James Van Pelt - Summer of the Apocalypse

Teach said, “He’s not going north, then?”

Skylar spit. “Bah! He’s gaming with us. He stuck his tongue at me before he threw the rock.” Teach laughed. “How’d you let that happen? You were a sharp little rock thrower yourself once.” Skylar scowled at him, then stalked out of camp.

“They won’t catch him, I think,” said Eric, “unless he thinks Dodge and I are safe.”

“Good,” Teach said, “if that means he’s not heading into the Flats.” They waited for an hour. Three times men came to report no progress. Eric and Dodge packed their sleeping bags. Dodge didn’t seem to be afraid for Rabbit or of Teach, and Eric found himself more relaxed around the man, even though he wasn’t sure if he was a friend, an odd stranger or their captor. Finally Eric said, “You followed us for days secretly. Now that you’ve come out in the open, what’s your plan?”

Teach said, “Today, the wind is my plan.” He added, “Getting off the flats.” He scuffed the dirt at his feet.

“And maybe asking you to talk to my students about the Gone Time around a campfire. They love ghost stories. Or you could tell them about singing with wolves.”

Teach cocked his head to the side, listening. In the distance, a bird chirped. A bit closer, another answered. That’s like no bird I’ve heard, thought Eric. Sounded like nut-hatches, sort of. From the hill above them, a third chirp drifted down. Ah, he thought, not birds at all. Men. He listened intently. After a few minutes he knew approximately where all of Teach’s men were, and Rabbit probably knew too. If they kept chirping, they’d never catch him.

Eric touched Dodge’s shoulder. Leaning against his backpack, the boy was almost asleep. “Dodge, can you do a meadowlark for me?” He nodded, pursed his lips and blew. The first try came out airy. The top note of a meadowlark’s call is high and hard to hit. He tried again, and the call trilled down perfectly.

“That’s good, boy,” said Teach. “Meadowlark’s a tough one.” From the middle of a bush fifteen feet away, a meadowlark answered. The bush shook, and Rabbit rose from the center of it like a wood sprite, twigs and leaves caught in his hair, a goose egg-sized rock clasped in each hand.

Teach didn’t even look particularly surprised. He sighed, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Within a couple of minutes all of the men returned. The last one limped in, supported by two others, his knee darkly swollen. “I was looking the wrong direction,” he said cheerfully. “I figure I can walk on it. Might have to go slow, though. Heck of a throw from thirty yards.” He gave Rabbit a thumbs up.

“My parents destroyed the old Coal Creek Canyon Road from the highway to the canyon itself,” said Teach. Eric walked behind him; Dodge and Rabbit followed. Spread to either side, the rest of the men hiked, sometimes in sight, other times hidden behind thick stands of scrub oak. We can’t be leaving much of a trail, observed Eric.

Teach continued, “They told me they blocked all the ways into the mountains. Some they blew up, like the Boulder Creek Road. Knocked down half a canyon. The Peak to Peak Highway to Black Hawk and Central City they cut the bridges. But this one, they obliterated. Earth movers, my dad told me. He and a handful of others dug it up, spread the asphalt and replanted. He called it a ‘deconstruction project’ or ‘highway beautification.’” Teach’s thick, bare calves flexed as he stepped onto a deadfall branch and pushed himself over. Unscarred foothills rose before them, and the land looked clean and untouched. If there had been a highway here fifty years ago, they did a darned good job hiding it, Eric thought. Eric puffed. Legs, achy and weak, protested at the pace, and they’d generally been climbing since they’d walked into what looked like an open field to the west of Colorado 93. “Must have been afraid of people coming,” he said, finally. “Somebody got the tunnel on U.S. 6 west out of Denver the summer I was there.”

Teach looked back over his shoulder. “U.S. 6?”

Eric rested, pressing his hand deep into his side, thought a second, then said, “Clear Creek Canyon Road.”

“Oh, yes.” Teach stopped. “Here, let me handle that.” He took Eric’s pack. A broad sweat patch on Eric’s back cooled quickly, and as soon as they started again he felt like Teach had subtracted years, not pounds. Teach said, “Couldn’t do anything about the maps, Dad told me, but a line on paper doesn’t mean much if you can’t find the road it belongs to.”

Eric tried to reconstruct a map of Colorado. He had a good head for geography. The Coal Creek Canyon Road led to… to…Golden Gate Canyon State Park, he thought. And above that, a couple of little towns. He couldn’t remember their names, but he didn’t think the road cut north soon. Every step took them farther from Boulder. If we could just go straight, we’re probably not ten miles away. He looked north, past the hills, to Boulder and its library, if it still existed. “How far do we have to go?” he asked.

“We might make Pinecliffe today.” Teach looked back again, obviously gauging Eric’s fitness. “Maybe not. Then it’s another day and a half to Highwater.”

Eric couldn’t place the name. “Highwater?”

It was Teach’s turn to think a second. “Nederland in the Gone Times. That’s where we live. It isn’t safe to cut any closer to the Flats than that, and there isn’t a good trail anyway.” Nederland, Eric recalled, was an old mining town twenty or thirty miles into the mountains and not too far from the Continental Divide. A big difference between twenty and thirty when you’re walking, he thought. A granite boulder blocked their path. Eric drug his hand across its rough face as they walked around, but another one the same size stood next to the first. A wall of boulders choked the mouth of the narrow canyon they were about to enter. “Your dad did all this?” Eric asked. He thought, what an immense project!

“Persistent man,” said Teach as he ducked into a narrow passage. The rest of the men had vanished. There must be many entrances, thought Eric. Dodge and Rabbit pushed into the corridor behind him. Rock framed a narrow band of sky. Dust kicked up in the passage scratched Eric’s eyes, and he rubbed his wrist across his nose to keep from sneezing. Then they broke into the open on the other side and Eric could see the extent of Teach’s father’s work. From side to side boulders choked the skinny opening of the steep valley. A man on foot would have no trouble getting through, but Eric doubted that one could lead a pack animal through the jumble, and a car, of course, would be stopped. Coal Creek, a three-foot wide ripple, tumbled down beside the two-lane asphalt road and dove under a pair of the boulders. Dodge walked to the creek’s edge and knelt to take a drink. In a move frighteningly fast for a man his size, Teach reached him and grabbed his wrist. For an instant the tabula was frozen, the hulking, leather-clad savage bent over the slight child. Eric’s breath seized in his chest.

“Don’t, son,” Teach said. “Not till we’re at Highwater.” He released Dodge and turned to Eric and Rabbit. “Let me see your canteens.” After sniffing them disdainfully, he dumped the water on the ground.

“You’ll drink from our supplies till I tell you different.”

Friend or foe? thought Eric. The ribbon of asphalt wound up the valley. The group walked single file now, Teach in the lead, then Eric, the boys, and the rest of Teach’s men, his students as Teach had called them. Students of what? What does Teach, teach? Not too far ahead, maybe a mile, the bush-covered hills gave way to more rugged mountains, and Eric could see that granite, canyon walls swallowed the road and Coal Creek.