Nick Cole - The Wasteland Saga

Afternoon, thin and cold, settled across the little river. There was no warmth left in the big stones and a breeze could be seen in the pines atop the surrounding mountains.

The Boy began to hack at the burnt lumber of Escondido’s lodge, salvaging any usable beams for shelter. There weren’t many. Near the river, he found fallen trees and in dragging them, he was soon exhausted.

If I had Horse right now this would be easier.

When night fell, what he had was little more than a two-sided lean-to. The open side faced the mountain wall that rose above their camp. Moving Horse within the lean-to, the Boy built a fire. Later he gathered loose wood from the forest floor and brown grass for Horse.

It was night now and he didn’t mind the dark or the forest. He had known such places his whole life.

In the night, keeping the fire high, face burning hot, body and back cold, the Boy sat staring into the shifting flames. Occasionally he simply watched Horse. He tried to make a plan for the coming morning beyond this endless freezing night.

Fishing in the river.

Food.

Traps.

How to improve the shelter.

The snow was coming down thick and silent. It hissed as it fell into the fire.

Even with the fire, it was cold. But Horse slept and that was good. Or at least the Boy hoped it was good.

On nights like this, when it was too cold, Sergeant Presley would talk, telling him things, teaching him. Sometimes they would break camp and simply walk to keep warm. The Boy remembered walking in the freezing rain outside Detroit.

Later he remembered the heavy warmth of late summer when they finally reached the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Sergeant Presley’s Mission, he’d called it.

They’d come upon the old Capitol the day before, broken buildings overgrown by blankets of green. Cracked highways had fallen into swampy water thick with flies and insects.

I got to go in there, Boy, and there ain’t no use you comin’ in with me, said Sergeant Presley on that long-ago day.

It was hot and sticky in the late afternoon. Summer. It had been raining for much of the week.

Let’s make camp and then I’ll go in and look for what I got to find—what I know won’t be there. But I’ll go in all the same.

They’d been living well that year. They’d fought for Marshall and his men the spring before. A range war in Pennsylvania. When the war was over, they’d been granted permission to move on into Maryland. When they’d gone from the warlord Marshall and his expanded kingdom, they’d had good clothes and supplies. They’d found nothing but wild people after that—abandoned farms and shadows in the thick forest and overgrown towns. The small villages and loose power that men like Marshall had held over the interior lands between the ravaged cities would not be found along the devastated ruin of the eastern coast.

One morning, in the center of a town that had burned to the ground long before the Boy had been born, standing in the overgrown weed-choked outline of an intersection, Sergeant Presley said, If there is anyone here, I’ll find them in the Capitol—or in the President’s bunker below the White House. They were both looking at an old fire hydrant that had been knocked out into the road. The road was covered in hardened dirt that had once been muddy sludge.

Who am I kidding? Sergeant Presley had suddenly erupted into the silence of the place. There ain’t anybody left. There wasn’t since it all went sideways and there hasn’t been since. I know that. I’ve known it all along!

His shouted words fell into the thick forest turning to swamp. An unseen bird called out weirdly, as if in response.

But orders are orders, he’d said softly, his sudden rage gone. And someone had to come and find out. Once I know, we’ll head back to the Army in Oakland. We got to cross the whole country. You up for that, Boy?

Sergeant Presley had smiled at him then.

The Boy remembered, nodding to himself.

Still, it’d be nice if someone was there. That’d be something, Sergeant Presley had said.

But there hadn’t been.

Now, beside the fire in the mountains as the first big snow of winter came on, almost to the other side of the country, the Boy knew there hadn’t been anyone in the old Capitol or at the President’s bunker beneath the White House.

Sergeant Presley was gone all that next day.

In the morning the Sergeant had put on some special gear they’d found in a place called Fort. They’d spent two weeks looking through the place, scouring warehouses that had long since been looted, searching through ash and rubble. Finally, in a desk drawer they’d found the gear Sergeant Presley had been looking for.

Some clerk probably got told to bring in his MOPP gear in case things went that way in those days. So he brings it in and his section sergeant checks it and then sends him off to do paperwork. And now I’m gonna wear it and hope the charcoal and other protectants are gonna hold out long enough to get me to the White House without getting radiation poisoning.

When he’d left, wearing the dull green cloth and rubber shoes, fitting the gas mask and hood over his head, Sergeant Presley had looked like a monster.

He was gone all that day.

Sitting by the fire, the Boy couldn’t remember what he’d done after that. Probably exploring with Horse.

In the swarming-insect early evening, outside the Capitol in the swamp camp, it was misty. The gloomy ruins of the Capitol faded in the soft light of dusk. It looked like a dream. The Boy remembered that in the last moments of light, the Capitol, whatever it had once been, looked like a dream castle—like something that might have once had meaning for him. Like things that seem so important in a dream, but when you awake, those things seem of little value and you can’t imagine why they’d held such a place in the dream.

That was what the Capitol had looked like to the Boy in those last moments of daylight.

In the early evening of that long lost waiting-day, Sergeant Presley had finally come up the hill to their camp above the swamp. Threading his way through the tall grass, Sergeant Presley took off the bug-eyed gas mask. He dropped or threw the mask off into the sea of silent yellow grass. He tore off the suit, coughing. Crystal droplets of sweat stood out in his short curly hair.

The Boy gave him water from their bag, then some of the cakes they always made back then.

Still hot in there. Sergeant Presley coughed.

The Boy said nothing.

“Hot” meant forbidden. If sometimes they saw a city on the horizon, like the one by the big lake, its tall towers skeletal and bent, Sergeant Presley would simply say still hot . And sometimes he would add, When you’re an old man, if you live long enough, you can go in there. But I never will.

Sergeant Presley drank more water and coughed.

I woulda brought you somethin’, but it’s too hot in there. I swear I came right up on a bomb crater. Must’ve been low yield. But hell if it didn’t go up twenty degrees. I look around and everything is black ash. Even the marble on one of them old government buildings, the House I think it was called, had turned black.

He coughed again.

‘He will never stop coughing,’ thought the Boy. That was when the coughing had started. That day everything changed, though at the time neither of them knew it.

Sergeant Presley knew it, he suspected. But he didn’t say anything.

Sergeant Presley coughed again.

Made it all the way to the White House.

He coughed and then drank, swallowing thickly.

There was never anything there. It wasn’t a direct hit. See, back then our enemies were fighting unconventionally. Dirty-bomb strikes by remote-controlled aircraft launched within our borders. Terrorists. They went after Washington early on. We knew that. It wasn’t until later, when China got involved, that we didn’t know for sure what had really happened anywhere. After that it was just plain dark everywhere.