James Van Pelt - Summer of the Apocalypse

“First one’s easy, but important. Our last Gone Timer died seven years ago, and most of the young ones haven’t heard about Gone Time from someone who’s seen it. So you’re the featured speaker at the town talk-around tonight.”

“Okay.” Eric almost did a skip step but didn’t. The dirt and sand footing was slippery. “You want to hear old Gone Time stories?” Nobody in Littleton listened to him. The kids would gather at the hunters’ feet and wait for each word about finding elk or killing a bear, but when Eric said anything about Gone Time, they ran off, except for Dodge and Rabbit.

Eric looked for them. He spotted the dark-haired Dodge on the black-top beyond the slide. Rabbit walked in the tall grass on the road’s shoulder, as always looking as if he were ready to bolt. “I can do that.”

“Talking might not be that easy. We’ve got a girl up there—name’s Ripple, a kind of, I don’t know, child prodigy—she’s got some strong ideas about Gone Time. You can bet she’ll ask some tough ones. Might have some things to say of her own. She was my best pupil, but she left me behind years ago.”

“I’ll watch myself. What’s the other problem?”

“Getting you into Boulder. The roads aren’t safe.” Teach offered Eric a firm, hard hand and helped him over a slippery patch of gravel.

“You said the Flats weren’t safe either. More radiation?” He stepped thankfully off the uneven surface of the slide onto the flat road. Here and there, portions of the double-yellow line were still visible on the pavement. Been a while since a car had to worry about oncoming traffic here, he thought. The long stretch of highway curved in between pine-covered hills a half-mile away.

“Nope. Federal’s gunmen.” Teach fell into pace beside him. Eric sighed a little to himself; the bigger man visibly shortened his stride to accommodate him. “Your library may or may not be standing, but there’s a guy who calls himself ‘Federal’ or ‘The Federal’ who thinks something’s valuable in Boulder, and he’s got the roads.”

“Really? Guns? I haven’t seen a working one for years.”

Teach grinned at him, his gray-flecked beard fanning out beneath the smile. “Neither had I. My dad kept a rifle, but he was down to just four boxes of ammo. Took it off the wall on his birthday and would fire one shot. Never did tell me why he did that. But the last year, it took six tries to get a shell that’d work, and it sound pathetic; hardly an explosion at all. Mostly smoke. Dad said the shells had gone gunny-bag, said there wasn’t much ammo anyway, so I’d better learn how to make arrows.” Eric stretched his gait a bit; the extra effort felt good. He thought, at least I’m not hobbling. “What kind of guns?”

“Don’t know, but one of my men has one.” He chuckled. “Federal’s boys aren’t all that bright. One of them shot up a couple of deer and didn’t notice Skylar sitting in a tree. Walked right under him, and Skylar dropped a water skin on his head. He got the gun and a good knife off him, and the guy probably woke up an hour later with a sore neck and a lot of explaining to do. But bright or not, they’ve set up camps on the roads into Boulder. Sometimes we hear shooting.”

Teach spat into his hands, rubbed the palms together and wiped them on the front of his shirt. “Lousy hunters, the lot of them. No respect. Take just parts of the meat and leave the carcass in the open. Worst kind of jackals.”

A whistle from farther in the canyon trilled down the scale. A lark, Eric thought. Haven’t heard one like that before.

“Whoops, speak of the devil, as my dad told me,” said Teach. He scanned the slopes on the sides of the road. Eric looked up too. Here, the road snaked smoothly through rounded hills with few trees or boulders. Immediately the rest of the men started climbing. Teach tugged Eric’s arm. “Best place to not be seen is in plain sight.”

Then he taught Eric how to be a rock.

Eric’s back itched. He pressed his face down even harder. A particularly sharp piece of gravel dug into his cheek. A spot of dampness slid toward his ear. I’m bleeding, he thought. Feet tramped steadily on the road below, measured, military. Metal clicked against metal. Gun swivels? he wondered. They were less than a hundred feet off.

Someone said, “Don’t like this duty. Stupid way to spend a day.”

“Shut your hole, private,” rumbled another voice.

“Just talking. No harm in that.”

They passed. Slowly, Eric raised his head for a peek, marveling that he hadn’t been spotted. Marching toward the slide they had just crossed, a line of eight camouflage-dressed soldiers moved down canyon. They wore dark green boots that reached to mid-shin, and on their backs rode small packs, and each carried the same gun with distinctive open-metal stocks, sharply curved banana clips and cone-wrapped snub barrels.

Eric sucked air between his teeth.

“What?” whispered Teach.

“I know those guns.” The men single-filed it to the other side of the slide and out of sight. “They’re army M-16s.”

Firelight illuminated the blackened stone face of the natural amphitheater and cast flickering light on the pines that surrounded the site. Split-log benches, two deep, formed a half circle around the fire. Eric, Teach, Rabbit and Dodge had one bench to themselves, although it might easily have held a half-dozen more. The people of Highwater drifted out of the trees and started taking their places at the fire. Eric hadn’t thought much of the remains of old Nederland, what used to be a mining town and then became a tourist trap in the Gone Times. Most of the buildings were gone, part of the “Naturalization Project” as Teach called it.

“Where’s the town?” Eric had said. A few foundations poked up, and a bank and small office building still stood. After a long afternoon of nervous hiking, convinced that at any second they would run into more of Federal’s patrols, he’d been looking forward to sleeping with a roof over his head on a comfortable mattress.

Teach chuckled. “We’ve been walking through it for the last half mile.” He pointed to a small hill they’d just passed. “Got several families there.”

Eric saw nothing man-made at first, then he picked out the shape of a wall. Unmortared, rounded stones slumped to one side. Partially hidden by a boulder, the house was practically invisible.

“Looks small,” he’d said.

“Much of it’s excavated. Warmer in the winter. Some of the homes have tunnels running back seventy, eighty feet. If they have another kid, they dig out another room.” Teach pointed to a pile of rock chips. Eric had assumed it was mine tailings. “Takes a long time, too. Soil’s thin. Mostly they’re carving into solid mountain.”

More people sat at the fire. They moved silently, soft on their feet. Even the children were quiet, muted. He saw one poke another and a woman put a hand between them. They looked up and she shook her head gently at them.

Teach said, “What’s different about an M-16? You sounded frightened.”

“Not really,” said Eric. He shifted so he sat closer to the fire. After the sun set, the temperature dropped quickly, not at all like the late-June conditions they were probably enjoying in Littleton. “It’s a powerful gun, though. I saw a few in the year of the plague. Some National Guard units had them, and the people who lived got to be real good at hoarding items like that. I read up on them.” Eric noticed that the people around him were listening. He spoke a little louder for their benefit.

“An M-16 is a small calibre weapon, only a 22, but it has a high muzzle velocity… uh, the bullets come out very fast. And the way it’s designed, the bullets don’t fly smoothly like an arrow. They tumble. When the bullet hits, it tears or smashes. I read that one could be shot in, say, the leg, and it still might kill. The shock of the impact would be so great that it could stop the heart.”