine-bottle-colored trout. He sat on his haunches watching the gentle current drift along the bottom of the rock-covered pool.

Later, one of the fish entered the pool. The Boy waited, watching it move first one way and then another. He got little flashes of white from off its belly as it turned. Finding the current, the emerald-colored trout settled into it. After a moment, when the Boy knew it would be sleeping, he raised up, leaning over the pool, the spear drawn back over his good shoulder, the point just above the surface of the water.

He waited.

He felt a breath enter his lungs and as he let the air go, when there was little left in him, he plunged the spear through the surface, catching the trout in the back, just behind its head. It bent to the left, sending up a splash of water with its wide tail, and the Boy hauled it from the pool, amazed at his prize. Its rainbow-colored flanks fell away from its wine-bottle back, the white belly pure and meaty. It was a creature of beauty.

When the catch was gutted and spitted over the smoking fire, the Boy made more herb paste and applied it to Horse’s wound, wiping away the oozing pus as best he could.

He’d tried to lead Horse to the water before doing this, but the animal wouldn’t even bother to raise his head, much less stand.

“Okay, rest then,” said the Boy and heard the croak in his voice against the deafening fall of water over rock.

When the fish was cooked, he walked while eating, back to the drawing of Sergeant Presley on the cliff wall. He’d worked on it late into the night, immune to the cold. When he’d returned to the fire, he’d felt frozen. The heat stung his skin as it warmed him. He’d thought the drawing had been complete, but now looking at it in the late-morning light he could see where features would need to be added—filled in and shaded.

In the afternoon he tried to improve the shelter, but other than laying green pine branches across the top, there was little that could be done.