everything ahead of me. And then a few seconds later, a hot rush of dry wind.
“We kept on moving, farther and farther up into the mountains.
“All these tribes, all these people of the mountains, I knew ’em all in those first days when we ran from the cities. They was just survivors then, running as fast as they could while the bombs kept falling. I think about that sometimes. I kept looking for my mom in each new group we come across. But it was always someone different to be found. I can see the Mexican woman with the twin boys standing by the body of her husband as we all walked past them on the trail. I can see those boys’ faces in all of them tribes folk down near Sonora. We traded some of our women years back with them when theirs kept making weak babies, worse than what you were born with. I see the bearded guy who got shot for his food in the back of a station wagon that had broke down. I see his face now and again in some of the men and children of the Psychos. He must’ve had kin that run off once we took to his stuff. But we hadn’t eaten in three days. So, it was to be expected. What I’m sayin’—and I’m thinkin’ about it all the more now as we come up to that rave—is, I’ll be seein’ all these people again. Except it’s not them. It’s their children and grands and great-grands. Strangers I passed, sitting among the fires of the refugee camps waiting for help that never came. Dark, muddy rain comin’ down on us. Eatin’ soup. Radio’s gone. No one knows anything and the things people say don’t mean anything to me. I was young and my world was limited to music and movies, or a boy I thought I loved and would run away with and we’d be together. We’d be a real family.
“All of us survivors thought we might make it in the first few weeks after the bombs. But the big winter that come taught us the error of our ways. What little survived that winter—two years long it was—what survived would be burned away in forest fires, taken by raiders, or plain just wore out.
“I was just a girl. I knew movies. I did whatever it took to survive.”
The dark sky above the orange glow of the fire turned a soft morning blue.
“I’m a rock star. I’m the bomb keeper. I’ve loved the grim reaper.” The Rock Star’s voice was strong but passionless, as if these lines were played for the thousandth time too many and to no one in particular.
“Words of power, Bear Killer, dontchu forget about me. Don’t forget I know them words. I’ve carried them from the Before. Carried them from a television inside my heart. From that fairy palace mall.
“Words of power.”
Chapter 24
In the Hidden Valley, the Boy found the tribes.
He found what happened forty years after all the bombs fell.
He found savagery.
There were big men, cut and scarred, tattooed in ash. There were thin, misshapen men bearing the marks of exposure to the weapons of Before. There were warriors wearing the patchwork armor of ancient road signs beaten to form breastplates. Some wore the skins of wolves, some the skins of other animals and even humans. Here and there were human heads, held aloft, candles burning in their empty eye sockets.
There were the Psychos, who wore the skins of the lions that prowled the eastern desert. Teeth hung in great looping necklaces about their thick, raw, and sunburned necks. They dragged dull-eyed women behind them by heavy chains with little effort.
And there were the Death Knights, who wore battered Stop signs over their chests, mile markers on their arms, and wide-brimmed hats of leather from which the oily feathers of crows dangled in long woven cords.
There were the Park People, who wore skins and carried long beaten scythes. They were tall and lean. One or two had red hair, but who knows the why of such genetics among their mostly brown skins? They cast long, silent looks from almond-shaped eyes, warning all to keep a good distance from them, as they drank the blood of a now silent pig from the battered cups they carried at their hips.
They and many others were the strange tribes of the Sierra Nevada, which runs the length of the eastern border of what the map calls the State of California. They had lost touch with what most call Before or the Before. Those things were not coming back and, among the youngest, were not even imagined.
What was lost was now simply gone forever.
These tribes held tightly to trail and track, hunt and prey, winter and summer. Friend and enemy.
They gathered in screaming laughter and thrumming chant before a great pile called the Lodge. Poles erupted from the riot of mud- and even blood-covered warriors. The poles were adorned with skulls and strings of nuts or pine boughs indicating camp and people, honor and disgrace. On one was a patchwork flag of one red stripe, one white stripe, one star on a field of blue. On another, hubcaps banged and clattered as they were twisted this way and that, making a singsong chime of bang and rattle. Others, strange and varied, wave and leap up and down across the forest floor of the high valley that lies beneath the stony granite mountains.
These tribes gathered before the large pile of stones and timber that formed a wall between them and the Lodge, a castle from Before.
The people of the Hidden Valley had fought these many years against fire and other tribes to keep it to themselves.
But the whispers and tales of growing Chinese power, encroaching up into the native lands of the Sierra Nevada, were being told in the gutter speak of all the tribes. Whole tribes wiped out. Women murdered. Babies stolen in the night.
Now, messengers had gone out and they were gathering. Gathering against the coming storm. Gathering against the Chinese.
The Boy as Bear Killer sat astride Horse wrapped in his dark bearskin, the shining tomahawk at his belt. Beneath him the Rock Star’s People milled about with their bows, proud to have a mounted warrior who had killed a bear counted as one of their own.
All around them, stretching far off into the smoky, dusky forest floor at twilight, were the Park People and the Death Knights and the Psychos and all the other tribes. Their number was beyond his counting except for him to know that this was larger than any gathering of mankind he had ever seen. When he imagined the size of Sergeant Presley’s I Corps, it was never as numerous as on this night.
And in the distance, at the extent of his vision, other tribes were streaming forward, surging into the hot, clamoring mass at the foot of the pine log pile.
The leaders of all these tribes, including the Rock Star, have gone beyond the ramshackle wall of stone and pine, penetrating the maze of timberworks—seemingly haphazard but designed with defense and killing in mind— and disappear into the Lodge.
Hours later, just after nightfall, the leaders returned to the top of the wall. A tall man led them out onto the high wall of the Lodge, above which the waiting tribes could see the steep roof of the castle, which was once a rustic tourist resort.
The man was tall and rangy. He wore blue jeans and a long dark coat.
Clothing from Before.
His sharp jaw and blowing hair gave him a wolf’s appearance. But even from among the milling mass of warriors, it was the blue eyes the Boy noted: clear, sparkling, glinting with thoughts of some plan.
The leaders of all the tribes formed a line, linked hands, and raised them high above their varied heads and hair. And at the center of the line, the tall man, the wolf-like man, the man in the clothing from Before, stood joined to all the other leaders. He raised his sharp jaw skyward and howled up into the trees and the night above.
