John Birmingham: After America

Pulling on his reins, at last he brought Flossie to a halt on a small mound of waterlogged earth that seemed high enough to have avoided inundation. Three longhorns already stood there, but they moved aside silently for the newcomers. Miguel turned in the saddle and peered back up the valley, into the rain. Even with visibility still reduced, it was possible to see that a hugely destructive force had scoured the wide shallow gorge of animals and plants in a short time. He spied an uprooted tree heading toward him from the south, along with what looked like an old car body. The Lord only knew where that had come from. He had seen no sign of human habitation, new or old, for miles.

"Hello!" he cried out. "Can anyone hear me?"

Of D'Age, who had been so close at one point that he'd been able to reach out and steady his ride, there was no sign. He heard a plaintive barking somewhere behind him and craned around to see Red Dog a few hundred yards away, standing atop a truck-sized boulder, wagging her tail and spinning in circles. She was safe from the flood there, but he saw nothing of the other dog, Blue.

"Hey. Over here!"

A female voice, coming from the north and a little to the east, on the far side of the still-roaring river that had sprang into life.

Miguel found her waving from a tree.

Miss Jessup, and with her Sofia.

His heart felt as though it might burst from his chest.

One of the camp whores appeared from behind them, too, but he could not tell which, so thoroughly bedraggled and mud-covered was she.

"Stay there," he cried back. "Do not move until the water falls or someone comes to help."

Sofia yelled something in reply, but he could not make it out.

Miguel waved in what he could only hope was a reassuring fashion as he spurred on, looking for other survivors. He saw hundreds of dead cattle, some of them jammed up in massive natural dams formed when one or two had caught on a tree trunk, providing a temporary obstacle against which even more had piled up. A few minutes on he found D'Age's body, smashed against a rocky outcrop, the head staved in and resting at a horribly unnatural angle. The young man's eyes were open, staring up into the storm that had killed him. Miguel did not dismount. There was nothing to be done for the dead at this time, whereas the living might be in need of his help.

Another body just a short way farther on turned out to be Jenny, Willem D'Age's fiancee. Miguel recognized her fine red leather riding boots sticking out from the crushing weight of a dead longhorn.

He crossed himself and offered a quick prayer for the souls of the departed. It was a mechanical gesture, something programmed into him by the nuns of his childhood. In his heart he no longer felt as if he was talking to God. There was only a void and a world full of pain and wickedness.

"Miguel… over here…"

He almost didn't hear the faint voice crying out over the raging waters and the still hammering rain, but the crack of a rifle shot drew his attention back across the flood stream to where Adam stood atop another large boulder with a woman. His spirits lifted as he recognized Maive Aronson, but then his mood palled again. He just knew that her husband must be dead. Cooper Aronson, the leader of this small band who had taken him and Sofia in, who had adopted them, really, after Crockett, had been riding on the far side of the herd with his wife. Miguel knew the man well enough to understand that he would not have let himself be separated from her even in the worst of the storm. That he was nowhere to be seen was an ill omen indeed.

Miguel waved and gestured for them to stay put, nodding when Adam signaled that he understood. Shivering in his sodden clothes, the vaquero rode on to survey the extent of the damage.

"All gone," Aronson's wife whimpered. "All of them?"

"I am afraid so," Miguel said, the words like ashes in his throat. It was he who had suggested-insisted-that they head to the northeast to avoid entanglements with the road agents, but in doing so he had doomed the small party to utter destruction.

Four more hours he had ridden that day, up and down the length of the flood, until it receded, leaving a hellish landscape. Dead and broken cattle. Shattered trees. The bodies of the missing, save for Adam's sweetheart, young Miss Gray, who remained unaccounted for. Wrack and ruin.

The herd was scattered to hell and beyond.

His own horses and Blue the cattle dog had perished.

The few surviving souls clustered around a sputtering, rusted iron stove in an old corrugated iron shed on high ground, a good five miles from where they had lost everything. Himself. Sofia. Maive Aronson. Adam and Trudi Jessup. And the camp whore named Marsha, rescued, cleaned up, and dressed in a very damp pair of Adam's jeans and a grossly oversized flannelette shirt and lamb's wool jacket from Miguel's pack.

Just another hour would have seen them clear of the worst effects of the flash flood. Had the storm held off just that brief while longer, they could have laagered up here on this hill, easily high enough to have sheltered all the cattle and the humans who watched over them.

A steady downpour fell outside, and occasional gusts of wind blew miserable drifts of cold rain and even sleet into the shelter, which looked to Miguel to be an outstation for a large ranch. A workbench ran along the back wall, and rusted bridles, and one stiff cracked ancient saddle hung neatly from the rafters. He stoked the oven fire from a supply of hardwood stored neatly under a tarpaulin, well back from the entrance to the shed. As the others warmed themselves and absorbed their shock, he did his best to hang the tarp over the gaping entrance, providing them with a barrier against the weather.

Somebody had once cared well for this small outpost, he could tell, probably camping there overnight after a long trek from the main homestead of this ranch, wherever that might be. He had even discovered a few logs of pitch wood under the canvas sheet, sticky with resin and easy to light even in the damp conditions. Miguel had no idea where they had come from. Such fuel was not common in Texas.

Upon finishing the makeshift canvas wall, he returned to the stove, where the others now sat silently and Red Dog lay curled up in his daughter's lap, as close as possible to the heat. Sofia stroked her with shaking hands and appeared to be staring at something a long, long way off in the distance.

A small burst of orange sparks floated out of the open grille as he tossed in two more logs, old gray hardwood this time. They would burn slowly for hours. Night had fallen outside, and with it came a killing chill. Adam and the women huddled around the warmth, wrapped in old horsehair blankets they had found hanging in the shed. Their own sodden blankets and sleeping rolls were draped from the same drying racks.

Miguel busied himself with food, a few hunks of good meat he had cut from the rump of a longhorn he had found suffering from two broken legs. After putting the animal out of its misery, he'd dressed the kill and returned to the shed in the last failing moments of daylight.

Miss Jessup had been a great help, taking the bloody steaks from him without a qualm and tending to them on the stove. Poor Maive Aronson was beyond talking to anybody and merely sat, shivering and staring into the coals. Sometimes her chest would hitch with sobs, and she would whimper a few words. But mostly she just sat and gazed.

Miguel had tried to apologize, to tell her how dreadfully sorry he was, how this was all his fault, but she had waved him off.

Adam had spoken for her.

"This is nobody's fault, Miguel. Not yours. Not Brother Aronson, who chose this particular path. Not God's. It is not even the fault of those agents we came through here to avoid. These things are… God's design… but not his fault," the young man said, although he did not seem at all convinced.