The Wasteland Saga

I was the last one off the roof of the Ferry Building. Close one that day, Boy.

And…

I saw the TransAmerica Building go down after a Jay Thirty-three went in about halfway up. Dust for days after that one, Boy.

And…

The Army will be down along the East Bay. Headquarters in an old college library. That’s where you’ll find I Corps, Boy.

Tell them I made it all the way.

Tell them there was no one left.

Tell them who I was, Boy.

And…

You take everything with you.

Chapter 34

I’m glad you died, Sergeant.

You thought they would still be here—waiting for you.

The wreckage of military equipment littered the highway that wound its way along the green-grass slopes of the East Bay. Broken concrete pads and burnt black fingers of framing erupted through tall wind-driven grass.

You crossed the whole country and lost all your friends, Sergeant. The general, even. Someone named Lola, who you never told me about. All of them.

The Boy passed a convoy of supply tucks, melted and blackened forty years ago.

“Five tons,” said the Boy as the morning wind off the bay beat at his long hair, whipping his face and shoulders.

Farther along, the tail rotor of a helicopter lay across the buckling highway.

Apache, maybe.

The KIAs and the MIAs and all the people you imagined were still here, waiting for you to come back— they’re all gone.

Later, as Horse nosed the tall grass, the Boy walked around three helicopter transports long since landed in the southbound lanes. They were rusty and dark, stripped of everything.

“Black Hawks,” he mumbled, sitting in a pilot’s seat, wondering at how one flew them through the air like a bird, which was impossible for him to picture.

Climbing up through the concrete buttresses that remained of Fort Oakland, he came to the tanks.

Blackened. Burnt. Abandoned. High up on the hill he could see the ragged remains of canvas tents and the flower blossoms of spiked artillery pieces.

Sergeant, your dream of finding them here couldn’t have survived this.

He led Horse up the hill through the long grass and around the craters and foxholes long since covered in a waving sea of soft green and yellow.

When he reached the spiked artillery pieces now resting forever in permanent bloom, he could see the remains of the Army, of I Corps, below. All the way to the shores of the sparkling bay’s eastern edge he could see burnt tanks, melted Humvees, helicopters that would never fly, a fighter jet erupting from the rubble of the few houses that remained along the bay.

I followed you through the rain and the snow and along all those long moonlit nights while you told me about this place. The people. What we would find. Who you were.

And.

Who I might be.

He stood among the tent posts on top of the hill.

Of the Army he’d waited his whole life to meet, only ragged strips of canvas remained, fluttering in the breeze.

Off to the right, down along a ridgeline, he could see a field of white crosses. The graves were open and the crosses lay canted at angles.

I’m glad you died with your dream of this place, Sergeant, because…

…this would have killed you.

All the way.

Tell them who I was, Boy.

Tell who, Sergeant?

And who am I now, Sergeant Presley? Now that you are gone and the dream that you promised me is dead, who am I now?

But there was no answer.

Chapter 35

He smelled smoke.

The smoke of meat came to him on the wind of the next day, in the morning, before light.

At first light, he scanned the horizon and saw, across the bay, the columns of rising smoke. He checked the map. Sausalito.

He’d spent the day before combing the wreckage of the Army. There was nothing to be had. Everything that was left had burned long ago. When he went to the cemetery below the ridge, he found bones in the bottom of each open grave. Nothing more.

Maybe there is someone, maybe even I Corps, over there on the other side of the bay, Sergeant?

But there was no answer.

Someone was there.

Later he rode out to the north, crossing large sections of muddy bay where ancient supertankers rested on their sides. Occasionally he passed large craters.

At the northern edge of the bay, mudflats gave way to the tall brown grass of the estuaries. A long thin bridge, low to the water, stretched off toward the west.

A heron, white and tall, stood still, not watching the Boy.

The bridge may only go so far.

After a small break and time spent looking at the map, he decided to try and cross the bridge.

You would ask me why I was in such a hurry to get to the other side, Sergeant. You would say, Whatchu in a hurry about, Boy?

I would say, I want to know what’s in Sausalito.

Then you would say, You always did.

That is what you would say.

But the voice didn’t say anything.

The Boy had not heard the voice since the open graves and the tattered canvas.

The ride out into the marshes made the Boy feel lonely—lonelier than he’d ever felt in all his life. Other than the heron he’d seen at the eastern side of the thin bridge, he saw no other life.

‘That is why I feel so alone, because there is no other living thing,’ he thought. He’ll speak to me again.

In the afternoon, the wind stopped and fog rolled in across the bay. Faster than he would have ever expected, the fog surrounded him and he could see little beyond the thin road ahead.

Only Horse’s hooves on the old highway broke the silence.

He expected some bird to call out to another bird, but there was nothing. No one to call to, even if it were