S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

None of them looked quite like it was their first time on a horse, but:

It was what followed that made Eric swear under his breath, and Havel 's eyes narrow. There was one more rider, a middle-aged black man with his feet lashed to the stirrups and his hands cuffed before him, with the chain of the handcuffs through a ring on the horn of his saddle. Two women walked beside the packhorses, also cuffed; the older looked Hispanic, or possibly Italian; the teenage girl beside her was darker, but had a family resemblance. All three of the captives looked like they'd been roughed up, and recently, with still-wet blood running from mouths and noses; the black man looked as if he'd have trouble walking at all, though even semiconscious he rode much better than his three captors.

The saddles were Western-style, looking practical and battered enough to be real working gear, and the mounts were excellent; definitely of quarter-horse stock, but in the older style, with good thick legs and strong hooves, and big for the breed.

"Afternoon," the potato-with-legs leader said as the party drew up; he halted within talking distance, but not close.

Havel waved a greeting, unobtrusively letting the rabbit stick fall into the palm of his right hand and handing it off to the left behind his back.

"Follow my lead," he said softly to Eric.

The young man nodded; Havel could tell he was trembling-tense, but he wasn't showing it much.

"Hello there," Havel went on. "Mind telling me what the hell's going on? We crash-landed up in the woods"-he waved his left hand back towards the wilderness rearing southward-"about ten days ago, and just walked out. Is it like this all over?"

The fat rider with the bow threw back his head and yeee-hawed; Havel had heard it done a lot better. The older two laughed.

"It's the apocalypse, brother," the potato-man said, grinning. "It's the downfall of the Z-O-G, and the triumph of God's people! And yeah, it's all over. Far as we know, and we've talked with people from as far as Smithton, and over to Billings in Montana. All of 'em on bicycles, trying to get somewhere better, and not finding it. And they'd talked to people from farther east and west."

Uh-oh, Havel thought, schooling his face to polite interest. Bad news. And probably true, even given who's peddling it. He recognized the breed; there weren't actually all that many of them in Idaho, but they made up for it in the amount of attention they attracted and the way they gave the state a bad name.

ZOG stood for "Zionist Occupation Government." These three were obviously some variety of neo-Nazi/Christian Identity/Aryan Brotherhood types, one of the groupuscules that had set up redoubts in northern Idaho through the eighties and nineties as part of the survivalist wave-or the scum on the wave, to be more descriptive.

The redoubts usually consisted of a cluster of mobile homes and shacks on heavily mortgaged land, splitting and recombining as the quarrelsome lunatics anathematized each other over fine points of ideology and/or got arrested for credit card scams and death threats to judges and process servers, but the inhabitants could be dangerous enough when they weren't selling each other out to the FBI.

The tall thin one was riding with his jacket open over a bare chest, and the tattoos under it were pure jailhouse; all three of them looked hopped up, as if they'd done a major hit of coke or won the Powerball.

They have, Havel suddenly realized with a chill. If cars and radios and guns don't work, they've just inherited as much of the earth as they can take. No laws.

Eric bent, as if he were scratching at his leg; out of the corner of his eye Havel couldn't be sure, but he thought the younger man palmed a rock.

Good for you, Havel thought, and went on: "You mean everything stopping working?"

The man nodded. "Didn't we say it was coming?" he crowed. "And now we white original sovereigns are coming into our own."

"What about these folks here?" Havel said mildly, drifting a little closer.

"We got us a good husky slave here," the thin man said, grinning. "To look after these fine horses he brought us. He'll be real useful once we've cut his balls off to make sure he don't breed."

"Couple of nice fuck-toys too," the youth with the bow said. "I like the look of the young one."

"In your dreams, Jimmie," the thickset man said; apparently he was the leader. "But you can have her momma tonight while I break her in."

The tattooed man scowled. "They're mud people, Dan," he said, probably a long-running argument. "They're unclean, most likely full of diseases. We ought to kill them right off, like we did those Indians."

"Now, Bob, we'll find us some good pure white women for bearing children," the leader said. "When we're settled in our stronghold waiting for the dying time to pass. Meantime, a man has his needs."

The black man was sitting slumped in the saddle, resting his cuffed hands on the horn and a good deal of his weight on those. His head was down as well, but his eyes peered up at Havel, flickered to Eric. There wasn't much hope in them, but there was thought, and he was probably noticing Havel 's slow, inch-by-inch drift towards the riders. He looked to be about forty, with an outdoor worker's weathered skin and squint lines beside his eyes, sinewy and strong.

He reminds me of someone. Glover, the actor who plays next to Gibson in that Lethal Weapon series, ran through Havel 's mind at some level entirely aside from the swift calculation that filled the active part of it.

"Dying time?" he said, edging a little closer still to Dan. "Could you tell me what you mean by that?"

"Well, it figures that with all the technology gone, most everyone's going to die, except in the real backward places, bush-niggers in Africa and such. Even country folk, without their tractors and pumps, and anyway those close to the cities will get eaten out. Without guns, they can't even defend their farms from the hordes. But up here in the National Redoubt where people are thin on the ground, we can survive and expand later. Lot of cattle and a lot of grain in Idaho. Not to mention game in the forests. I figure best thing is to hide out for maybe six months, then go looking for a place to live long-term."

Not necessarily a complete idiot because he's a total shit, Havel thought.

The man's eyes had glazed over with lust as he spoke; partly, Havel supposed, at contemplating the death of more of humanity than a nuclear war could have managed; partly at the prospect of being a big man among the survivors, after a lifetime of total failure; and partly a more human elation that at last he'd gotten something right, even if it was only improving his chances of surviving by moving to Idaho. From his accent, he'd started out in some East Coast city, although he was trying hard to westernize it.

You know, generally the people I've killed have just been a cost of doing business, Havel thought. Because they were wearing the wrong uniforms. But this bunch would be a real personal pleasure. Why is it that guys who think they're the Master Race always look like walking advertisements for retroactive abortion?

Just a minute more to get them relaxed:

"You two boys look like good original-sovereign stock," the leader of the riders said. "Why don't you-"

"Help us!" the woman walking by the packhorse cried. "For God's sake, mister, please, help us! They're crazy!"

Eric wound up like a pitcher on the mound and threw his rock; he was too close to do a really good job, but his stream-smoothed lump of granite thumped into the shoulder of the bowman.

The archer loosed, the shaft flying inches wide of the back of the neck of the thin man with the jailhouse tattoos; that one did what Havel expected-clapped his heels to his horse's sides, heading straight for Eric. He had some notion of what to do in a fight.