Authors: Nick Cole
Nothing, my friend. Nothing.
To the south, the Old Man saw dark figures coming up out of the earth.
More horsemen, dark riders to encircle us.
Moments later the dark riders were charging forward.
They have been down in a riverbed that must run through this plain, and now they are coming to attack us from behind.
The Old Man climbed into the driver’s seat at the front of the tank.
The cannon fired once more.
But this time the rounds fell amid the charging horsemen. The dark riders.
Wait!
The dark horsemen thundered past the tank.
The Old Man could see the Boy. He’d crashed into the line of ashen-faced men, swinging his mace in wide arcs as they fell back from him.
Encircling him.
Pressing down on him.
Wait!
One of the dark horsemen who’d been thrown from his mount by the falling artillery rounds remounted and dashed past the tank, whooping like a Plains Indian, long black hair streaming behind, almost touching the flying tail of the chestnut mare. And in that hair a long gray feather, following in the wind.
Like the Boy.
Green eyes turned and smiled for the briefest of moments at the Old Man, and then the dark rider was gone, riding forward into battle. Riding forward to fight by the side of the outnumbered Boy.
W
HEN THE BATTLE
was over the Old Man watched as the outnumbered dark horsemen climbed the heights, vaulting the low bric-a-brac wall, falling on the artillerymen, cutting and stabbing.
The bodies of the ashen-faced warriors lay in the tall grass and at the foot of the hill and up along its dusty slopes.
The Old Man and his granddaughter left the tank. Looking among the bodies. Looking for the Boy. And they found him.
He was drinking water from a water skin held up to his mouth by a large, bloody horseman. The Boy’s massive arm was shaking. The bowling ball mace and the manhole cover shield lay in the dust. The crushed bodies of slavers scattered in a wide arc about him.
The Boy, standing, spoke haltingly in a strange language to the bloody horseman between gasping pulls at the water skin. The Old Man could make out only a few of the many words.
“What’s he doing, Poppa?”
The large horseman suddenly embraced the Boy. A feather, long and gray, just like those of the other horsemen, like the broken feather in the Boy’s hair, lay on his shoulder, resting against a bloody scratch.
“I think . . .” said the Old Man. “I think he has found his people.”
“Oh,” she said.
The Old Man moved the tank closer to the hill, near the falling walls of a village that had once occupied the slopes nearest the highway. A place once called Wagon Wheel Mountain if a faded sign was to be believed. Ted’s people huddled in small groups, eating shared rations given out by the horsemen and drinking water from leather-skinned bags. The Old Man walked forward to where the Boy stood amid the warriors.
The Boy’s muscles still trembled and twitched as he too held a water skin to his mouth.
“Who are these people?” asked the Old Man.
The Boy lowered the bag and opened his mouth to speak.
“The real question should be,” said a tired voice from behind them, “who is he?”
The Old Man turned at the sound of the voice.
A crippled man and old like me.
“That is the million-dollar question, if a million dollars were still worth anything beyond kindling.”
The Crippled Man was small and thin. His hair, what remained of it, was wispy, his eyes milky, his legs bent and twisted as he sat in the dust between two giant horsemen who’d carried him into the impromptu camp after the battle.
“What do you mean?” asked the Old Man.
The Crippled Man crawled forward and when he reached the feet of the Boy, he beckoned for him to bend down. The Crippled Man ran his fingers just above the feather that hung in the Boy’s hair.
He muttered to himself.
He waved the Boy back up and crawled back between his bearers.
He looked straight into the eyes of the Boy.
“I made that feather seventeen years ago. Maybe more, maybe less. But I made it.”
The Boy undid the leather thong and brought the feather down, holding it under his green eyes.
“I made it bent like that with some glue I’d manufactured. Epoxy we called it once. Made it from the wreckage of my plane.”
Silence. Some of the horsemen muttered in their pidgin.
The Old Man heard, “Como,” and “Fudgeweisen.”
The Boy stared at the broken feather.
Silence.
“Why?” asked the Boy softly.
“Because,” replied the Crippled Man. “It was who you were. Who you are.”
“Broken Feather?” asked the Boy.
The Crippled Man looked up, considered the sky, seemed to mumble to himself in some agreement, then looked back and said, “Yeah, that could be one way of saying it.”
The Old Man saw the Boy tighten his jaw.
He saw the Boy nod to himself.
He never really knew where he’d come from. Where his starting place was in all this.
No, he never knew, my friend, where his course began on the map he’s carried for all these years. It has bothered him all his days and he has been looking for his beginning in all the places he has ever been. And he never found it, until now. The meaning of it. What the feather meant to him and the people who had first given it.
“You were born that way,” said the Crippled Man. “Because of the radiation. Many were in those days. Not so many now. But in those days there were many birth defects. From the moment you came out, we could see that you would be weak on that side.”
“And you threw me away,” said the Boy through clenched teeth in the silence that followed. “You gave me away.”
Everyone watched the two.
The Crippled Man and the Boy.
“No. I have no idea what happened to you,” said the Crippled Man. “You were very little when your mother and father, and a few of the other warrior families, tried to make it into the Tetons. There wasn’t enough here and we were fighting with other groups of survivors constantly. Those times brought out the worst in people. So your father, if he was who I remember him to be, was part of an expedition that went up into the Tetons. We never heard from them again. Years later when we sent scouts to look for them, there was no trace.”
The Boy remembered cold plains.
His first memory was of running. Of a woman screaming. Of seeing the sky, blue and cold in one moment, and the ground, yellow stubble, race by in the next.
“And now you have returned to us,” said the Crippled Man. “A brave warrior who inspired us to victory where we saw none. You charged out against our enemy with your weapon all alone.”
“I was . . . it wasn’t what you thought.”
The Crippled Man considered the Boy and his words.
“No. It never is.”
“Why did you come to our rescue?” said the Old Man.
“We’ve been shadowing you since before Santa Fe. Those are our lands. We thought you were working with these people. There was nothing we could have done against you. We fought a battle against them at Pecos Creek when they initially entered our lands a couple of years back. That was a hard day and our losses were bitter. Still are. But when a report came to me that one of you was wearing our badge, the feather, well, then I hoped.”
“Hoped for what?” asked the Old Man.
“Hoped you might not be with them.” He pointed toward the bodies lain out on the slopes of the hill. “Hoped we were finally getting a break.”
Silence.
“I’ll be honest,” continued the Crippled Man. “I wasn’t convinced he was of our tribe. I didn’t remember a warrior like him. But I hoped all the same. Or maybe I was just stunned to see one of our old tanks still working. I figured if you two just wiped each other out, then that would be best for us. There aren’t too many of us Mohicans left these days.”
“Mohicans?”
“Yes. It’s my little joke from long ago that’s sorta stuck as a name for us. In the days after the bombs, the people who rescued me, the people I would lead, we called ourselves that. It was our bad little joke in a very bad time. And there were days when we felt as though we were indeed the last.”
I know those days.
“When I saw what you were trying to do,” said the Crippled Man, “to rescue these people, when I saw him run out into the field to fight them all alone, when I saw his feather through my ’nocs, I knew he was one of us. And I knew I just couldn’t let him die all alone. That wouldn’t be right, now would it?”
Silence.
“Thank you,” said the Old Man.
“Truth be told I thought it was the end of us too. Like I said there aren’t many of us left. I thought, oh well, and ordered the attack. I thought we’d all get killed together. But I guess we caught them by surprise.”
T
HAT NIGHT THEY
made camp out on the plain, the conical hill still in view. Large groups of women and children had come up from the hidden creek bed. Tents were up and a large buck that had been killed was spitted and roasting.
In the first breezes of night, as the sparks were carried away from the fire, the Old Man sat watching the meat, listening to the Boy tell the story of his whole life.
It was the tale of a young boy raised by a soldier. The last American soldier. There were days of hunger and cold. And there were good times also. They crossed the entire country to complete a mission.
“What’s there?” asked the Crippled Man when the Boy told of how they’d finally made it to Washington, D.C.
The Boy shook his head and said, “Nothing.”
When the story was done and the Boy had told how Sergeant Presley had died and how he’d buried him in the cornfields, the Old Man said, “He sounds like he was a good man.”
Silence.
Sergeant Major Preston.
Staff Sergeant Presley.
Long after the country had given up, they were out there, still soldiering. Still trying to save their country when the rest of us were only trying to save ourselves.
We need more of those kind of people.
More Staff Sergeant Presleys.
More Sergeant Major Prestons.
What is a soldier?
A soldier is someone who never gives up.
Yes, my friend.
The Boy finished his tale by the side of the grave in the cold cornfield with winter coming on.
But there is more he will not tell us tonight.
When I found him he was mad with grief. So it’s probably something he still carries with him.
He said to you,
You take everything with you
, my friend.
The meat was ready.
A woman in soft buckskin carved the first piece and offered it to the Crippled Man.
He nodded his head toward the Boy.
All eyes watched as the dripping and steaming haunch of meat was carried to the Boy. They had all seen him carry that massive shield, wielding that immense weapon, riding an ancient war machine into battle against impossible odds.
They had seen him stand alone against many.
The Boy swallowed thickly.
Hungry.
Then . . .
“Please give it to my friends.” He turned to the Old Man and his granddaughter. “They found me when I was . . . lost.”
The Old Man held up his hands in protest.
But the look from the Boy, the look from all of them, stopped the Old Man.
The Old Man tore it in half, handing a piece to his granddaughter.
“Thank you, we are very honored.”
“And now the other question is ‘Where are you going?’ ” the Crippled Man said as he and the Old Man sat in the golden dawnlight of the next morning.
They drank a brewed tea by a smoking fire.
“We are heading north.”
The Crippled Man’s face darkened.
Beyond them, warriors fed and brushed their horses, exercising the animals with short sprints or gentle walks.
“Why go there? There is nothing up that way anymore,”
The Old Man nodded. “There is someone there.”
The Crippled Man’s eyes went wide. Then he sipped his tea, blowing away the steam.
“Where?”
“Beneath the mountain at Colorado Springs. The old NORAD bunker.”
“I didn’t think they’d survived,” said the Crippled Man.
“They contacted us by radio. They said someone is trying to break into their bunker from the outside. If that happens, the complex will flood with a lethal dose of radiation. They’ll all die in there.”
“Who’s in command?”
“Natalie . . . I mean someone named General Watt.”
The Crippled Man thought for a moment, sipping his tea again, smacking his lips.
“I don’t remember that name. But it has been a long time.”
Small sleepy-eyed children emerged from patchwork tents and were dragged down to the stream by women.
“You won’t survive. That is, if you go north beyond a deserted place once called Raton.”
“How do you know we won’t?”
The Crippled Man refilled his tea, leaning from off his multihued carpet, holding out the kettle that hung over the fire, filling the Old Man’s cup.
“I was a Lightning driver in those days. Flew the F-35.” The Crippled Man nodded to himself. “I flew the F-35,” he whispered.
“I can’t remember what I did,” said the Old Man. “Whatever it was, it must not have been that important.”
“I can’t remember my wife’s maiden name,” said the Crippled Man. “Age is funny like that, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So how do you know . . . about the North?” asked the Old Man.
“Operation Running Back. I’ll explain. Sorry. I’m lost. Talking about, saying those words makes it all seem like . . . like it just happened. Like it was yesterday. And this is funny, but sometimes it seems like it all happened to someone else. Does that . . . do you ever feel that way too?”
“I do,” agreed the Old Man.
Yes.
“That’s good. It would be terrible to be the only one who ever felt like that.”
The Old Man nodded and blew on his tea.
Today will be very hot, my friend. Do you ever think that today will be your last day? Like those men on the slopes. Like all those people back during the days of the bombs. Everyone has a last day. Everyone dies.
I am only thinking this way because of what he has told me about the North. About where I must go.
Yes.
“When the bombs started going off . . .” began the Crippled Man. “When we lost New York, we had to keep the President airborne in . . . oh, I forget . . . wait, Air Force One. Yes.” He laughed. “That was it. Air Force One. I was based out of Dover. I flew shotgun for . . . Air Force One. I’d been somewhere else . . . in the desert before that, then I got reassigned. Moved my . . . yeah. That’s right. I moved my wife and kid there. Two weeks later I’m on the tarmac. Engine to max power and I’m following Air Force One for the next three days. Maybe the last three days of the United States, I kept thinking. For three straight days I flew and flew and when my plane got thirsty I was refueled by an air tanker. We couldn’t put the President down anywhere. We were trying to make it into the bunker at NORAD. D.C. had been hit, so we couldn’t get him in to the bunker there. A civilian plane got a little too close outside of Chicago and I shot him down. I didn’t think it was a terrorist, but we couldn’t be too careful. I wasn’t proud of that. So we’re vectoring in on Colorado Springs. I’ve been flying for three days straight. I remember that I got to set down twice. Once in a field. The other time on a highway. They let me get a few hours of sleep and then I was back on cap again. That night over Colorado I was falling asleep at the stick. I kept slapping myself, doing everything I could to stay awake. On top of that, Air Force One was running dark, which is a hell of thing when you’ve got to follow it real close. Hell of a time. The controller contacts me from Air Force One and tells me we’re turning for the air base at Colorado Springs. It looked like we’re heading straight in. Then she adds, I remember it clear as day, she adds, ‘Oh yeah, and for your own personal beatification, we just went nuclear on the Chinese fleet.’ We were tired. We’d been talking to each other for three days. I’d always imagined she was a redhead. Never met her. We hit the runway and I’m right on top of Air Force One. I go around while they taxi to meet the convoy that’ll take the President up to NORAD. I’m turning downwind to get back to the airport, and off to my left I see tracer rounds and gunfire zipping all across the airfield. It was an ambush. We had Chinese insurgents everywhere in those days. They knew the President hadn’t made it into D.C., so they were going for the kill shot at Colorado. So Air Force One just turns around and takes off at max power straight back down the runway.
“Now the plan is to orbit the air base until the Army can re-secure it and clean out the insurgents. Then we’ll try to go in again.”
“An hour after that, the plan to make it into the bunker and ride out the attack was scrubbed. A few minutes later and we’ve got reports of Chinese aircraft all across the Southwest. Someone shot down a transport dropping paratroopers in Texas. That’s when they came up with ‘Running Back,’ which was to get the President down to Yuma where we had air superiority and the Eighty-Second Airborne on the ground.”
You must have thought about your wife and child back in Maryland.
The Crippled Man drank some of his tea. Swallowing. Eyes distant.
“That was the plan,” continued the Crippled Man. “The plan until China responded with a full-scale nuclear strike. It’s dawn in the East, like zero five thirty and their missiles, and ours, are streaking across the upper atmosphere. We’re still trying to clear the airport; I’m even being called in to make close air support strafing runs. We’re already low on fuel and there’s a rumor our tanker got jumped and that we might not be getting refueled at all. I mean, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, and I thought that’d already happened two weeks prior. So we hit it. We head south. I think command was thinking we’d take the President to South America. But we don’t have the fuel. Maybe we’ll get some somewhere, but who knows. Anyway, we’re out over southern Colorado entering New Mexico and, last time I counted, Colorado gets fourteen military-grade nuclear warheads in the space of thirty minutes.”
“Worse thirty minutes of my life listening to stations go offline.”
“We get a tanker rendezvous and it’s now or never for some fuel. I’m on fumes but Air Force One always drinks first. EMPs are playing hell with our commo, but the F-35 I was flying was hardened for that kind of stuff. Still, let me tell you it’s hell at Mach One with mushroom clouds everywhere, vapor trails crossing the sky, and aircraft fleeing in every possible direction.”
“Air Force One is halfway through her drink when radar control gives me a fast mover aimed straight for us. So I’m thinking at that point the Chinese have somehow managed to get one of their supersecret J-35s into our airspace and they’re shootin’ up targets of opportunity. Anyway, long story short, it wasn’t a J-35. It was a damn missile. Did I mention I’m down to just guns now? My missiles were gone back at the airfield. So they vector me in on this thing and I’m thinking I’m on a hard intercept for the latest, at the time back then, Chinese stealth fighter. Probably still is. Who’s built anything since? Anyway, I had about thirty seconds to realize it was a low-yield Chinese version of a Tomahawk and they were going for Air Force One. So I hit it with my plane. Head-on. If it woulda been armed, which they don’t do until seconds before impact, I wouldn’t be here. Instead, it cartwheeled me through the air and the plane took over and ejected me. I woke up with my legs crushed out here on the prairie. Not too far from here in fact. That was my little flying tackle for Operation Running Back. Get the President out of Dodge. I don’t suppose you even know if he ever made it? But then again, how would you?”
Pause.
The Old Man finished his tea.
“He did. He made it to Yuma that day or the next.”
The Crippled Man made a face. Then he smiled and softly chuckled to himself.
“How d’ya like that. Forty years later and I can stop kicking myself.” He looked at the Old Man. “Thanks for that.”
Don’t ask me what happened after.
Don’t ask me what time it was on my car radio clock when it stopped. When I saw the mushroom cloud rising over Yuma in my rearview mirror.
Don’t ask me about that.
“So that’s my shameless story of how I saved the President. But the nugget I’m tryin’ to give you in all of that, is this: Colorado . . . well, Colorado just ain’t no more. Like I said, at last count that morning, she’d had fourteen direct hits from high-yield nuclear weapons. The land up there is poisoned. I wouldn’t go there. You won’t survive even buttoned up inside your tank.”
The Old Man stood, brushing the dead grass and twigs from his pants.
“It’s death up there,” said the Crippled Man.
Silence.
“I know,” said the Old Man.
A
T NINE O’CLOCK
the Old Man turned on the beacon.
“I have your signal. The device is now active. That’s good,” said Natalie, General Watt. “Now can you point the lens toward a significant or prominent land feature such as a large hill or mountain?”
The Old Man pointed the device at the small conical hill in the distance.
“Now, squeeze the trigger and hold it while pointing at the feature you’ve selected.”
The Old Man squeezed the trigger.
A small red light on top of the device blinked twice.
“Are you squeezing the trigger?” asked Natalie.
“Yes,” said the Old Man.
Silence.
“Are you holding the trigger down?” she asked again.
“Yes, I am holding the trigger just like you asked me to.”
Silence.
The Old Man, wearing his helmet, standing in the hatch, continued to point the device toward the hill.
“I’m afraid there’s a problem,” Natalie said over the radio. “The device does not work properly.”