Authors: Nick Cole
On the last night, the night before the long climb up into the high valley, the Boy woke. Against the wide dark blue sky of frosty night, the wind swept clouds swiftly across the night. The dark shadow of Horse stirred for a moment.
For the thousandth time the Boy thought now might be the time to leave.
He did not hear the voice of Sergeant Presley.
Maybe I have gone too far down a road I should’ve never traveled. Maybe the voice of Sergeant Presley has finished with me.
Maybe I have gone too far.
The fire was low and the Boy saw the Rock Star, mouth open, staring into the glowing embers.
For a while he lay still, but his weak side was stiff and cold.
How much of the night was left?
He drank cold water from his bag and limped over to the fire to warm his cursed weak side.
All around, the hunters slept. The Boy knew two or three were watching him, watching with the poison on nearby and ready arrows.
The hunters had kept their distance over much of this cold trek across the western face of the Sierras.
Poison.
The Rock Star began to speak.
She did not look at the Boy.
She stared into the flames after he added a log and sparks rose on the night wind.
“I was a girl—little more than—on the day it all went down.”
She swallowed. Her old face was hollow and dry like an empty water skin drained by time.
“I was a survivor though, even before all of the war that come. A survivor in a wasteland of malls and perfect families. My mother worked all the time. Worked so much I never saw her. We communicated by notes left on a little table in our tiny kitchen. One year I left the same note over and over and she never noticed.”
The Boy rubbed his weak calf, working the heat of his good hand into the thin muscle.
“I lived at the mall. I was there when it opened, and there was many a time I was the last out the door at closing. Frank. Frank let me out. Told me to go on home.
“When it all went to hell, we ran. We ran for the mountains. I was in the San Gabriel Foothills when one of them bombs went off south of Los Angeles. We were climbing on our hands and knees. I saw a flash light up everything ahead of me. And then a few seconds later, a hot rush of dry wind.
“We kept on moving, farther and farther up into the mountains.
“All these tribes, all these people of the mountains, I knew ’em all in those first days when we ran from the cities. They was just survivors then, running as fast as they could while the bombs kept falling. I think about that sometimes. I kept looking for my mom in each new group we come across. But it was always someone different to be found. I can see the Mexican woman with the twin boys standing by the body of her husband as we all walked past them on the trail. I can see those boys’ faces in all of them tribes folk down near Sonora. We traded some of our women years back with them when theirs kept making weak babies, worse than what you were born with. I see the bearded guy who got shot for his food in the back of a station wagon that had broke down. I see his face now and again in some of the men and children of the Psychos. He must’ve had kin that run off once we took to his stuff. But we hadn’t eaten in three days. So, it was to be expected. What I’m sayin’—and I’m thinkin’ about it all the more now as we come up to that rave—is, I’ll be seein’ all these people again. Except it’s not them. It’s their children and grands and great-grands. Strangers I passed, sitting among the fires of the refugee camps waiting for help that never came. Dark, muddy rain comin’ down on us. Eatin’ soup. Radio’s gone. No one knows anything and the things people say don’t mean anything to me. I was young and my world was limited to music and movies, or a boy I thought I loved and would run away with and we’d be together. We’d be a real family.
“All of us survivors thought we might make it in the first few weeks after the bombs. But the big winter that come taught us the error of our ways. What little survived that winter—two years long it was—what survived would be burned away in forest fires, taken by raiders, or plain just wore out.
“I was just a girl. I knew movies. I did whatever it took to survive.”
The dark sky above the orange glow of the fire turned a soft morning blue.
“I’m a rock star. I’m the bomb keeper. I’ve loved the grim reaper.” The Rock Star’s voice was strong but passionless, as if these lines were played for the thousandth time too many and to no one in particular.
“Words of power, Bear Killer, dontchu forget about me. Don’t forget I know them words. I’ve carried them from the Before. Carried them from a television inside my heart. From that fairy palace mall.
“Words of power.”
In the Hidden Valley, the Boy found the tribes.
He found what happened forty years after all the bombs fell.
He found savagery.
There were big men, cut and scarred, tattooed in ash. There were thin, misshapen men bearing the marks of exposure to the weapons of Before. There were warriors wearing the patchwork armor of ancient road signs beaten to form breastplates. Some wore the skins of wolves, some the skins of other animals and even humans. Here and there were human heads, held aloft, candles burning in their empty eye sockets.
There were the Psychos, who wore the skins of the lions that prowled the eastern desert. Teeth hung in great looping necklaces about their thick, raw, and sunburned necks. They dragged dull-eyed women behind them by heavy chains with little effort.
You watch yourself with them, Boy. You can tell from the cuts and branding and even the homemade tattoos, that bunch is strong and they dig pain. Forget their Mohawks, it’s the necklaces made outta teeth. Anyone weaker than them ends up on that necklace
.
And there were the Death Knights, who wore battered Stop signs over their chests, mile markers on their arms, and wide-brimmed hats of leather from which the oily feathers of crows dangled in long woven cords.
They like to rule, Boy. They probably got a king or a warlord even. They’re workin’ some sort of rudimentary feudal system. My guess is you don’t wear the crow feathers and armor, then you ain’t to be considered. You fight one of ’em, you’ll fight the whole bunch
.
There were the Park People, who wore skins and carried long beaten scythes. They were tall and lean. One or two had red hair, but who knows the why of such genetics among their mostly brown skins? They cast long, silent looks from almond-shaped eyes, warning all to keep a good distance from them, as they drank the blood of a now silent pig from the battered cups they carried at their hips.
Koreans, Boy. Come up out of Los Angeles during the war is my guess. There was a lot of ’em there before. Probably held together based on that. If looks could kill, everybody’d be dead as far they’re concerned
.
They and many others were the strange tribes of the Sierra Nevada, which runs the length of the eastern border of what the map calls the State of California. They had lost touch with what most call Before or the Before. Those things were not coming back and, among the youngest, were not even imagined.
What was lost was now simply gone forever.
These tribes held tightly to trail and track, hunt and prey, winter and summer. Friend and enemy.
They gathered in screaming laughter and thrumming chant before a great pile called the Lodge. Poles erupted from the riot of mud- and even blood-covered warriors. The poles were adorned with skulls and strings of nuts or pine boughs indicating camp and people, honor and disgrace. On one was a patchwork flag of one red stripe, one white stripe, one star on a field of blue. On another, hubcaps banged and clattered as they were twisted this way and that, making a singsong chime of bang and rattle. Others, strange and varied, wave and leap up and down across the forest floor of the high valley that lies beneath the stony granite mountains.
These tribes gathered before the large pile of stones and timber that formed a wall between them and the Lodge, a castle from Before.
The people of the Hidden Valley had fought these many years against fire and other tribes to keep it to themselves.
But the whispers and tales of growing Chinese power, encroaching up into the native lands of the Sierra Nevada, were being told in the gutter speak of all the tribes. Whole tribes wiped out. Women murdered. Babies stolen in the night.
Now, messengers had gone out and they were gathering. Gathering against the coming storm. Gathering against the Chinese.
The Boy as Bear Killer sat astride Horse wrapped in his dark bearskin, the shining tomahawk at his belt. Beneath him the Rock Star’s People milled about with their bows, proud to have a mounted warrior who had killed a bear counted as one of their own.
All around them, stretching far off into the smoky, dusky forest floor at twilight, were the Park People and the Death Knights and the Psychos and all the other tribes. Their number was beyond his counting except for him to know that this was larger than any gathering of mankind he had ever seen. When he imagined the size of Sergeant Presley’s I Corps, it was never as numerous as on this night.
And in the distance, at the extent of his vision, other tribes were streaming forward, surging into the hot, clamoring mass at the foot of the pine log pile.
The leaders of all these tribes, including the Rock Star, have gone beyond the ramshackle wall of stone and pine, penetrating the maze of timberworks—seemingly haphazard but designed with defense and killing in mind—and disappear into the Lodge.
Hours later, just after nightfall, the leaders returned to the top of the wall. A tall man led them out onto the high wall of the Lodge, above which the waiting tribes could see the steep roof of the castle, which was once a rustic tourist resort.
The man was tall and rangy. He wore blue jeans and a long dark coat.
Clothing from Before.
His sharp jaw and blowing hair gave him a wolf’s appearance. But even from among the milling mass of warriors, it was the blue eyes the Boy noted: clear, sparkling, glinting with thoughts of some plan.
The leaders of all the tribes formed a line, linked hands, and raised them high above their varied heads and hair. And at the center of the line, the tall man, the wolf-like man, the man in the clothing from Before, stood joined to all the other leaders. He raised his sharp jaw skyward and howled up into the trees and the night above.
This is the one you got to watch, Boy. This one’s no joiner, and he ain’t no leader. He’s a taker. A ruin-er, and he’s walked alone more often than not. Be careful, Boy. Real careful
.
The tribes below and beyond the wall roared, punctuating their approval with whoops and screams.
The drumbeats began to roll across the forest floor of the valley, echoing off the distant mountains, lost in the crash of the high waterfall over which flaming logs tumbled into plumes of steam.
The Chinese would be defeated.
Night fell and campfires beyond the Boy’s counting sprang up across the valley floor. The chattering of languages, one as seemingly alien as the next, murmured across the distances between the camps.
The Rock Star’s People formed their camp, unsure what to do in her absence.
But then the bloated skin of fermented drink arrived, carried on a pole between two large warriors—black wolf skins and ash-covered faces, machetes made from the guts of old machines in great scabbards at their backs—and the Rock Star’s People found their purpose.
All the tribes were drinking.
Now. Tonight is your night to escape, Boy
.
It is good to hear your voice, Sergeant.
The Boy mounted Horse and began to ride the twilight camps. He smiled at those he suspected kept poison on their bows and when they smiled back, the smile was sloppy, happy, lugubrious, as if there was a friendship formed in all those cold miles between the mountain lake and this friendly place.
The Boy checked the great pile of stone and fallen timber that was the Lodge and saw only two torches guttering blackly at the gate. He rode to a nearby fire. Here there were men and women warriors, long spears, and woven hair like muddy ropes. They smiled after their guttural greeting failed to find meaning in the Boy’s ears. They seemed to wish him well, and one woman even cast a hungry eye upon him. When he sensed the bearers of the poison arrows coming from the campfire of the Rock Star’s People, shadowing him in the early dark, he rode back to their fire as if to reassure them.
The noise was getting louder across the valley floor as fires grew in leaps and explosions, sending sparks high into the star-filled night.
Soon, Boy. Real soon
.
He got down from Horse and took a drink from the bloated skin.
The hunters cheered at what they perceived to be a long draft by the Boy beneath the un-corked stream of the drinking skin.
They smiled and chattered at him, forgetting he understood very little of what they spoke. He laughed and took a bigger drink and they all roared their approval.
We are all mighty hunters around the campfire.
Yes, that is something Sergeant Presley might have said, though I can never remember having heard him say anything like it. All the same, it seems like something he would have said.
When the night seemed alive with revelry and recklessness, the Boy lay down in the dark, not the least bit taken by drink.
Someone screamed. The pain of a wound was evident.
In the moments after, the mood was much more somber.
The Boy waited.
You are always stiff, my left side, especially when I have been lying on the ground for some time.
Now you must do your part.
The Boy rose and returned to Horse.
He laid his hand atop the long equine nose, looking into those forever uncaring brown eyes. The Boy raised his index finger to his lips as he led Horse away from the sleeping hunters.
They had almost faded into the shadows of tall trees beneath a starry night above, when a voice spoke softly to him.
“Nice night for a ride, Boyo.”
The voice was a whisper.
The voice was the shadow of a grave.
In the dark a man came close, and though the Boy smelled the stranger, he did not hear him break the forest floor as he walked toward the Boy and Horse.
He’s good. This one’s got skills. Watch out, Boy
.
“Come with me.”
Beyond a moment’s hesitation, the Boy led Horse after the stranger, following the lanky figure through the shifting shadows of the night forest.
The Boy slipped the fingers of his good hand to his tomahawk, hovering above the haft.
When the shot is clear I’ll take it. I’ll put it right between his shoulder blades.
The stranger moved fast, like some dark liquid seeking the path of least resistance, relentless as he slipped the tall pines back to the bric-a-brac wall that surrounded the Lodge.
They emerged onto the wide dirt porch of the ramshackle castle.
Two men walked from the shadows beyond the gate and the stranger, maintaining his loping, soundless stride, directed them to take charge of Horse.
The stranger turned to face the Boy as the ash-faced guards moved to obey.
By the light of the torches at the gate, the stranger is a drooping mustache and sad eyes that stared coldly back at the Boy.
“There’s something you should see inside.”
When the Boy didn’t move, the stranger said, “C’mon,” and dropped his eyes to the Boy’s grip on the tomahawk. “It’s good from now on. You can trust me.”
The Boy followed the sad-eyed stranger through the break in the wall of rotten pine logs and earthworks surrounding the once grand and unknown building of Before turned collapsing fairy-tale castle now more than anything else.
After a few dogleg turns within the wall, they arrived in a weedy courtyard at the entrance to the Lodge. Smoke-stained stones rose up to a sagging roof as windows gaped like open and jagged wounds.
The Boy spelled a sign above the entrance.
A-w-a-h-n-e-e L-o-d-g-e.
A wagon and a team of horses waited near two once grand doors.
Ash-faced guards worked in teams carrying bodies out from the dilapidated castle to the back of the wagon.
The Boy stood with the sad-faced stranger as the last body was thrown into the waiting transport.
When the last body was thrown with an unimpressive thump onto the other bodies in the back of the wagon, the sad-faced stranger led the Boy to the wagon, and before a tarp was pulled and tied, he showed the Boy the leaders of the tribes.
Underneath rictus grins, foaming mouths, and upward-staring eyes, a head of hoary gray hair rested above that same openmouthed, wide-eyed stare the Boy had seen at the beginning of this day, as the two of them had sat by the fire before dawn and she’d told him the story of her life as a young girl on the day the bombs fell.
The Boy listened for the voice of Sergeant Presley.
I understand what you meant, Sergeant. I understand “involved,” now.
The stranger let the tarp fall, covering the horrified faces and contorted bodies.
“Now,” said the sad-faced stranger. “MacRaven wants to meet a Bear Killer.”