The Wasteland Saga

never hear.

He looked at the cars scattered along the highway.

It is beyond me to ever know why such things have been left the way they are.

And yet I want to know.

He rode on, long after the sliver of a moon had completed its descent. It was dark and damp and cold. In the misty gloom he saw standing water in the surrounding fields and broken buildings.

The water looked like a rug.

Before long, he had ridden in close to the skeletal towers of the old state capitol in Sacramento. He heard frogs everywhere and even the highway was submerged. He came to a bridge that had long since fallen into the muck of the dark river below and he could go no farther.

It is too dark to find a way around, Sergeant.

He looked behind him and saw nothing in the misty night.

The frogs will warn me if anyone comes along.

Sorry—he pats Horse—we can’t have fire tonight.

He draped his blanket over his friend and rolled up in his bearskin at the side of the bridge, far out along it, almost to the edge of the broken span over the swamp below.

IN THE MILKY light of morning he surveyed the bridge. There was no way to the other side. The city, twisted, bent, and broken, lay all about him, submerged in the cold water of the wide river.

The course of the river must have changed in the years since the bombs.

Or because of the bombs.

He led Horse down an off-ramp and they waded through the watery streets of a long-gone city. Windows, regularly spaced, gaped and screamed in silent horror as they passed.

My whole life I’ve wanted to explore such places. But there is nothing here now.

Is this why Sergeant Presley said no? Because there is nothing left of the things that were once here?

At noon the murk had mostly burned off and they—Horse and the Boy—had crossed over to the far side of the river on an old rail bridge that still stood. The Eighty continued west on the other side of a field.

The Boy looked back at the dead city.

I could wander you for years and what could you give me back?

Could you show me who I might have been?

And why is that so important to me?

He tries for a moment to imagine what it must have looked like—looked like with people in it. People from Before.

That night, beyond the city, after a day filled with long silences punctuated by the last lonely birds of winter, he camped next to a wall whose purpose he didn’t understand. Why it lay next to the old highway or who built it and for what he did not know.

He ate three small rabbits that he took with the rifle in the afternoon and set wild corn in front of Horse.

The world is filled with wild corn and you want nothing more, Horse. Life must be pretty good for you.

He thought of the five rounds he’d fired to take the three rabbits.

Two had been wasted.

Yes. But if I am to use the rifle I must practice with it. I must be sure of it when I need it.

He reached into his bag and took out the charcoal. He shaved it with his knife and looked at the wall.

He drew a great bridge in long, sketchy strokes that ran the length of the wall. Then he drew the skyline of the hoary city sinking into the swampy river. Below, near the gritty pavement of the old highway, he filled in the moonlit water, reflecting the shadows of the city back up at itself.

The night was bitterly cold and even the fingers of his good hand ached like those on his bad side. Later he returned to the fire and warmed himself, looking at the mural.

Was that it?

It seemed as though there should be something more.

He thought of drawing Horse. Or himself. Or even MacRaven.

But nothing seemed right.

Lying on his side drifting toward sleep, facing the hot fire, the cold at his neck, he saw the city come to life.

And he lived there.

And there was a day…

The best day ever.

He awoke to the orange light of the coals in the deep of night and saw the shadowy city rendered on the wall. He could not remember what was so good about the dream of the day in that city before the bombs. Only that it was the best, and worth having, and that he had been cheated, as though a valuable piece of salvage had been stolen from beneath him while he slept.

‘It seems as though there should be something more to the picture on the wall,’ he thought again, remembering the dream.

And as he fell back to sleep he heard, I bet the people who lived in that city thought so too, Boy. I bet they did.

Chapter 33

In the days that followed, the Boy rode in quiet along the muddy river that reminded him so much of the big one back east, and the Possum Hunters and Sergeant Presley, when he had been young.

He felt old.

The days passed and towns on the map either didn’t exist or lay buried beneath wild grass and corn.

He passed a convoy of military vehicles forever parked in the median of the great windswept highway.

He smelled the salt of the ocean on a sudden shifting breeze.

It smelled of Texas.

But cleaner.

He passed rusting vehicles lying swaddled in the reeds that shot up out of the mucky fields and stood for a long time considering the wreck of an Apache helicopter, held longingly by a clutch of thorny rosebushes.

He climbed a high pass and saw long iron spikes cast to the ground, all in one direction, as if thrown by the hand of a giant. Large windmill blades lay buried in the dirt and grass.

In the town beyond, he saw the charred remains of buildings reaching up to the gray sky.

The wind and the clouds march east, lashing the buckled highway with spring rain. At the end of the day, the Boy felt as though much more had been required of him than just movement. He was exhausted.

On the day he reached the bay, the weather turned warm. At least, if he stood in the center of the road at full noon and turned his face toward the bright sun, the day felt warm. In the shade of bridges and crumbling buildings, the cold had always been and always would be, just like the rusty destruction he found there along the bay’s edge.

He saw the bay from a high hill and on the far side of its blue water, he saw the great pile of rubble that was San Francisco, in the State of California. Only a few tall buildings remained standing. The rest lay buried in the piles of concrete and twisted rebar he could see even from this distance.

Ain’t never been nuked, Boy. Chinese wouldn’t do it. Needed a deep water port on the West Coast. Seattle, San Diego, and of course L.A. were all long gone. We fought for that pile of rubble for ten years.

The Boy could hear the campfire stories of the great battles and “ops” of the San Francisco of Sergeant Presley.

On Market Street we lost all our armor, Boy.

And…