Marching As to War: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel (2 page)

“What about the man?” I said.

“That’s her uncle.
Got a bad leg.
He
won’t be going with you. So you’ll need a second man.”

“Riley?”

“Good. Take Riley. Just keep him out of trouble.”

“I will, Sir. But . . . why’d you pick me?”

He smiled. “She asked for you.”

That made me curious. I looked over to the tent, but her
back was to me.

“Sir, what’s all this about?” I said.

“Don’t you worry about
that.
Just get
her there as soon as possible. I’ll have her meet you and Riley at the western
edge of camp.”

I went down the hill and found Price. When I told him the
Captain was sending Riley and me on special duty, he said, “Shit! Go on then,
leave me even more short-handed.”

“Hey Price,” I said, “
wasn’t
my
idea. Take it up with the Captain.”

Price just gave me a hard look and turned away, pissed off
again. I was glad to be shut of him for a few days.

Riley was still sleeping in the morning sun, his hat down
over his face.

“Wake up,” I said, nudging him with a boot. “We got a
special job.”

Riley pushed up his hat and smiled. “Good.
When?”

“Now.”

“Even better.”
And he got to his
feet and stretched like a big cat. I told him where to find the girl. I would
hunt up some extra food and ammo and meet them there.

Weber had overheard.
“The girl?
What’s going on?”

“Taking her to Central.”

“Why? Who the hell is she?”

I just shrugged, gathered up my things, and headed off to
scrounge up some food and ammo. When I was done, I found the three of them at
the edge of camp. A few yards away from the girl and her uncle, Riley stood
waiting. He had a sly smile, like something was funny. I was still looking at
Riley, wondering what he was up to, when I realized the girl was standing not
two feet in front of me. She wasn’t tall, but she stood up straight and looked
me right in the eye. Her hat was off, and I could see her hair looked goddamn
awful, like she had hacked it off in a hurry with a dull knife. The britches
she had on were far too big. The waist was cinched in by an old leather belt
and the legs were rolled way up at the bottom. I wondered who had lent her
those clothes.
Maybe her uncle.
To be honest, she was
kind of funny looking.

“You a saved Christian?” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” I said. Then I felt foolish. The girl was
younger than me. But she had caught me by surprise.

“Keep the Commandments?”

“I do my best,” I said, leaving off the Ma’am.

“How long you been in the militia?”

“Near three years.”

“You read and write?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Good at it?”

“Good enough,” I said, wondering how long this would go on.

“Let’s go,” she said and turned to her uncle, hugged him,
and said something in his ear. He looked about to cry.

To give them a moment, Riley and I walked toward the woods.
He said, “Ma’am?”

“Oh, never mind.” I was a little angry about her questions.

“She did the same to me. Have to say I didn’t do as well on
the one about Commandments. But she didn’t ask me about reading or writing.
Wonder why.”

“Maybe
it’s
plain you’re an
ignorant Hillbilly.”

“Maybe.
But I reckon it’s something
about you.”

Riley led the way through the woods. I brought up the rear.
The girl walked between. After about two hours, we stopped for rest and water.
The trail had been uphill. The girl was breathing hard but keeping up. She
seemed anxious to move on. Then I took point, and we walked for another two
hours before resting. We continued like this throughout the day, talking no
more than what was necessary. The girl, for whatever reason, said nothing.

In the early afternoon, we crested a ridge and began moving
downhill. It was almost dark when we got to where the trail flattened out and
crossed an old blacktop road.

“Let’s camp at the well,” I said. We left the trail, walking
a quarter mile up the road.

Riley and I had been here before. He knew why I liked the
spot. There was an old car close to the well. The car was just a rusting hulk,
a shell of what it had been. But I liked imagining what it had been like to drive
such a car a mile a minute down big broad roads, listening to radio music. My
parents and grandparents, of course, had told me about life before the Plague,
when almost everybody had such a car, when it was easy to get plenty of food,
and when you didn’t have to carry a gun everywhere you went. I had also seen
pictures in old books and magazines of all the nice things people had, the way
they dressed, how happy and well fed everyone looked. Maybe life hadn’t been
that good but I liked to imagine that rusting old car when it was new, shiny,
and full of power. It could have taken me anywhere I wanted to go.

We settled in, filled our canteens, built a fire, and ate.
Riley and I had traveled together so long that it was as easy to be quiet as to
speak. But the girl upset our balance. It isn’t like she did anything. She just
sat staring into the fire, drinking some water, eating jerky. She hadn’t said a
word since morning. Yet her silence, and our questions about her, made us fill
the time with talk.

“Still gonna fix up that old car?” Riley said. It was one of
our running jokes.

“Oh yeah,” I said, playing along, “all I need are a few
parts, some fuel, maybe a coat of paint.”

“And some oil?
Might be kinda rusty after
all these years.”

“Sure, some oil. Thanks for the reminder.”

The girl was looking at me, puzzled. “
You
talking
about that old heap of rust?”

“Just joking,” I said.

She looked like she didn’t get the joke.

“Well,” I said, not sure how to explain. “I’m interested in
things from the time before, like that car. Riley thinks that’s foolish. He
thinks--”

“Gone for good,” he said. “Can’t bring all that back. Best
forget it.”

“Come on,” I said. “They knew so much back then. They could
do so much. They even--”

“I know, I know. They even sent men to the moon. But what
good did that do them?
Didn’t stop the Plague.
Didn’t
stop everything from going to hell after, did it?”

“Yeah, but--”

“The Plague was God’s punishment,” the girl said. “Nothing
could stop that.”

Riley and I looked at each other. Of course, we had heard
people say the Plague was God’s punishment. My Grandpa used to say that.

“Now the way I heard it,” I said, “the old Government had
made the disease as a weapon against its enemies. The disease got loose somehow
and spread.”

My parents told me it was early June when people began
dying--first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. Then the sickness was
everywhere, and nobody bothered to keep count anymore, or even bury the dead.
Bodies rotted where they fell. Everything stopped. The electricity and telephones
went off. The water pipes went dry. Soon there was no fuel for the cars and no
food in the stores. Some of the survivors began to take what they needed, and
then to steal what they wanted. Before long, gangs of men roamed like packs of
wild dogs. No one could stop them. By the end of that summer, the old
government had disappeared just like the electricity and the water. In the Book
of Judges, the Bible says, “In those days there was no king in Israel:
every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” So it was after the
Plague.

“That’s what I heard too,” Riley said.
“An
accident.”

“That’s how it happened,” she said, “but not why.”

“OK. Why?” I said.

“Pride,” she said. “We
was
too
proud of our cars, the moon, and all the rest of it. And in our pride, we
turned from God. So God punished us, humbled us, with the Plague.”

When I was a child, I was always frightened when Grandpa
talked about God this way. So frightened, I could barely breathe. I was
frightened of disease and death, of course, but I was more frightened of a God
who would punish and kill so many people. It made all the talk of God loving and
forgiving us into the biggest lie there could be.

She looked at us without blinking. She was either dead sure
of herself, or plain crazy.
Maybe both.

“Just who the hell are you, anyway?” I said.

“Jane Darcy. I have a message for Charles Winslow. The Lord
has laid it upon me to save our people.”

Riley let out a low whistle. Then he said, “God talks you
often, does he?”

“Not often. But enough.”

Riley leaned back a little and looked over at me, his
eyebrows up. He seemed to be saying,
Your
turn.

“Save us?” I said. “Save us from what?”

“The Government,” she said.
“The Restored
Government of the
United
States of America
.”
She said it slow.

“Just how you gonna do that?”

“Lead our men into battle.”

“Ever been shot at?”

“No.”

“Can you use that rifle?”

“Some.”

I looked over at Riley. He smiled. I turned back to her and
said. “So if you lead our men against the Government army, what then?”

She looked at me as if I had asked if it got dark after the
sun went down. “Then God will give us victory.”

For a long moment, we were silent. The only sounds were the
crackling of the fire and the hum of bugs out in the woods. I looked over at
Riley. He wasn’t smiling anymore. The girl put away her food and canteen. She
lay down, turned from us, and pulled up her blanket. We sat looking at her
back. After a while, Riley stood up and said he would take first watch.

There was nothing for me to do but sleep. But I couldn’t. “The
Lord has laid it upon me,” she had said.
Craziness,
I thought,
pure craziness
. To my way
of thinking, God might want a thing but we had no way of knowing what. He
didn’t tell people things. Not anymore. All we could do was try to remember
what the Bible says, use common sense, and do our best. I would fight the
Government if it came into our mountains. I don’t know if God wanted that or
not. But I would fight all the same.

I gave up trying to sleep and went over to where Riley sat,
keeping watch.

“Sorry, I got you into this,” I said. “I didn’t know she was
crazy.”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he leaned his rifle
against a tree and scratched his beard. I had learned to listen when Riley took
time to think.

“No need to be sorry,” he said. “What she says is sure
enough crazy but . . .”

“But what?”

“But she
don’t
say it in a crazy
way.”

“Not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Up home, I had this cousin on my mama’s side, name of
Billy. We called him Bible Billy.
Always reading Scripture,
praying, and fasting.
Real Jesusy.
Know the
kind?”

“Oh yeah.”

“A few years back, Billy took to what he called Proclaiming
the Word. One week he’d make a fuss saying God didn’t want us to eat meat.
Says so in the Bible, he’d say.
Next week, he started saying
we oughta take up snakes in church. God wanted us to.
Says so
in the Bible, he’d say.”

“Come on,” I said. “He wasn’t serious, was he?”

“Dead serious.
And if you let him,
he’d talk at you all day, maybe all night. He’d argue and preach, recite scriptures.
If that didn’t work--and it never did--he’d wave his big black Bible in your
face and shout. Then next time you saw him he’d be talking up something
completely different that God wanted.
Says so in the Bible,
he’d say.”

“Yeah.
But what’s that got to do
with the girl?”

“Well, like I said, what she says is crazy.”

“No doubt about that. Just how the hell did she talk the
Captain into sending her to Winslow?”

“Maybe
cause
she don’t sound
crazy.”

“How can you not sound crazy when you’re saying something
crazy?”

Riley scratched his beard a little before answering. “Now
Cousin Billy, he not only said crazy things, he always rambled on like somebody
with a bad fever. Seemed he needed to change your mind so bad he just couldn’t
shut up.”

“Like if you believed him that proved he was right.”

“Maybe.
But this girl ain’t
no
Bible Billy. If you hadn’t asked her, she wouldn’t have
said a thing about God and the Government and all.”

“I suppose.”

“Yes, Sir.
She looked right at you
and said it plain. Said like it was true, true whether you believed it or not.
Said it like nothing was ever gonna change her mind.”

“Yeah, but you don’t believe her, do you?”

“Naw.
Maybe she’s just a different
kind of crazy than old cousin Billy. Anyways, we don’t have to figure it out.
We just have to get her to Central Camp.”

“Amen to that. I should get some sleep before my watch.” I
started to walk away.

I heard Riley’s voice behind me. “Of course, maybe God did
send her.” Turning to him, all I could see was his shape in the darkness.

He said, “But I was hoping
God’d
do better by us than a girl in borrowed britches.”

I was on watch at dawn. The girl was also awake, kneeling on
her blanket, praying quietly. I waited until she was done to wake Riley.

We went back to the trail. It ran flat through woods, but
about
noon
, it led out into a wide
meadow, tall with grass. When we reached the middle of the meadow, we heard a
distant humming noise. At first, I thought it was a swarm of bees, but it was
the wrong pitch. Then I saw it in the eastern sky. As high up as a mountaintop,
it looked like a big stiff-winged bird. I realized it was an airplane like in the
old books.

My heart pounded as I listened to the humming get louder. I
watched the airplane pass directly overhead.
What would it be like to be up that high,
I thought,
to move that fast?

The airplane flew west and was soon out of sight over a
ridge.

“What the hell was that?” Riley said.

“An airplane,” I said.

“Be damn hard to hit that with a rifle.”

“I saw this in the Spirit,” the girl said. “The Government
has many airplanes. They will shoot at us, or drop things that explode.
Bombs.”

Damn
, I thought,
how can we fight that?
I had a weak
squirmy feeling deep down inside.
Fear.

Jane looked at us. She didn’t seem frightened of the
Government, its airplanes, or even of bombs. Maybe she didn’t know any better.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Riley and I looked at one another. Neither of us liked being
told what to do, especially by this strange girl. But it was time to go.

We moved into the woods and across small ridges and hills.
About an hour before sunset, I was on point and the ground had flattened again.
We continued until a dirt road cut across our path at a sharp angle. After a
look up and down the road, I crossed and continued, following the trail.

I heard her call out, “We should go this way.” Turning, I
saw she was standing at the junction, pointing up the road. I walked back.

“Why?” I said.
“Why the road?”

“I feel a leading of the Spirit,” she said.

“I think the road curves around and meets the trail later,”
Riley said. “It’ll add half a day, or more.”

I turned to her. “The Captain said you were in a hurry.”

“That’s not important now,” she said. “We should go where
the Spirit leads.”

“There will be houses,” I said. “We might not find a place
to camp. If we’re on the road after dark, somebody might just set their dogs on
us or start shooting.”

“But with luck,” Riley said, “somebody might feed us. Maybe
get to sleep indoors.”

“Sure, if we’re lucky,” I said. “But best to be safe.”

“We best go where the Spirit leads,” she said.

“The Captain told me to get you to Central as quick as I
could,” I said. “And that’s what we’re gonna do.”

She turned and started up the road.

I wanted to grab her by the back of her coat and drag her up
the damn trail. It was bad enough we had to go on this fool’s errand without
listening to her craziness. But when I looked at Riley, he shrugged. It didn’t
matter to him which way we went.

“Damn!” I said and hurried to catch up with her.

After about two miles, I saw a house ahead. I signaled for
us to move slow and be quiet. We needed to be careful. But the girl kept
walking toward the house. She slung her rifle over her shoulder, put her hands
up in the air, and shouted, “Hey there! Hey!”

A big black dog ran from around the far corner of the house,
barking. It got between the girl and the house. I put my rifle on the dog. If
it charged her, I would have to kill it. Dogs at other houses up the road
started barking too.

Jane called out, “Hey there! Hey! My name’s Jane. Can you
help us?
Hey there!”

By now, the girl was only ten yards from the house, and the
dog was still barking like crazy. I tried to keep it in my sights as it jumped
and hopped about, baring its teeth and barking. Then something strange
happened. The girl held her left arm out straight with the palm of her hand
down. The dog stopped barking and looked at her. Then she lowered her arm real
slow, and the dog sat down in the dirt. The other dogs, barking in the
distance, kept at it, but this one sat panting, its tongue hanging out, calm
and friendly.

I brought my rifle down and looked over at Riley. He
shrugged.

The front door opened a crack and then wider. Someone inside
spoke to the girl, and she answered, but I couldn’t make out the words. She
walked closer. More talk. Then she turned and called us to come in. Riley and I
moved in slow. To my surprise, the dog didn’t bark at us. An older man and
woman were standing next to the girl. The woman was talking to her, smiling.
The man, holding a pistol, was watching us, nervous. Then he smiled, put the
pistol in his belt, and said, “Why, you’re George Riley’s boy!”

Riley smiled. “Yes Sir, I sure am. And you’d be Mr. Baker.
Sorry, I didn’t recognize you right off. How’s your boy?” They shook hands and
started talking.

The Bakers took us in and fed us. Riley and Mr. Baker caught
up on family news, while Mrs. Baker and Jane talked as though they were old
friends. I just ate, happy to have a home cooked meal. After dinner, we moved
our chairs over by the fireplace to talk. As we settled down, I could see Mr.
Baker looking curiously at the girl. I suppose he was about to ask why she was
dressed like a man, traveling with Riley and me, and all that. And I was
curious to see what would happen. But Mrs. Baker excused herself saying she had
to look in on Sally, their granddaughter, in the back room. Jane went with her.

Mr. Baker explained that Sally’s mother had taken ill last
winter and died. Just a week ago, the little girl had fallen from a tree and
hit her head. “Now she just lies there,” he said, looking into the fire.
“Reckon she’s gonna die. When my boy comes home, his wife and daughter will
both be gone.”

After a long silence, Riley said, “Mr. Baker, you knew David
Winslow, didn’t you?”

I knew what Riley was doing. Old-timers like Mr. Baker loved
to tell stories about David Winslow and the early days. It would take his mind
off his troubles.

Mr. Baker brightened and said, “I not only knew Winslow, but
I was there when it all began.”

Riley and I knew the story. We had grown up hearing it. We
could tell it.

“Now, I know you boys have heard about the Plague,” Mr.
Baker said, looking at us, “but if you didn’t go through it yourself you just
can’t imagine how bad it was. God help me, I was scared. I pray you two boys
will never be so scared.”

That was how it was with old-timers. They always had to talk
about the Plague. They had to tell you how bad it was even if they had told you
before. It was as if they still couldn’t believe it had happened, still
couldn’t believe they had come through it alive. Riley and I exchanged a
glance. We would just have to let the old man talk it out.

Mr. Baker continued, no longer looking at us. “My wife and I
got out of Waynesville and came up to the mountains, to a town where we both
had kin. Winslow had a church there. While the rest of us
was
acting like scared rabbits, he saw decent people had no choice but to take care
of themselves. When some looters raped and cut up a local girl, Winslow and
some of us men in his congregation tracked them down, and brought them back.”

“We blindfolded them,” Mr. Baker said, still looking into
the fire. “And Reverend Winslow had us take them out to a big tree right on the
main road into town. We had plenty of rope, but none of us knew how to make a
real hangman’s noose, like we’d seen in movies. So we just used slipknots. We
threw the ropes over a stout branch of that tree. Then we took off the
blindfolds, and let those three bastards see what they was gonna get.”

“Only three?”
Riley said. “I’d
heard there
was
five.”

“I’ve heard five, but I’ve also heard four,” I said.

“It was three,” Mr. Baker said. “I was there. Twenty-six
years in July. Remember it like yesterday.”

Mrs. Baker and Jane came back in and took their seats by the
fire. Mr. Baker didn’t seem to notice them. The story was the only thing on his
mind.

“Well, when those three saw the nooses, it was something.
Two of them just pitched a fit, crying, saying they ain’t done a thing, and
all. But there was the one who had real backbone. He didn’t
so
much as blink at the ropes. That sumbitch--”

Mrs. Baker interrupted, “Now Harold, I won’t have that
language in this house.”

Mr. Baker looked like he was about to argue with her, but I
guess he thought better of it and went back to the story. “Anyway, the first
one set to cursing us and yelling about his ‘constitutional rights.’ Said he
wanted a lawyer. Before the Plague that would’ve meant something, but it didn’t
anymore. Well, Winslow put the noose around his neck and gave him a chance to
get right with God, ask forgiveness for his sins. And you know what that sum--
. . . that one did?”

I knew. But Mr. Baker wanted someone to ask. So I said,
“What’d he do?”

“He spit at Winslow and cursed God. Can you imagine? He’s
raped and cut up an innocent girl and he’s sure to burn for eternity, and he
curses God, throws away a last chance at mercy. Can you imagine?”

Mr. Baker sat there shaking his head, still in wonder after
all the years.

“Then we had to hang him. Winslow had us pull on the rope.
Together we lifted him, and he died real slow, choking and kicking. You could
feel it through the rope, jerking in your hands until he got still. Then we
tied off the rope and let him hang there.”

I looked at Jane. She was leaning forward, listening real
close to Mr. Baker.
Nothing squeamish in her.

“I’m here to tell you,” Mr. Baker continued, “that
was
something. I wasn’t much more than a boy.
Then to hang a man.
With these hands.”
He held them
up,
fingers spread wide, and turned them
over. He looked at them like they belonged to a stranger.

“And then you had to do it again,” Jane said.

Mr. Baker looked at her, kind of surprised. For a moment, I
thought he might forget the story and start talking to her.

But he said, “Yeah, and then we did it again.” He looked
back into the fire. “The next one prayed for mercy, all the mercy he could get.
Maybe he thought we’d let him go, if he prayed. I didn’t think he was sorry for
what he’d done, not really. But that’s for God to know. Not me.”

He shook his head, “Anyway, when we hung that one, I thought
my arms would give out. I almost let go. But I didn’t cause nobody else did.”

“And the last man?”
Riley said.
Like I told you, we all knew the story. But it was like in church. Everyone
knows what comes next. You have to do it complete. If you don’t finish, better
not to start.

“The last man,” Mr. Baker said, “didn’t say or do much when
it was his turn. Reckon he’d given up after seeing the other two die. Winslow
put the rope around the man’s neck, and we all got ready to haul him up. But
then, Winslow stopped it and said to the man, ‘I’m letting you go.’ Well, of
course, the man commenced crying and promising never to do anything bad again.
But Winslow just hit him hard across the face and told him, ‘Shut up. This is
not mercy. You’re my messenger. Go tell all the other filth. They come around
here and they’ll die too. You come back, I’ll kill you myself.’”

Then Mr. Baker came to the part that always frightened me
when I was a boy. I suppose the hangings didn’t frighten me as much because I
couldn’t imagine what it was to strangle at the end of a rope. I had never seen
it. Not back then. But I had seen accidents and blood. I had seen what sharp
metal could do to flesh. So I could imagine what Winslow did next, and it
scared me bad.

“So the man would never forget, and so he’d have to explain
it to everyone he met,” Mr. Baker said, “Winslow took a knife and cut a big X
deep in the man’s forehead.”

“Like the mark God put on Cain,” Mrs. Baker said.

“That’s right,” Mr. Baker continued. “Then Winslow let him
go, and he ran down the road, blood pouring down his face. We all thought it
was over and started to go, but Winslow called us back and preached us a
sermon. Right there under those swaying bodies, he preached.”

Mr. Baker turned to his wife. “Mother, where did you put my
Bible? I want to read a scripture to them.”

“Right where you left it,” she said.
“Behind
you, on the table.”
While he was finding it, coming back, and flipping
through the pages, she said, “Lose that head of his if it weren’t attached.”

“Here it is,” he said, “Nehemiah, Chapter 4, Verse 14.” He
cleared his throat and read to us.

And I looked, and rose up, and said unto the nobles,
and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people,
Be
not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and
fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your
houses.

He put down the Bible and said, “Now this was when the Jews
had come back from exile in Babylon
and Nehemiah was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem
against their enemies. Winslow said we
was
just like
those Jews living in the ruins. We had to build a wall against our enemies too.
He told us to remember the Lord and to fight. He said the bodies would hang
there as a warning to others and a reminder to us.”

“And they hung there,” Mrs. Baker said, “until they rotted
right off the ropes. It was a terrible thing, like to make you sick, but we
sure never forgot.”

“That was the beginning,” Mr. Baker said. “The militia,
thinking of ourselves as a people, all the things David Winslow did for us. And
I was there.”