Nick Cole - The Wasteland Saga

“I know where you are going. But where did you come from?”

His granddaughter watched him, her eyes wide.

I am surprised she has not told him already.

She still listens to you.

“A city,” said the Old Man.

The Boy continued to watch the fire, its flames within his green eyes.

“Ain’t nothin’ left of cities, Boy,” said the Boy.

“What do you mean?”

The Boy shook his head.

“Just something someone used to tell me.”

The soldier.

I wish we’d more of that rabbit than we did. Tomorrow we should hunt for a while.

“It’s true,” said his granddaughter. “Isn’t it, Poppa?”

The Old Man nodded still thinking of rabbit.

“Poppa found it. We used to live in a tiny village but Poppa went out into the wasteland and found Tucson.”

The Old Man shot a quick look at her and then the Boy.

“Sorry, Poppa.”

The Old Man got up and went to get some water.

When he came back he said, “I’m sorry.” He nodded at the Boy. “I didn’t know if we could trust you. When we found you… well… you’d had a tough time. That was obvious.”

The Boy only seems to listen to me now. But really, he is somewhere else. Maybe in his past, before we found him.

How do you know, my friend?

Whatever happened before we met him scarred him, changed him. Left its mark on him. He is there even now and I doubt he wholly ever leaves that place.

Yes.

“We don’t need to know about your past,” said the Old Man. “You’ve proven yourself to us. In fact, I don’t know what we’d have done without you. When we finish with this business, you could come and live in the city with us, if you wanted to.”

“You’d like it there!” said his granddaughter. “There’s lots of salvage.”

After a moment the Boy whispered a barely audible “thank you” and nothing more.

In the night, the others were asleep and the Old Man lay awake again, watching the night and the stars.

I would give anything to sleep like I used to. Like they do.

You’re not thinking about rabbit even though you’ve been trying to.

Yes.

So what are you really thinking about?

Everything.

That’s a lot to think about, my friend.

Yes.

A lot for one person.

Yes.

The story of Santa Fe? The story you would need to know if you were going to go and salvage there?

A little of that, although it is easy to understand what happened there, but mostly of other things.

Then what happened there?

A dirty bomb would be my guess. That is why we got the higher reading on the dosimeter. A dirty bomb parked in the downtown district.

Or the art district. Or even the historic.

Did they have such things?

Wherever it was, it went off and destroyed less than a block. The fire engines and police arrived. If it was the first bomb, or one of the first in those early days before we truly understood what was going on, they hadn’t even thought of checking their dosimeters that day. But in the days that followed, before the EMP that knocked out the networks, an exploding van in any kind of populated area would have had them checking. In a moment they would’ve known.

Known what?

That the city was poisoned.

That everyone must flee.

Why?

Because, what can you do now? The bomb has gone off. You can’t put out radiation like a fire. Or clean it up like a flood. Or pack it into an ambulance and take it to the hospital. No. It is just there, somewhere under all that brush.

And that is what happened. In a matter of hours, by evening no doubt, because I remember the bombs always seemed to go off during the morning rush hour… they are all gone into the desert and the city is dead for all practical intents and purposes.

The bombs always went off at morning rush hour.

I have not thought about that in a long time. Funny, what comes back to you across the years. What surfaces in the little pond we call our mind.

Or sails across the ocean and back again.

Yes. That is an even better way to think of it.

By evening the city is dead. And in the silent years that follow, the brush grows. It covers everything. It pulls everything down into the dirt for someone to find at some far later date when we who lived through those days aren’t even a memory in the mind of the oldest of them. Then they will find what we left behind.

If humanity survives, my friend.

Yes, there is that also.

If a fire happens, then everything is so much faster.

And the bone chimes?

Unseen people who live near here or pass by. They have put those chimes up as some sort of marker to warn others away from what has been poisoned.

Stay away.

Bones.

Death.

Soft notes in a gentle breeze.

The Old Man watched for satellites beneath the stars above.

He thought of Natalie.

General Watt.

I wonder what her story of salvage is.

In the badlands, they crossed alongside pink canyons of stacked rock and through stunted forests twisting away beyond Santa Fe.

They began to find the bodies.

The first was a woman, her corpse bloated and lying in a ditch alongside the road.

The Boy exited the tank and searched the road and its sides.

When he returned he said, “Hard to tell, but less than a week. There was a fishhook in her lip but she didn’t die from that.”

He pointed to the center of the road.

“They were all chained together up there. She must have died along the march. Then they unhooked her and threw her over there.”

“Should we bury her, Poppa?”

You know we will find more of them as we go, my friend.

“No. We have to hurry now.”

To what? To overtake the slavers, and then what? Or do you mean the bunker and again, then what, my friend?

Project Einstein, whatever it does.

Whatever it does, indeed.

THERE WERE MORE bodies rotting in the merciless sun. They passed them and the Old Man wondered if any one of them was Ted.

The canyons and forest gave way to a wide plain of rolling grass and slight hills that swept away toward the hazy north.

When they stopped in the middle of the plain, the Old Man could hear insects buzzing in the long grass. In every direction, the tall grass ran off toward the horizon, its undefinable edges disappearing into a screen of summer haze and thick humidity. As if the wide plain simply fell off the edges of the earth.

At noonday, they rested in the small ledge of shade alongside the tank, drinking warm water and not eating. The Old Man asked the Boy if there was something they might hunt to eat.

The Boy stood and scanned the indeterminate horizon.

‘We have no idea what’s out there, any of us,’ thought the Old Man. ‘No idea.’

“It looks like horse country,” said the Old Man hopefully.

Whether it was horse country or not, the Boy didn’t bother to respond.

In time they mounted the tank and continued along the road as it cut like a straight line into the hazy north.

I cannot believe we’ve come this far. It feels like we’re in a strange land at the top of the world. A land I never knew existed. Or maybe it is like an ocean. Like a sea of grass so high up.

That’s because you spent so many years in the desert, my friend. You thought the whole world had become desert.

I thought often of the sea. Every time I read the book, I thought of the sea and the big fish.

Later, they passed more bodies.

At dusk, they pulled off to the side of the road. All around them, the plain continued to stretch off into a hazy pink nothingness where there was no mountain, or forest, or city, or even an end to things. An unseen orchestra of bugs clicked and buzzed heavily through their symphony well into the twilight and falling dark.