David Robbins: The Fox Run

That was when Hickok closed the trap. He calmly came into view, his feet firmly planted, his hands on his Colts.

The mutate was twenty yards from Hickok and it roared when it spied him blocking its escape route.

Hickok did not draw his .357’s.

The mutate was closing, the mouth wide open, the horrible teeth exposed.

Hickok remained immobile.

The mutate was pouring on the speed.

“Now!” Blade screamed, wondering why Hickok was waiting and knowing the answer, knowing that Hickok thrived on excitement, that he reveled in danger and adventure, and dreading that, this time, Hickok had gone too far, that the gunman had overestimated his ability.

But he was wrong!

Hickok drew, the Colts clearing leather simultaneously, the two shots as one, the slugs striking the mutate’s forehead, and the thing stumbled, recovered, and continued to charge, even as the Colts cracked again, and a third time, and the mutate was dead on its feet, carried forward by the force of its own momentum, up and over the top of the east wall.

Hickok leaped to one side.

The mutate plowed into a large tree and dropped on the spot. There was a final, wheezing gasp, then silence.

Hickok stared at the dead creature for a moment, smiling. He casually twirled the Colts and replaced them in their holsters in a quick, fluid motion.

Blade and Geronimo were running towards the buck. Hickok joined them.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” Blade snapped when they regrouped.

“Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

Hickok simply shrugged.

“You take too many chances,” Geronimo asserted.

“Why do you do it, Nathan?” Blade asked, suppressing his anger. “Don’t you realize that one day your grand plays will be the death of you?”

Hickok glanced at the mutate, at the ground, and at his friends. “Can you think of a better way to go? I’d rather die in a fight, with my guns in my hands, than old, sick, and decrepit.” Hickok lowered his voice, and his companions were surprised by an insight into his character they’d never glimpsed before. “You both heard Plato. About six or seven months ago.

The Family records show that each generation is not living longer, like it used to be in the old days, before the Big Blast. Each generation has a shorter life expectancy now. Plato said it’s more than our constant fight for survival, more than our lives being a lot harder than life was in the old days. He said he wasn’t sure what was causing our shorter life spans, our aging earlier and earlier in each successive generation. He suspected some form of radiation-induced genetic imbalance just might have something to do with it, but he doesn’t have the equipment he needs to be certain.”

Hickok absently drew a circle in the dirt with the toe of his right moccasin.

“Don’t you see?” he continued. “Look at Plato. He’s a prime example.

He’s… what? Not quite fifty? And look at him! Already he’s gray and wrinkled, old way before his time. I went and did some checking in the library. I’ve compared pictures in the different books. Plato looks the way a man of seventy or more would have looked before the nuclear war. And that’s going to happen to us, sure enough.”

Hickok angrily slammed his right fist into his left palm.

“Well, I’m not about to let it happen to me!” he brusquely declared. “I’m going to go out while I’ve still got my senses about me!” He fell quiet for a moment, then resumed. “Besides, it really doesn’t matter how we go.

Plato’s convinced me that we’ll survive this world, that there is a higher plane of existence. It isn’t important how we get there, just so we get there.”

Blade was disturbed. He could see the logic in Hickok’s argument, and it bothered him, but he completely disagreed. “What if you marry some day?” he asked Hickok. “What then?”

Hickok shrugged. “Cross that hill when I get to it.”

“And when you do,” Geronimo chipped in, “I predict you’ll change your tune.”

“We’ll see,” was as far as Hickok was willing to commit himself.

Blade wanted to change the conversation and dispel the moodiness settling in.

“My wrist is bothering me,” he announced, and it was. “I better have it tended before dirt gets in the wound and it becomes infected.”

“Yeah.” Hickok drew his right Magnum and began reloading the spent cartridges from his cartridge belt. “And the old man did say he wanted us back as soon as we could manage it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t refer to him like that,” Blade said stiffly.

“The old man?” Hickok grinned. “I like Plato, sure. But he’s not my favorite person like he is yours. I don’t mean anything personal by it.”

They had discussed Hickok’s apparent lack of respect for Plato before, and Blade was about to wade in again, to defend his mentor, when Geronimo sighed.

“Why am I doing all the carrying today?” he demanded. He slung his rifle over his left arm, stooped, and lifted the buck onto his right shoulder.

“Glad you’re not much of a hunter, white man.” He smiled at Blade.

“And what do you mean by that?”

Geronimo started walking. “Look at this buck.” He gave the carcass a whack. “All skin and bones. Not much more than a year or two old.”

“We need the meat and the hide,” Blade reminded him, following.

“I’m not complaining,” Geronimo said. “Makes it easier for me. If this thing was full grown, you’d be helping me right now, sore wrist or not.”

“You want me to lend a hand, pard?” Hickok had loaded his revolvers.

“I can manage,” Geronimo snapped indignantly. “And why do you persist in using that phony Wild West talk? You were taught in the same school we were, by the same teacher. So where do you get off talking like you really were Wild Bill Hickok?”

Hickok pretended to be hurt by the rebuke. “What is this?

Pick-on-Hickok Day or something?”

“Now that Geronimo mentions it,” Blade interjected, “I’ve often wondered about the same thing myself. Why do you talk that way sometimes?”

“Just count your lucky stars I’m not partial to that Shakespeare dude,” Hickok replied. “What a loser! Imagine anyone talking like that! As for me…” He paused. “I feel comfortable dressing like Hickok and talking like Hickok…”

“Like you think he talked,” Geronimo corrected.

“…and if it makes me feel good, what’s wrong with that? Maybe it helps me forget.”

“Forget what?” Blade wanted to know.

“Forget who I am, and where I am, and the utter senselessness of it all.”

Blade was sorry he had asked.

The Founder, as the Family called him, had built well.

Kurt Carpenter, as revealed in his other legacy, the diary he left behind, had been a filmmaker, an environmentalist, yet practical, an idealist and a visionary, all the while retaining a mature, firm grasp on reality. When others had said that the world’s leaders would never blow up the planet.

Carpenter had smiled and shook his head in disagreement. When the talks had broken off and the media had offered hope that peace could still be maintained. Carpenter had known better. When his many friends had gently derided him for spending so much time and his considerable fortune on his pet project, Carpenter had wisely ignored their barbs and proceeded anyway.

Yes, Kurt Carpenter had been extraordinary and, like the majority of forward-looking individuals in the course of human history, he had been ridiculed and sneered at, castigated behind his back, and mocked to his face.

Ironically, Carpenter, in a sense, had had the last laugh.

When World War Three finally had erupted, when the misguided political madness known variously and collectively as government had attained inevitable fruition, Carpenter and those relatives and friends he had gathered about him at his carefully selected survival site actually had outlasted his many detractors.