S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

"You don't hurt my mom!" he cried; he was sobbing too, but striking out with blind determination. "You don't hurt my mom!"

"I'm not going to hurt her!" Juniper said helplessly.

She wrapped her arms around the boy in self-defense, lifting him and handing the writhing, kicking bundle to Dennis.

"Or you either; be still, for the Goddess' sake!"

The Oriental woman was silent where she lay in the roadway, wide-eyed, clutching at her injured leg. The bolt Eilir had used had a smooth target head, and the blood trickled freely but did not have the fatal spurting flow that would mean a severed artery.

"He's just a little boy," the woman said as Juniper approached. "Please, whoever you are, he's just a little boy. He didn't hurt anyone. You've got to help him."

"And I'm not going to hurt him," the musician replied.

And she's thinking of nothing but her child, with that through her flesh. Damn it!

It would be so much easier just to go away and leave them if the injured woman were a ravening bandit spitting curses, or thinking of nothing but her own hurt.

"Will you let me see to the leg?" she went on aloud. A nod replied. "Toss your knife away, then. I have a daughter depending on me, and I'm not taking any chances."

Juniper used her own dagger to slit the tight cycling shorts up around where the shaft pierced the flesh, wincing as she looked at it. Dennis came up; he had their medicine box, and readied a bandage; the boy was standing behind him, darting looks around his legs and then turning away.

Juniper took a deep breath, gripped the bolt and pulled; it came free easily, and they occupied themselves with salve and tape for a moment.

"I'm Sally Quinn," the wounded woman said when she'd stopped panting and recovered herself somewhat. "My son's Terence, Terry."

She spoke good General American, with a very faint trace of an accent, and looked to be half a decade older than Juniper, though that might be the dirt and desperation and not having eaten much the past week.

Dennis surprised his friend by breaking into another language, fast-paced and with a nasal twang; she didn't think it was Chinese, which she could at least recognize. Sally started in surprise, smiled hesitantly through her pain and replied haltingly in the same tongue. After a moment she relapsed into English:

"But my parents came over in 'seventy-five, when I was very young," she said. "I don't remember all that much."

Juniper looked at Dennis. Well, he's the right age, but he never said a word!

"You were in Vietnam?" she said curiously.

"In the rear with the gear," he said, shrugging. "Supply corporal. But I did pick up some of the language, yeah, dealing with the local economy. And we better didi mao, you bet."

She recalled vaguely from books and movies that that meant get out, and it was true. She looked down at the injured woman; her son had crept close, and now he lay in the dusty grass beside the roadway with his head pillowed on her shoulder, looking at Juniper with enormous silent eyes. He had some of his mother's fine-boned comeliness, but his hair was dark brown and the features sharper.

"Was your husband with the. others here?" Juniper asked.

There was a wedding band on Sally's left hand, she certainly hadn't been born with the surname Quinn, and she had suburban respectability stamped all over her under the layer the days since the Change had left.

"No," Sally replied; her voice was tired and flat, and her face sagged with lack of sleep and food and hope. "Peter was working late at the office at HP. that night, you know what I mean."

They both nodded. "When things Changed," Juniper said, hearing the capital in her own voice.

"He didn't come back. I couldn't go looking for him because of Terry, and it was four days. And then there was nothing left in the apartment, and nothing worked: the water, the toilets: there was fighting in the streets! And some people I knew a little said they were going to go south to where there was food; I think they wanted me to come because I had the bow, I'm in an archery club, we meet every second Saturday: "

The words trailed off. Juniper stood abruptly and paced, then turned. She left the words unsaid; Dennis was about to speak too. They met each other's eyes and Juniper shrugged angrily.

"Oh, we should not be doing this, Dennie, we really shouldn't. We shouldn't."

A hand tapped her on the shoulder. Yes, we should, Mom, Eilir signed. Yes, we should. She held out a piece of cold biscuit to the boy, and he grabbed it and jammed it into his mouth.

"All right: Sally," Juniper said. "We can't help everyone: which doesn't mean we can't help anyone. You wait here, and we'll get you into the wagon when the horses are hitched." She looked at Dennis. "We'd best get a move on, before we pick up so many strays we're out of food even before we reach the cabin."

W ell, shit," Havel said with profound disgust. "I was really hoping this wouldn't happen."

There were cars on Highway 12. The problem was that they were all stationary; he could see half a dozen, before the road curved out of sight along the steep canyon of the Lochsa. Several of them had been left with the doors open; not one was moving.

Eric halted beside him, gawking up and down the roadway. "Wait a minute," he said. "Do you mean that all the cars are stopped the way our plane's engines were?"

"And my GPS unit and the radio at the cabin," Havel said grimly.

He spat into the dirt by the side of the roadway. It seemed to be the only way to really express his feelings. Unless I get down on the ground and sob and cry and scream and beat my fists on the pavement, he thought wryly.

"But: " Eric's slightly battered-looking face went fluid with shock. "How are we going to get help for my mother?"

"You tell me," Havel said, throwing down his pack. "Shit!" He sighed. "All right, let's check the cars."

They did; nothing remained but a few empty plastic wrappers. Hmmm, Havel thought, looking through another trunk, and then casting back and forth along the road for a hundred yards either way.

"No blankets," he said.

Eric looked at him; probably big-city families as rich as his didn't think about that sort of thing.

"A lot of people out here keep spare blankets or a sleeping bag in their trunks on a long trip," Havel said. "Or emergency supplies. None of these cars have anything like that. Five gets you ten everyone's car stopped at the same moment, then they hung around for a while and eventually started walking out when they realized nobody was coming to rescue them."

He swept a hand along the road. "They were crapping by the side of the road for a couple of days too."

Eric tried a shaky smile. "I'm not much of an expert at roadside dumps," he said.

"Spoor is spoor."

Havel felt his mind struggling to refuse the implications of what he saw.

How far does this stretch? he thought. How far can it stretch? All the way from coast to coast, or 'round the world?

The two men looked at each other. It was a relief when they heard the hollow clop of shod hooves, and the harder crunch on the gravel beside the pavement. The sound came from the east, down the road that stretched in from Lolo Pass and Montana.

Damn, it isn't the Forest Service, was his first thought.

There were six horses. Two carried packsaddles; three bore men in outdoors dress, looking even more scruffy than Havel felt or Eric was. The lead rider had a brush of mouse-colored beard that fell halfway down his chest and: Havel blinked: an actual coonskin cap. He looked like a potato with legs, and rode like one, sawing at his horse's mouth as he pulled up; a lead rein from his saddle controlled the packhorses after a fashion.

His face was thick-featured under the matted hair, heavily pocked, with a nose like a smaller spud attached to the mass. His companions were a gangling stork and a third man much younger than the other two, pinker and fatter as well; he carried a compound hunting bow with an arrow on the string and six more in the quiver clipped to the side of the weapon.