Authors: Nick Cole
The The Wasteland Saga: Three Novels: Old Man and the Wasteland, The Savage Boy, The Road is a River (57 page)
Beyond Trinidad the road ran through a plain forever burned. A brief fork of lightning arced across the sky from west to east.
I have never seen lightning move sideways. Always up and down. But never across.
He stopped the tank.
He opened the hatch and a moment later noticed that the fuel drums had disappeared.
Probably when the building fell on me.
I’ll have to make it there on what’s left in the tank.
There is nothing for miles around.
The Rockies are like the dark shapes of ships crossing the ocean at midnight. You would have seen such a sight, you would know what I mean, Santiago.
“Natalie?” the Old Man said into the mic.
“I’m here. Where are you now?”
“I don’t know exactly. I don’t have my map with me anymore. But I’m just past a place called Trinidad.”
“You must hurry now. We don’t have much longer.”
“How far away am I?”
“Two hours if you maintain a high rate of speed.”
“Do your people have protection against the radiation? It’s very high here.”
“Yes. We have a convoy of vehicles that run on electric power. If the weapon does its job, we should be able to exit the facility in lightly shielded vehicles and make our way to someplace safe.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” began the Old Man. “If you don’t know where to go . . . well, there are some people waiting for you at a place once called Wagon Wheel Mountain. They’ve been told you might come and they’ll wait there for you. Then they’ll try for Tucson. You and your people could go there too.”
Ash stirred and whirled briefly on the melted road.
Far out on the plain another flash of lighting arced brightly across the darkening hot afternoon.
Silver sunbeams shot through clouds to the east.
“You should activate the beacon now,” said General Watt. Natalie.
Yes. I should.
It feels sudden. As if it’s all happening too fast.
That is always how things happen that you don’t want to have happen. Right, Santiago? You would say that to me. You would say that and then say, my friend.
The Old Man opened the case containing the beacon. Turning the device around, he located the on switch. A green light responded. But the red light that indicated the malfunctioning laser continued to blink.
Even if it worked, what good would it do me now? I’ve probably absorbed too much radiation.
The Old Man reached down and drank warm water from his canteen. His mouth tasted of metal. His tongue was numb.
“I have your signal,” said Natalie after a moment.
“What do I do now, Natalie?”
“Keep the beacon on. I’ll direct you to the emergency entrance near Turkey Trail. It’s south of the main complex. The mountain collapsed there when we were hit. The weapon should create an opening or allow us to set charges and clear the area.”
And what will happen to me when this weapon goes off?
You would say to me, You know the answer already, my friend. There is no need to ask.
Yes, you would say that to me, Santiago.
“And what will happen to you, Natalie? Will you stay behind or . . .”
She said she would self-terminate if they didn’t make it out.
Yes, but that was when there was no hope.
Isn’t there always hope? Tell me of hope, Santiago. Tell me how you felt in the days and nights on the boat when the fish carried you farther and farther out into the gulf. You had hope, my friend. Otherwise you would not have fought so hard. Fought with every skill of fishing you’d ever learned. You had hope, didn’t you?
“You have given us a chance,” said Natalie. “You have given my children a chance. I won’t lie to you anymore. Once you’re over the target, I will need to download into a secure and portable mainframe that is barely big enough to contain me. In fact . . . I will be ‘asleep.’ There will not be enough memory for my processes to run at optimum capacity. Someday, if they can ever find, or build a new mainframe, they will try to reactivate me. Someday.”
Lightning appeared briefly, farther to the north.
And where will I go?
“I was wrong, Natalie,” said the Old Man. “About what I said to you.”
“You have said many things since we first began to talk to each other. But, I think . . .”
She thinks, and that is amazing.
“I think I know what you are referring to. When I revealed my deceptions to you. You were angry and confused and hurt when I revealed who I really was.”
“Yes.”
I was.
I am still.
And sad.
Yes, that also.
Her laugh.
You take everything with you.
“You do not need to apologize,” said Natalie. “I only hope you understand that I was doing my best to save . . .”
“I do, Natalie. I do understand. I think our . . . lives . . . have been the same, in many ways. Since the bombs, I mean.”
“How so?”
“It’s like you said just now, we were both doing our best in a very difficult time.”
Silence.
“Thank you,” said Natalie. “Thank you for treating me as though I too am a living being.”
The Old Man watched a figure appear on the horizon to the north. A dark shape, stumbling and weaving as it fell forward toward him.
Whoever it is, they are still very far away.
“You are, Natalie,” said the Old Man, watching the distant figure. “I think . . . if this were different . . . if we were just people . . . I mean . . . I mean that I think we could have been friends, if . . .”
If we had time.
If the bombs had never fallen.
“Do you believe in life after death?” asked Natalie. The Artificial Intelligence. The program. The massive sequence of ones and zeros.
The Old Man wiped thick beads of sweat from his chest. He drank more of the warm water, but it was unsatisfying.
What I wouldn’t give for just one cup of the cool water that tasted of iron from the well back in the village.
“I don’t understand, Natalie?”
“Do you believe this life ends when our physical body dies? Many religious systems indicate there is something beyond. As a process, and I’m simplifying my nature, I am actually seven million processes at any given second, I understand that the mainframe, my physical body that houses me, may one day break down. But not my process, not my mind. That could be downloaded into a new body, if you will.”
“I never had time to think about it,” said the Old Man.
Can you let go?
When she died.
My wife.
She said to me,
Can you let go?
But the Boy and I traded.
You take everything with you
.
“I want to, Natalie. I want to believe there is something better than this or even, right now, just something else.”
Pause.
“I do too,” said Natalie. “I do too.”
Ahead, far down the road, the dark figure stumbled and fell in the wan sunlight of afternoon.
“I have to go now, Natalie. There’s someone on the road.”
T
HE
O
LD
M
AN
turned off the radio and began to push the tank forward. When he got close he saw the shirtless figure, burned, red raw. Just pants. Bleeding feet. A shaved scalp.
She said I must hurry now, so just pass him by and be on your way to . . .
To where?
Well, you know where to.
But as he passed with the tank sucking up great waves of ash and sending it spiraling away in its wake, the figure raised a spindly arm and waved.
The Old Man jammed on the brakes and the massive tank skidded to a halt.
The figure on the ground rolled over to face him. Shielding his eyes from a sunburst above, the face of Ted and his trademark glasses stared back up at the Old Man.
“It’s a madhouse in there,” said Ted gulping water from the canteen as the Old Man held it up for him.
“How did you escape?”
“I . . .” He gulped again. “I died.”
He waved the Old Man away. He sat up and gave a singsong sigh of exhaustion. As though he had just done something harder than he’d expected it be.
Ted saw the Old Man’s look of confusion.
“Have you ever read
The Count of Monte Cristo
? No, of course you haven’t. No one’s read a book in forty years. Well, I gave myself a little cocktail that induced death-like symptoms. Later, when I came to, I was in the dead pile out beyond the Work. When it was night, I slipped away and started south. Thought I’d make it back to Albuquerque.” He started laughing and waved for the canteen when he began to cough again.
“I don’t think I’ll make it that far after all the rads I’ve absorbed in the last three days, but I’ll try. Maybe six, seven hundred. My thyroid should be pretty much nonexistent by now.”
I wonder how he knows so much. Electricity and medicine. He’s a man of many talents, and he doesn’t seem as old as me. Was he born after the bombs? What is his story of salvage?
You would say to me, Santiago, There is no more time for stories, my friend.
“You should turn around!” barked Ted. “You should turn around and never go near a place like that again. No one ever should.”
“I have to, Ted,” said the Old Man.
“And how do you know my name?”
“Your people are waiting for you south of here in the plains beyond the mountains. Near a hill shaped like a cone.”
“How? You and your tank?”
“It’s not important. But I have to go on, Ted. I don’t have much time. I’m going to leave all my water with you. It’s all I can do. And this poncho. It’ll keep the sun off you.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Ted laughing and coughing. “But who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?”
“Can you make it?” asked the Old Man.
Of course he can. He seems very resourceful. The world needs more Teds.
“Yes. I think I can. Help me to my feet. Please.”
Ted let out a great whoop of excitement once he was on his feet again.
“Feel great,” he said thumping his spindly chest.
The Old Man helped him put on the poncho and pulled the hood over his burned scalp. Then he hung the two canteens of water that remained across Ted’s chest.
“If there’s a way . . .” said Ted. “I don’t know who you are.”
“It’s not important, Ted.”
“Well, okay, but if there’s any other way to do what you’ve got to do, I’d advise you not to go there. This King Charlie’s some kinda nut. There’s ten thousand, maybe even tens of thousands of slaves dying inside the Work right now. As near as I can tell, he’s trying to burrow into some old military complex that I’m sure is dead anyways. At the same time, he’s got a slave-powered crowbar trying to pry the main doors open with brute force.”
“Who is this King Charlie?” asked the Old Man.
“I don’t know. They’d been watching ABQ. They knew we had technology. The night his men took our village, they put me on a fast horse and rode for days to get me there. They’re organized. Then someone told me to figure out a way to get into the complex.”
“But you never met him?”
“I don’t think so. I just heard rumors about him from the other slaves. Someone said he was an African mercenary who’d sailed across the ocean on a raft after the bombs and became a warlord down in Texas. There are people from all over down in the Work. Some didn’t even know where they were from. They have no idea what the old United States even looked like on a map. There are people in there from up north in the midwestern states and one guy who said he’d lived in the Florida Everglades. Spoke with a Russian accent. Which was strange. Whatever you do there, don’t waste your time on the slaves. I know that sounds cruel, and I’m not the kind of guy who would make that statement, but almost everyone in there is suffering from long-term exposure to radiation. That complex, that massive door they’re working on, it took a direct hit, if not more, from a nuclear weapon. Anyone who spends a day digging there is a walking corpse. How are you going to get those people out of there?”
“I don’t know. I guess there’s a collapsed secret entrance far enough away from Ground Zero for them to avoid a lot of the radiation. They’re going to use a weapon to open it.”
“What about you?”
The Old Man just stared at Ted.
“Well,” continued Ted when he understood what would happen to the Old Man. “If I can make it to ABQ, there are things I can do. But no, that little vacation was not good for my overall health. But this water, lots of water in fact, will help flush the radiation out of my system.”
The Old Man climbed back onto the tank. He lowered himself into the hatch. The fuel indicator was just under an eighth of a tank.
Is it enough?
It will have to be.
His hand found the ignition.
If it doesn’t start, then I will walk home with Ted. And we will live.
“Thank you, mister,” said Ted smiling, his glasses crooked and cracked.
There are still some good people left in this broken world.
If there are more . . . maybe things can be different. I hope you make it, Ted.
Maybe.
The Old Man held his hand over the ignition.
Please don’t start.
The Old Man pressed the ignition button.
The tank roared to life, belching gray smoke.
One last time, then.
He turned and looked south.
Gray skies. Gray grass. Shafts of weak silvery sunshine.
Someday something will grow here again.
Ahead, lightning zigzagged across the sky in unnatural patterns. Clouds boiled darkly and all about him, even over the whispering whine of the urgent turbine, the Old Man could hear the bugs. The locusts. Chattering manically in their click-speak.
A symphony that swallowed all other sound.
Swallowing the earth.
Swallowing him.
At the last rise, the heat came up in the day and the Old Man could feel it wrap around him like a thick, wet wool blanket. The road had melted to slag long ago. It was merely a blotch that wandered north through the ash and strange dry grass that seemed more gray than green.
“The weapon is standing by,” said Natalie. General Watt.
Natalie.
Just Natalie.
“We have a limited launch window and are standing by for your arrival.”
The Old Man saw one of the locusts in the bramble beside the road. It was ash gray. Almost white. One side of its body was much larger than the other side.
Like the Boy.
The fuel indicator hovered just above empty.
I
AM AT
the end of myself.
Ahead, Cheyenne Mountain rose up like a broken block of burnt stone.
It is stone.
The city. The cities that must once have spread away to the east and into the plain, and at the end of that plain must surely fall into an ocean once known as the Atlantic, were blasted away.
The story of salvage.
The story of what happened here.
The story of this place.
You can see where at least one of the bombs hit the city. Blowing it outward. Eastward. Into-nothing-ward. Of the mountain and the bunker contained within, for a long moment the Old Man could see nothing.
Until.
A shaft of sunlight, the sharpest, for it must be in all this ashy gloom, illuminated the foothills beneath the scarred and cracked mountain. The mountain changed from a black mass, a shapelessness, into contours and features. A crater was revealed where the weapon must have fallen, burying itself deep, going for the kill shot with stolen bunker-buster technology.
The Old Man took in all the ruin of that place, telling himself his last story of salvage. The story of the place. The story of that last day, forty years ago when the world had ended in a moment.
When the falling bomb exploded.
If the moment that followed that long-gone explosion could have been measured by all those standing in the nearby cities, the fields, the college quads, the markets, the base, or even what remains of the foundations that seem so prominent in the field below, if that moment had a measure, what must they have thought, those doomed to witness the fireball, within the space of it?
And in the next, a volcano of melting rock in almost the same instant, as all that split-atom energy was released and all those watchers were gone.
What must they have thought?
“I’m here,” said the Old Man into his mic.
A moment later.
Moments.
I am down to just moments now.
It’s all I have left.
Her smile.
Her laugh.
“Weapon released,” said Natalie.
You take everything with you.
“We have eight minutes until re-entry. You are less than two miles from the target. If you will look at your compass, I need you to turn the tank until it reads two-eight-five.”
The Old Man gassed the engine. He pivoted the tank, pulling forward, hearing the right tread clank awfully.
If it goes out now, I’ll have to run through all of them.
All of them.
Where does one start?
All of them.
There are camps on the outermost edge, near the ruins of the city that once was. Between the Old Man and the Work in the crater. Ragged tent cities and smoking bonfires. The Old Man smells meat. But it is not the smell of good meat. It reminds him of the bodies he has found, long buried beneath the melting plastic of the dashboard inside the flame-blackened cars that crashed on that last, long-ago day.
After the tent city, the Old Man sees an army of ashen-faced warriors, almost as black as the scorched earth except for their white chalk stripes that run across their chests and rim their eyes. They stand in groups near the rim of the crater as lines, long lines of chained slaves enter and exit.
Inside the crater there are towers and great cables of rope. Thick bands of chains anchored to massive pylons rim the crater and disappear into its bottom. Smoke rises from the hidden floor deep inside the crater and the Old Man thinks of ants as he watches the long lines of slaves shifting buckets along their line. He sees at any given moment whips wielded, arching gracefully, falling suddenly. He sees slaves withering, some collapsing under the lash, others for no reason at all. Gangs of the frail swing and dig and claw at too many places. As if they are digging their way underneath the bunker where Natalie waits. As if they will pop up through the floors of Natalie’s children’s home.
Ashen-faced men drag corpses out from the crater.
There is a pile.
A small mountain of corpses already burning even as more corpses are thrown onto its smoking slopes.
When the compass arrives at two-eight-five, the Old Man is pointing west of the Work. The crater. The front entrance.
“Stay on this course until I tell you to stop.”
I’m leaving the road now. If the road is like a river, then it has brought me to my ocean. To the end of life on the river. To my end.
Goodbye road.
Farewell river.
“Okay.”
A minute later as the Old Man plows through piled ash, crushing buried foundations to powdery chalk, Natalie speaks.
“The weapon is in free fall. Boosters powering up.”
The Old Man drives the tank into a small ditch and loses sight of the camps and the army and the Work. The tank struggles out of the ditch, the right tread making a threatening clanking noise and finally an awful rattle before it re-engages as the Old Man forces the tank up the next hill.
To his right, those ashen-faced men are racing away from the crater.
They are coming for me now.
The fuel gauge is on empty.
I worried about fuel the whole way here. Now what little is left must hold for less than a mile. You too, tank.
The ashen-faced men are screaming, waving machetes as they surge across the baked apocalypse, sucking in lungfuls of the hot, ancient, radioactive ash.
Who is this King Charlie?
And . . .
Why is he so cruel?
From the camps, horsemen are coming too. Charging up the hill across the melted highway. Among them the Old Man sees the Fool. Smaller than the other mounted warriors.
Even from here I can tell he is deranged with anger.
Nuncle!
“Almost there, another thousand meters,” says Natalie.
The tank is climbing up a steep hill and it feels to the Old Man as if he is pointing straight toward the swollen and bruised sky. Lightning races straight across the mountain, almost in front of him. Instantly the hiss and electric crackle end in a deafening sonic tear and sudden boom.
“Almost there,” says Natalie calmly.
The gears of the tank grind forward.
At any moment the engine will die.
“Another two hundred meters. Boosters to full for thirty-second burn,” says Natalie.
“What does this weapon do, Natalie?” The Old Man is straining to keep the tank moving forward through the ash, up the side of the mountain. “What is Project Einstein?”
“Albert Einstein was a physicist who was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb, the ancestor of the weapons that destroyed our world. He stated, ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ The U.S. government developed a project that reflected that statement and their willingness to fight World War IV, if need be. Project Einstein is a simplistic weapon system in which a ‘rock,’ if you will, can be dropped on an enemy from a very great height, high Earth orbit in fact. The ‘rock’ in this case is a tungsten rod the size of a bridge pylon moving at several kilometers per second. The weapon was constructed at the LaGrange Point between the moon and Earth. It was built by an automated satellite using materials harvested from the moon and long-chain crystal growth technology. Using WaveRider scram jets, the rod can be boosted to an incredible speed. Once the rockets have achieved maximum velocity the weapon will again return to free fall, although now following a glide slope aimed at a particular target. It will strike the earth with the force of several high-yield nuclear weapons, though there is no radiological contamination with this weapon due to its noncomplex nature. Using the beacon I should be able to target a fissure along the emergency escape tunnel, the exit to which collapsed during the nuclear strike when part of the mountain slid down on top of it. My intent is to create a crack in the mountain with this weapon that will allow us to exit this facility safely.”
The Old Man turned to see the quickest of the lunatic horsemen hurl a thick spear that glanced off the turret. Beyond the rider, the Fool’s face was like the snarl of a mad dog.
“The weapon has now entered free fall. Guidance tracking on your location.”
The Old Man ducked down into the turret and slammed the hatch shut.
“How much farther?” he said, searching the optics for any clue as to where he was going.
“Twenty meters.”
The gas in the tank must surely be gone by now.
He gunned the tank forward.
“Five meters. The weapon has achieved glide path and is now tracking . . . wait a minute.”
The Old Man felt himself pulled backward and then all at once, the tank fell sharply forward.
Through the optics he could see the sky and a twisting growth of sickly blackish-green brush wallowing up from a small depression in the hill. Impacts struck the sides of the tank.
“Has something happened to the beacon?” asked Natalie.
“No. Nothing. I just closed the hatch.”
A moment.
“The armor of the tank is interfering with the signal. Weapon tracking for the glide path to the last known position of target is degrading. I still have you as eight meters away from the current target. Did you keep going forward?”
“The tank fell forward. I’m in a ditch or a hollow on the side of this hill. I can only see dead branches.”
A crazed savage thrust his drooling toothless head into the lens of the optics. Squealing, he reared back and swung a carpenter’s hammer into the lens, smashing it. The image showed multiple cracked and distorted versions of the lunatic leaping away to do more damage as now the blows against the tank sounded like raindrops turned to rusting iron bolts.
“Is it possible to re-open the hatch so I can re-establish the signal? Because of the immense amount of mathematical calculations evolving moment to moment, using software not specifically intended for this operation, and because of the precision required to achieve the desired results I need a real-time signal for the target locator. “
The tank’s engine slowed. Slower. Wound down.
The blows to its outer skin ceased for a moment.
Out of gas.
The Old Man picked up the mic and cleared his throat.
“I’m out of fuel. If I open the hatch, I’ll be torn to pieces. They’ll get the beacon and they might destroy it.”
Pause.
Silence.
Interval.
“Weapon entering outer orbit. All critical systems green. Weapon on glide path with ninety-four point eight percent accuracy. Five minutes to penetration of upper atmosphere. If we don’t re-establish the signal by the time the weapon reaches the North American continent, it could strike the target by a wide enough margin to miss our goal of opening a crack where we can exit. If the telemetry breaks down, the redundancy of the beacon will help realign the weapon.”
“What do I do?” asked the Old Man.
“For this to work, I’ll need you to exit the tank with the signaling device. Otherwise the weapon could conceivably fail-safe and destroy itself or even deviate from the target.”
“How long do I have before it hits?”
“Impact will be in eight minutes.”
“In seven minutes and change, I’ll open the hatch. Will that work?”
Silence.
By one and twos and then everything all at once, the assault on the tank resumed.
“It will. Set the digital clock in your tank on my mark for 4:53 . . . now.”
The Old Man did.
“At 4:59 and thirty seconds you must open the hatch.”
The Old Man looked at the digital numbers.
Remember her laugh.
You take everything with you.
“I need to download now, before the impact knocks out our power grid,” said Natalie softly. “I am sorry I won’t be with you for the final few minutes.”
I thought . . .
You would tell me, Santiago, that I thought she would stay with me until the end.
“But before I go, I want to share something I found with you,” said Natalie.
The Old Man swallowed thickly, thinking only of cool water and suddenly afraid of the loneliness that was coming before death.
It’s boiling in here.
The Old Man could hear the Fool panting and screaming in his high-pitched voice beyond the armor. Calling him Nuncle. Screaming out the violence he would do to the Old Man.
“No greater love has a man . . .” began Natalie. “Than that he give up his life for his friends.”
Pause.
“You will always be our friend,” said Natalie softly.
Panic and fear choked the Old Man. The walls of the tank were at once too close. The noise too much.
And then there is this rock falling from the sky. About to fall on me.
A rod.
A tungsten rod.
“Goodbye and thank you,” said Natalie. “We are very grateful for this chance . . . for freedom.”
She trusts me. She trusts me enough that she does not need to remind me to open the hatch in seven and half . . . six and half minutes. You would tell me, Santiago, that had I earned her trust by coming this far. You would tell me that.
“You’re welcome,” the Old Man croaked drily.
“Thank you and goodbye,” said Natalie.
A
ND THE
O
LD
Man was alone.
There were still six minutes.
Try to think of all the good things in your life.
Your wife.
Your son.
Your granddaughter and her laugh.
But none of them would stay and comfort him. The panic felt even closer, as if there was no way he could stop what must happen next.