up. We advanced through the wreckage of the old city of Oakland, finding no one. When we came to the trenches at the bottom of the hill we found a ragged soldier, thin to the point of death. He was little more than the bones that held him up. He waved a white flag. From a distance he told us of the sickness. He said we should stay away.
“I withdrew and called my commanders. They told me to hit the camp with everything we had but to stay clear. We spent the day shelling it and shooting up into the heights. Shooting as though there was no end in sight to our supplies, after ten straight years of fighting in the streets amid the rubble of San Francisco.”
It was quiet in the study. Warm sunshine made the air thick and heavy with the scent of flowers and dust.
“But that was not the end,” muttered the general after a long pause.
“I was ordered to put on chemical armor and go up the hill by myself. It was a very hot day. Earthquake weather, like today. It is always that way on hot days that follow the cold. I trudged through the tall burning grass up to their headquarters. There was no one there, only graves and the dead, lying in their cots and trenches.
“What can one say of such things? The war was finally over.”
Chapter 43
The knock at the back door of the shack in the quiet of the sleeping shantytown was deafening and the Boy willed it to be unheard in the night.
Her entering and embrace of him were one action.
“I had a…”—she uses a Chinese word he did not know—“a nightmare… in the afternoon as I slept.” Then, “I thought that… you had gone away… and that I had lost you forever.”
She held him and he could smell the jasmine in her long dark hair.
“You had gone away,” she said breathlessly between kisses. “And I kept thinking… in the dream, that I must start looking for you. But there was always some house task to perform.”
She buried her face in his chest as the Boy closed the back door.
“It was… horrible,” she murmured and he could feel her tears.
“Come with me. We’ll leave tomorrow,” he whispered, and he thought of the man who had been watching the shack all day from the other side of the alley.
Is he out there in the dark?
Can he hear our whispers?
She held him tighter.
“I will protect you,” he whispered.
“I will serve you,” he whispered.
“I will love you,” he whispered.
And with each murmuring she held him tighter and he could hear her whispering, “Yes,” over and over and over.
Involved is involved, Sergeant.
She left after midnight.
From the dock she stepped into the small boat.
“I will meet you in the ruins outside the… western gate, toward the bridge. Look for the house where only the fireplace remains standing, like a… pointing finger. When the sun is directly overhead, I will meet you there.”
THE BOY TRIED to sleep.
When he did, he dreamed.
He and Sergeant Presley were running through the night. They were running from those dogs. They were always running.
“I’ve got to find Jin,” he told Sergeant Presley. But in each moment there was some fresh terror in the old mall they ran through, the one with the corpses hanging over the central pool from the broken skylight above. The one with the dogs. The one with the bones.
“I’ve got to find Jin,” he told Sergeant Presley, whose eyes were calm and cool even though the Boy remembered that they were both very frightened that day. It had frightened the Boy even more when he’d looked at Sergeant Presley, who was starting to slow down that last summer before he died in the autumn, and had seen the fear in those eyes, which had been angry but never afraid.
In the dream, in the nightmare, he lost her. He knew it, and the look in Sergeant Presley’s calm dream- eyes told him that he was sad for the Boy. And it was something about that look that terrified the Boy more than anything else in the dream.
He awoke in the night.
“I will not lose her.”
He felt emptiness in his words.
As if he were a child saying he would conquer the world.
THE BOY SADDLED Horse that morning.
Soldiers passed in the alleyway, heading off to work along the growing wall.
He packed his things and led Horse into the lane. There was no sign of the watching man, only an old woman sweeping farther up the street.
Three cannon opened up with successive cracks and distant
He led Horse back toward the eastern wall, following the soldiers.
Great logs had been cut and lay stacked, waiting to be put in place along the wall.
They had no idea. They had no idea how big MacRaven’s army was.
The Boy mounted Horse and rode past a sentry who said something he did not understand. He seemed to want to stop him, as if only because the Boy was a stranger, but he did not.
The Boy rode through the gate and into the trees, heading east.
They’ll think I’ve gone to inform MacRaven.
You would ask me,
I will ride through the hills and circle back around and come out along the western wall. They’ll send riders to head me off, thinking I’m going east. The Pacific is to the west and we don’t know about north. That leaves only one way, Sergeant.
From a small hillock just above the ruins of Sausalito and the inner city, the Boy saw the shantytown below, spreading out next to the bay, and the earthworks being cut into the fields beyond. The Boy watched the alarm being raised. The sentry was talking wildly and waving toward the east. Soldiers were gathering.
From the hill, the Boy could see the big rusting bridge that cut across the sparkling water into the pile of gray rock that was once San Francisco.
I should have checked the bridge to make sure it was safe.
But you would say,
HE RODE THROUGH the broken edges of the old town, casting his eyes about for the finger-pointing chimney.
If they have discovered our plan, then they will set a trap for me.
You would say,
He found the pile of rubble that had collapsed around a lone redbrick chimney pointing up into the hot blue sky.
She came out carrying a bundle. Her face was joy.
Her face was relief.
Her face was hope.
He helped her up onto Horse and she held him tightly.
