Skeletons (15 page)

"The whole town?"

"All except me. They kept me alive, for revenge.”

“The soldiers did this?"

She looked surprised. "Of course not. The skeleton soldiers didn't come until after the massacre. They rounded all the murderers up and took them away to join the army. They have plenty for their army now, I suppose. There was one army boy here yesterday, a human army boy, but he died with the rest of the town.”

“Who did this?"

She pointed off over the rooftops with her broom. "They came from that direction, the graveyard, all at once. All the dead of this town. And they hadn't forgotten."

"Forgotten what?"

She looked up at me. "Why, how to be alive, of course. They hate us, you know."

I began to be impatient with this rambling old woman. I got up to walk away from her, but she made a quick movement and grabbed my arm, holding it tightly.

"If I'd known they hated us, I wouldn't have helped them."

I looked down at her. "What are you saying?"

"Forgive me," she said. Tears had come into her eyes. "Someone must forgive me. You get to be so old, you think you don't want life to end."

I stared down at her, waiting for her to go on.

"I helped them!" she said. "How was I to know they hate all of us, want all of us to be dead! They promised me life, if I told them where all of the hiding places were! They promised that all of the rest would be merely turned into those like themselves! How was I to know that my foolish, mad son, and all the rest, would fight them? How was I to know that!"

She clutched at me with both of her aged hands. "So they were grouped here by the fountain, the whole, living town, and the skeletons killed them once, and then killed them again! And they turned to this!" She let me go, picked up her broom, brushed at the powder with it. "I begged them to kill me, too, but they wouldn't! Now you must kill me!"

She began to brush at the powder, knocking it out of clothing, trying to clean it up. I moved away from her. She followed after, falling into the piles of dust, crawling after me, moaning. "All right, I confess! Those other times, when the Germans came, when the pogroms came, I told them where the hiding places were then, too! I wanted to live! But now I want to
die
!"

She crawled after me like an insect as I moved back away from her. I turned to run off toward the other end of town.

She laughed madly after me. "I know you! I know who you are! I saw your picture on the television! So this is your new world, your world of peace and democracy? Is this what you wanted?"

I ran until I could no longer hear her words, and left the town behind me.

So I had learned that the army of the skeletons had already been through here. Perhaps, then, the areas off the main roads would be safe. I passed the rest of the morning in the woods at the edge of the road, hearing the occasional rumble of trucks.

Seeing another small village back off the road, I made my way toward it.

This one proved to be entirely empty. It was much smaller than the previous town, a few small houses, little more than huts, and a dirt-covered square.

One of the huts proved to be stocked with dry goods, and I made a meal, tying up the rest of what I could carry in a sheet and taking it with me. I checked the rest of the dwellings, seeking a working radio or television, but found none, and quickly moved on.

I decided to keep to the countryside. Veering away from the road, I made my way down into a wooded dell. Here, there was no sound save that of birds and the chatter of squirrels. I stopped momentarily to watch a jay attending her eggs in a nest, remembering all the times that nature had been my solace when the world of men became too much to bear.

This idyll was broken by the sight of a skeletal bird veering across my vision to dart viciously into the jay's nest. Feathers exploded, and there was a high, prematurely ended screech. The dead jay fell to the ground, only to transform into a skeletal presence and fly up to join the other aviary skeleton in pecking the eggs and knocking them from the nest. They stopped their work to regard me, the original bird screeching angrily.

I walked on. A brief shiver ran through me. Now I noticed all the churned-up holes in the forest floor, especially near the boles of trees, where the carcasses of dead animals had been renewed.

With relief I left that sight behind, only to break out of the trees at the bottom of the dell and confront a more fantastic one.

In the clearing, which measured roughly the size of a soccer field, lay the ruins of a Soviet MIG jet. It was a dreamlike thing to see, totally out of place in this tight woodland setting. I was reminded of a child's fairy tale, yet the touch of its cold steel was enough to remind me of its reality.

It must have been a fantastic landing. I traced the shorn tops of trees, trailing away from the rear of the plane, as far as the eye could see. The pilot must have glided along the top of the forest until he was dropped into this spot. The jet had been neatly bent in its middle, leaving it otherwise whole.

Always cautious, I approached the cockpit.

The canopy was up. Ready for anything, I put down my burden of food and hoisted myself up to peer inside. The cockpit was empty.

But there was blood. I took this as neither a good nor a bad sign. It told me only that with all probability a human pilot had landed this plane here. What he might have become . . .

I dropped down, regained my food parcel.

There was matted grass away from the plane, much more of it than would have been caused by one man. Again, with caution, I followed this trail.

It led into the woods, and then to a cleared path, where there were wagon-wheel tracks.

I followed.

I was led deep into the woods. The trees closed over-head like a canopy. A skeletal squirrel regarded me from a tree branch. I braced for it to jump, but it chittered and ran off.

I saw more skeletal animals—a rabbit, and once, far off, what looked like the bony outlines of a fleeing fox.

Two large skeleton birds, which may have been natural enemies, fought each other in the close skies above. The woods were filled with strange cries.

It occurred to me that the only live animal I had seen had been that jay.

There was sound ahead.

As I approached I bound my food pack to my back and scaled a branching tree. I had learned to be quiet, long ago in Cambodia. A skeletal owl I passed did not note my presence.

The higher I climbed, the more the tree arched over the noises below me. I caught sight of a wooden cart through branches. I climbed out higher. Soon I reached a spot that beautifully arched over the scene below.

There was a crudely covered wagon pulled by a small horse. Three men surrounded it. A woman came into the picture, bearing an armload of what looked like edibles from the surrounding forest. One of the men pulled a pot from the wagon, into which the edibles were dropped. In a moment another woman appeared, bearing a water jug. This she emptied into the pot while two of the men began to arrange a fire.

`"This will be a good meal!" one of the men said heartily, in a Russian dialect I could not quite place. All of them, thankfully, were human.

I made myself as comfortable as possible in my tree perch and watched.

In a little while they had a fire going, the pot suspended over it. They were good woodsmen and, from the smell that drifted up to me, good cooks. I thought of the packages of dried crackers tied to my back and realized it had been more than a day since I had eaten a real meal. Hunger came back to me in a wave.

I held it at bay. It had been many years since I had gone hungry, but like many talents it came back easily to me.

I watched them cook, then watched them eat.

It was during the meal that one of the women went into the covered wagon with a plate of food. I heard moans of pain from within. She reemerged and said, in the same strange dialect, "He will eat nothing."

The man with the hearty voice shrugged. 'Then he will die."

Without looking up, but raising his voice, he said, "Perhaps our friend up in the trees would like to eat something!"

They all gazed up at me and laughed. I felt like a pinned spider. At that moment any of them with a weapon could have shot me from the tree. Instead, the hearty one waved his hand and said, "Come down, my friend."

I climbed down from the tree and walked into their clearing.

"You are good, make no mistake about it," the hearty one said. He pinched my shirt. "But you forgot your clothing. You stood out like a child's kite caught in the tree." He shook my hand. "I am Sasha." He turned to the others. The two younger men he introduced as his sons,
Tibor
and Caspian. The women, who stood back, he did not introduce.

"Sit, and eat," he said.

I squatted by the fire. One of the women, who had long black hair, served me. She did not look at me. The other, whose hair was red and even longer, did, from a distance. I felt examined.

"I know him," the second woman said finally.

"
Reesa
, it is not your place to speak."

She shrugged and turned away.

Sasha leaned close to me and said, "You are Peter Sun."

"Yes."

"You are a good man. But not always, eh?"

I hesitated before answering. "No, not always."

He patted me on the back. "You are honest."

I thought of how he could know this much about me. They were not Chinese, were not Cambodian. Those days were many years ago. I felt the others regarding me closely.

"Perhaps I'd better move on," I said, putting my food down. I began to rise.

Sasha put his hand on my shoulder and urged me back down.

"Nonsense," he said. "No one here will hurt you. Isn't that right
Tibor
? Caspian?"

Each of his sons, in turn, nodded, though their eyes were not completely friendly.

The woman with the long red hair regarded me coldly from where she cleaned the pot.

From the wagon came a wail of pain.

"Come with me," Sasha said. "I will prove to you that we mean you no harm."

I walked with him to the wagon.

Inside was a man in a uniform, obviously the pilot from the downed MIG. He lay on his back on a pile of quilts. He was covered with a sheet. He looked to be in a fever, throwing his head from side to side.

Sasha drew back the sheet and pointed to the man's shin. "It was broken, here, when he landed," he said. "It was a spectacular sight to see. He had been shot from the sky by two other MIGs. We took him from the wreckage, and
Reesa
set his fracture." He looked levelly at me. "In the old days we would have drowned him in the nearest pond, because of the uniform he is wearing." He smiled. "But it's amazing what a difference one day can make, and now he is not an enemy, but a friend. We have a bigger enemy, all of us."

"And what about me?"

His face brightened. "You? You were never an enemy, Peter Sun. Or whatever name you are using today.”

“But the way your sons look at me—"

He put his hand on my shoulder. There was a hard kind of sadness in his eyes.

"They don't hate you, my friend. They are in awe of you."

I had seen many things in my days, but never something like this. "I don't understand."

His laugh came back. "You don't have to! You'll know everything in its time."

"All the same I should be moving along."

"No," Sasha said. "I don't think you want to do that. Even the forest, here, is filled with danger now. A man alone would not last long. We know these woods very well, and we're going east, just like you. Besides," he added, again gaining his sad smile, "we know you'll come with us!"

I was about to say something when his hand on my shoulder squeezed and he said, "We have coffee. Come and have some."

After covering the moaning pilot, he led me back to the fire.

I stayed. Strangely, it did not seem a wholly conscious decision on my part. Rarely in my life have I been content within a group; even in the days before the present madness, while planning the rally in Moscow, I had never been fully comfortable with those Jon Roberts had assembled. Often I had felt the need to get away, to be alone.

Yet here I was, part of a strange band, and content to be so. There was a kind of comfort in relying on men and women who knew these woods so well.

The first two days I was with them we met no opposition at all. There were many trails through the forest, and Sasha always picked one that best suited us and kept us heading east. Once, we heard a great commotion far off and determined that a battle was taking place, in, Sasha said, the city of Gorki; but, except for the occasional skeletal rabbit, which Sasha and
Tibor
took great satisfaction in trapping and then slaying to watch it turn to dust, we saw nothing in the way of skeletons.

I saw little of the awe in my companions that Sasha had spoken of. I was treated with deference, perhaps—but it was mixed with what seemed to me like barely veiled contempt. The woman
Reesa
, especially, took great satisfaction in nearly throwing my meals at me. I saw Sasha, in fact, take her aside a couple of times to scold her. But if anything, her dislike of me only grew. Only when I spoke to her myself about her actions, after she had deliberately spilled a plate of excellent vegetable stew on me while handing it to me, did she show a startling reversal of attitude.