The Wasteland Saga

the men we sent there. Their last report told of being dug in and facing American armor coming out of the desert to the southeast.”

The Boy watched the map and all the places Sergeant Presley had been.

“How is it like a wild animal in a cave?” asked the general.

The Boy thought for a moment. He approached a wall and moved aside a heavy machine gun, dusty and untouched. He cleared a space along the wall.

He took out his charcoal.

He began to draw.

He drew the blind window-eyes of a corpse that was once a city. In his mind the angles were somehow distorted and maniacal. The buildings took on a surreal aspect, as if sanity hadn’t been a requirement for their architect. As if the years since, and the madmen within, had somehow turned the buildings “wrong.” He drew the bridge they’d passed under. The Boy, Horse, and Escondido. It was an open mouth, full of smashed teeth. He drew a high window, a long window twisting to the side, almost bending away from the perspective of the viewer. A window among a hundred other lunatic windows in shadow. In it the Boy placed the shadow of a man seen for just a moment. With a few quick lines he began the face, the jaw, the hair, and before he could add more to those few scribbled, hesitant, unfinished lines, the lunatic seemed complete.

When the Boy turned back, the general, watching him, nodded.

The old soldier turned to the map, his finger still resting above the word “Reno.”

“I understand.”

After a moment of looking again at the map, the Chinese general cleared his throat.

“Tell me about Salt Lake City.”

And then…

She entered, carrying a tray of teacups and a pot.

Chapter 40

At the end of the week General Song sat in his patched leather chair from Before. Shoulders slumped. Eyes wide. Staring.

On the walls that surrounded him were many charcoal markings formed into drawings.

At Des Moines, two figures, a small boy, eyes wide with terror, and a black man, his face an angry curse —heavy oversize packs on each of their backs—ran across a field of sickly grass. Above them, crows—all the crows in the world—swarmed, diving and attacking them. In the foreground, a crow swooped away from the boy and the man. The crow’s eyes were two black oblongs of animal indifference. The wings seemed to rise in triumph. Its beak was open as if the cawww! that must come from it was a mighty roar. All the birds were rendered with such malevolence.

Beaks open.

Claws reaching.

Wings spreading.

One could almost hear a sonic sea of victory caws as each bird swooped and dived, wheeling overhead.

Herding their prey.

Carnivorous now.

Finally, after the end of the world and an ocean of wild, genetically powerful corn that had broken and overtaken the lands of middle America—surviving what civilization, mankind, had not, in Des Moines, Iowa—crows ruled the land.

Outside Madison, Wisconsin, powerful dogs with short necks like bulls and wide mouths full of canine teeth surged forward. Real hatred could be found in their snarling muzzles as opposed to the crows’ mere soullessness. The black man leaned hard on a door. His face was twisted in rage, his eyes focused. Next to him was the Boy, long hair covering his face as it turns back toward the approaching pack of wild dogs. A long hallway trailed off to the horizon. Someplace abandoned. An old shopping center. They were trapped. The fierce dogs bounded toward them. In the lead dog, every muscle was perfectly and beautifully rendered like taut cables of charcoal-driven power. There is an urgency the viewer feels when looking at the black man, who must open the door if he and the Boy are to survive. It is the kind of picture one looks at then turns away from, praying that such a thing will never happen to them.

Or to their loved ones.

“Who is the black man?” he’d asked the Boy.

“Sergeant Lyman Julius Presley.”

At Detroit, sailboats were piled high against a beach of black rocks and garbage. The sky was overcast and gray. The lake struck the shore hard, almost angrily. ‘One could hear,’ thought the general, ‘the damaged spinnakers and tangled tackle clanging compulsively in the wind while occasional ancient spars groaned in torment.’

“Were you with Sergeant Presley when you made it to Detroit?”

“I was always with him.”

“What is your earliest memory of him?”

“We were walking on the road. He was carrying all our things and I kept falling behind him because I was still little. He was singing one of his marching songs about Captain Jack and he said to me, ‘Keep up, or I might leave you behind.’”

At Cincinnati there was a river. There were no buildings. No trees. Only a dark hill on the horizon. A road sign, unreadable, bent forever away from the place.

“Why did this Sergeant Presley keep going, even though all the evidence seemed to indicate that his country was destroyed?” asked the general.

The Boy simply looked at the picture and then, when the general felt as if the Boy would not answer, the Boy spoke.

“He told me one time that he couldn’t quit. That to quit was to die. That he’d quit once, before I met him, and a lot of people got killed.”

And.

“I’ve always thought that those people getting killed had something to do with where I came from.”

At Pittsburgh was the American bomber. The nose and cockpit were in the foreground as the fuselage stretched away, cracked in the middle. The only wing visible lay collapsed. A car lay trapped under the nose. Rusting cars dotted the landscape of the freeway.

“How come you never asked Sergeant Presley about where you came from?” asked the general.

“I did and he told me that the past wasn’t important anymore because it was just wreckage and junk and not worth going over. He told me that the only thing that was important now was the future.”

“And yet he was still looking for his country under all this wreckage, like that of the bomber on the wall?”

Silence.

“He said America was more than just the things we’d seen: the rubble of the cities, the broken highways, the burned-up tanks. He said America was a good idea. And that as long as he was alive, the good that was in the idea was still alive.”

At Baltimore, a shaven-headed man with malevolent eyes held a shovel. A twisted farmhouse, windows out of perspective, rose toward the ceiling of the room where the general sat. A woman, scrawny and underfed, looked at the ground with bruised and blackened eyes. She stood behind the malevolent man, in his shadow. In an orchard in the background, under a crescent moon, wild figures leapt about a fire as something man-like lay atop a grill, its legs splayed, its arms akimbo.

“Who are they?” he asked the Boy.

“They are the Cotter family and they’re evil.”

And there were other pictures…