Too many mysteries here, he thought, but he didn’t let his confusion show on his face. He remembered the first night he left Littleton—it seemed long ago, now—and howling with the wolves in the middle of the night. Their long, sturdy shadows milled around the base of the rock he slept on, and they made harmonies to the sky.
Gray Beard said, “It’s a small thing, really, I told them, but the young men see the world differently. Lots of ways you could’ve acted around the wolves, and maybe we’d have stopped you from going into the Flats anyway. No one has come so far from the Jackals in years, and you’re old—we don’t see many old ones away from their homes—but of all the things you could’ve done, you sang, so we’ve been watching. We wouldn’t want you to come this far, then have plutonium get you.” He glanced north into the brush. Eric looked too. Surely the man’s fear of Rocky Flats was unjustified, but he realized he knew nothing about how plutonium was stored. All he remembered was the incredible toxicity of the element. A millionth of a grain, less than a dust mote, on your skin would kill. When the plague hit, was the facility safely shut down? Were they even still working with plutonium? He shivered. Dodge handed Eric a coat. “You should wrap up, Grandpa,” he said. Clouds glowed on the horizon. Sunrise was a few minutes away. “How far north would be unsafe?” asked Eric as he pushed his hand into a sleeve.
Gray Beard shrugged. “A mile or two maybe. Who knows what plutonium will do? We don’t trespass.” He turned, concerned again. “It will kill him if he gets too far. I’ve seen men who’ve tried to cross. They…” He paused. “Their deaths are… ugly.” He stopped as if contemplating a bad memory. “He won’t get too far. A town boy. My men will find him soon.”
Eric thought about the way Rabbit could move in the underbrush, his preternatural speed and sense of self preservation. “Not if he doesn’t want them to,” Eric said.
A half hour after the sun rose, one of the men dashed into the campsite. Gray Beard still stood, leaning on his staff. Eric and Dodge had rewrapped themselves in the sleeping bags. Eric had been guessing at what Rabbit had done. When he heard (or sensed?) the approach of the strangers, he must have awakened, realized there were too many to stand up to, and fled. He must have figured that he could do more good if he were free than if the men captured him. But why did he go north? He wouldn’t leave us, would he, and try to reach Boulder on his own?
The man said, “He lost us, Teach. Got off the soft ground. Skylar split the group, though. He can’t stay gone long.” Gray Beard nodded an acknowledgment, and the man ran back into the brush. Gray Beard shook his head. “Boy must be as fast as blue blazes.” Eric pulled the sleeping bag off his shoulders. It was a climbing expedition bag, and too warm for the summer. “He called you Teach. Is that your name?”
Gray Beard squatted and faced him, the sun flush on his face. “It’s what I do. Teacher. Teach. It’s a good name. You’re Eric. Littleton’s oldest resident. The last of the Gone Time survivors.” Eric started at his own name. Teach said, “We’ve heard you talking. That one,” he pointed to Dodge, “is your grandson, Dodge. The other is Rabbit.”
“But who are you? Where are your people? Why were you following me in the first place?” A different man ran into the camp. Teach looked up at him. “Skylar picked up the boy’s trail and we followed it for a while, but he doubled back. Then we figured out he lead us in a big figure eight. The little demon has us going in circles.”
Teach thought for a second, then said, “Ignore the trail. Tell Skylar to spread the men out and come back toward this camp. Better poke a stick into every hole or pile of leaves. The boy knows what he’s doing.” He turned back to Eric and Dodge. “I’ve told you who I am.” He scratched a figure in the dirt at his feet, a circle, then smoothed the image away. “We live upstream.” He nodded toward the mountains, now drenched with light, the high peaks of the continental divide still white and glistening with snow. Eric didn’t know what to ask next, but there was something alien about Teach, not just his clothes, but his demeanor, something wildly awake about him. When he wasn’t speaking, he listened, not just to Eric, but to the air. He rested his head on the breeze. His nostrils flared, like a blink, a couple of times a minute. He didn’t behave like someone who spent time indoors a lot. It would be hard to sneak past this man at night.
Teach tilted his head to the side, then stood. The man he’d called Skylar stepped through the bushes and approached Teach. “We cornered him,” said Skylar, “but he got away. The boy’s a devil, Teach. I say we let him go and the Flats can have him.” A large purple knot swelled below the young man’s left eye. He touched it gingerly with his fingertips. “He’s good with rocks too. Jackson caught one in the knee, and I think we’ll have to carry him home.”
Teach said, “He’s not going north, then?”
Skylar spit. “Bah! He’s gaming with us. He stuck his tongue at me before he threw the rock.” Teach laughed. “How’d you let that happen? You were a sharp little rock thrower yourself once.” Skylar scowled at him, then stalked out of camp.
“They won’t catch him, I think,” said Eric, “unless he thinks Dodge and I are safe.”
“Good,” Teach said, “if that means he’s not heading into the Flats.” They waited for an hour. Three times men came to report no progress. Eric and Dodge packed their sleeping bags. Dodge didn’t seem to be afraid for Rabbit or of Teach, and Eric found himself more relaxed around the man, even though he wasn’t sure if he was a friend, an odd stranger or their captor. Finally Eric said, “You followed us for days secretly. Now that you’ve come out in the open, what’s your plan?”
Teach said, “Today, the wind is my plan.” He added, “Getting off the flats.” He scuffed the dirt at his feet.
“And maybe asking you to talk to my students about the Gone Time around a campfire. They love ghost stories. Or you could tell them about singing with wolves.”
Teach cocked his head to the side, listening. In the distance, a bird chirped. A bit closer, another answered. That’s like no bird I’ve heard, thought Eric. Sounded like nut-hatches, sort of. From the hill above them, a third chirp drifted down. Ah, he thought, not birds at all. Men. He listened intently. After a few minutes he knew approximately where all of Teach’s men were, and Rabbit probably knew too. If they kept chirping, they’d never catch him.
Eric touched Dodge’s shoulder. Leaning against his backpack, the boy was almost asleep. “Dodge, can you do a meadowlark for me?” He nodded, pursed his lips and blew. The first try came out airy. The top note of a meadowlark’s call is high and hard to hit. He tried again, and the call trilled down perfectly.
“That’s good, boy,” said Teach. “Meadowlark’s a tough one.” From the middle of a bush fifteen feet away, a meadowlark answered. The bush shook, and Rabbit rose from the center of it like a wood sprite, twigs and leaves caught in his hair, a goose egg-sized rock clasped in each hand.
Teach didn’t even look particularly surprised. He sighed, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Within a couple of minutes all of the men returned. The last one limped in, supported by two others, his knee darkly swollen. “I was looking the wrong direction,” he said cheerfully. “I figure I can walk on it. Might have to go slow, though. Heck of a throw from thirty yards.” He gave Rabbit a thumbs up.
“My parents destroyed the old Coal Creek Canyon Road from the highway to the canyon itself,” said Teach. Eric walked behind him; Dodge and Rabbit followed. Spread to either side, the rest of the men hiked, sometimes in sight, other times hidden behind thick stands of scrub oak. We can’t be leaving much of a trail, observed Eric.
Teach continued, “They told me they blocked all the ways into the mountains. Some they blew up, like the Boulder Creek Road. Knocked down half a canyon. The Peak to Peak Highway to Black Hawk and Central City they cut the bridges. But this one, they obliterated. Earth movers, my dad told me. He and a handful of others dug it up, spread the asphalt and replanted. He called it a ‘deconstruction project’ or ‘highway beautification.’” Teach’s thick, bare calves flexed as he stepped onto a deadfall branch and pushed himself over. Unscarred foothills rose before them, and the land looked clean and untouched. If there had been a highway here fifty years ago, they did a darned good job hiding it, Eric thought. Eric puffed. Legs, achy and weak, protested at the pace, and they’d generally been climbing since they’d walked into what looked like an open field to the west of Colorado 93. “Must have been afraid of people coming,” he said, finally. “Somebody got the tunnel on U.S. 6 west out of Denver the summer I was there.”
Teach looked back over his shoulder. “U.S. 6?”
Eric rested, pressing his hand deep into his side, thought a second, then said, “Clear Creek Canyon Road.”
“Oh, yes.” Teach stopped. “Here, let me handle that.” He took Eric’s pack. A broad sweat patch on Eric’s back cooled quickly, and as soon as they started again he felt like Teach had subtracted years, not pounds. Teach said, “Couldn’t do anything about the maps, Dad told me, but a line on paper doesn’t mean much if you can’t find the road it belongs to.”
Eric tried to reconstruct a map of Colorado. He had a good head for geography. The Coal Creek Canyon Road led to… to…Golden Gate Canyon State Park, he thought. And above that, a couple of little towns. He couldn’t
