The Archivist (20 page)

A mass of wet dirt and rock debris fills the passage from floor to ceiling. Little Crow and I scramble to the top while Danae manages the lamp. We spend half an hour digging at the top. My clothes are getting soaked from the moist soil, my hands and face are mud-caked, and I do not see any indication that we will break through.

“Hey guys,” Danae calls up to us. “This candle is more than halfway gone. You do have another one, right?”

Little Crow scrambles down and searches through his saddlebag, then swears. “These aren’t the right candles!”

“Are you saying we don’t have another light?” I ask.

“I went to my cousin to get some candles and she told me to take the ones on the table. I must’ve grabbed the wrong ones, because these don’t have any wicks.”

“If this is our last candle, we’ve got a real problem. A landslide must have covered this end,” I tell Little Crow. “It could be five feet deep or five hundred. And even if we broke through right now it would be too small and unstable to get the horses through, let alone Malsum.” Exasperated, I slide down the muddy incline. “We need to go back now.”

“I’m sorry,” Little Crow apologizes. “A month ago my uncle came through, and it was open then.”

Without further discussion, we abandon the blocked passage and head back. We are still a long distance from the entrance when the lamp sputters and goes out. The bright opening far ahead beckons to us like a will-o’-the-wisp as we keep moving.

Little Crow holds onto Malsum’s harness while leading his horse, and Danae stays with his horse while I hang onto her mount. Eventually Malsum leads the blind back out into the cloudy light. I estimate that we have lost several hours, all told.

As soon as we exit the mouth of the tunnel, the three of us collapse against the hillside next to the entrance, where just a light dusting of snow has built up underneath an overhang. We are not just physically tired; we are emotionally spent. I am even too tired to stay annoyed at the delay.

“Do you know another way?” I ask Little Crow while we mentally regroup.

“I know there is a pass nearby, but it’s steep and we’ll have to be careful with the horses. It won’t be an easy climb, but we’ll probably end up making better time to the other side than we would’ve made through the tunnel.”

We backtrack down the rail trail for about a mile. Then, Little Crow turns up a steep fold that qualifies as a valley solely by virtue of the fact that it lies between two peaks. We dismount and lead our mounts up into clouds through a forest of pine trees that are draped with moss and lichen, which provide a canopy over a thin floor of dead needles.

A faint game trail provides the horses some footing up the steep hillside. At one point, the white shape of a bighorn sheep with huge horns appears on the ridge above.

Malsum turns to look back at Little Crow and queries him with a soft whine, but Little Crow clenches his fist and gives a low hiss as he pulls his hand down, indicating that the lioness should stay with us. The massive cat looks back at the sheep, crouches and then roars; it starts out sounding like a powerful, idling diesel engine, and revs up to a high-pitched howl. The ram vanishes, and I do not blame it.

The clouds remain so thick that we cannot see which direction the light comes from, but my stomach tells me that it is a little past noon when we finally climb over a sharp ridge and there is no higher ground ahead of us.

Shortly after we start downward, we emerge from the clouds, and I feel the climate change. It is as though we have crossed through a doorway to a landscape where everything is much drier. Instead of moss hanging everywhere, the hillside is dotted with scattered brush.

Little Crow has proven himself again as a guide, and though the way down is just as steep and treacherous as the other side, the horses maintain steady footing. We make good progress until mid-afternoon, when we pull up to a stop at a wide expanse of fallen rock.

The scree deposit looks like a frozen river of broken stone several hundred feet wide. Maybe it is closer to a waterfall—the slope is more vertical than horizontal. We all dismount, then Danae and I follow Little Crow across the rocky field leading our nervous, nickering horses by the reins.

We have to move carefully, because the rock tends to shift under our feet. About two thirds of the way across, I hear a loud snap from up the hill, followed by the sharp cracks of bouncing stones.

Saffron pulls away as her neigh turns into a scream, then yanks her reins loose from me and races forward. Seemingly in slow motion, a large boulder tumbles toward Danae, followed by a train of displaced, smaller rocks.

I reach Danae and pull her down, then the boulder takes a lucky bounce and diverts behind us along with most of the debris, but another small shower of rocks dislodged by the boulder now cartwheels our way.

Thorn has already taken off; I only have time to dive forward and cover Danae with my body before the bouncing rock fall swarms over us. As I tuck her underneath me, I hear rather than feel a crack against the side of my head… and everything goes black.

Timeless moments come and go.

I am lying under a gray sky. Tree branches pass overhead. A taste of water, cool and refreshing. Such cold as I have never felt before.

Each moment comes, then goes and each time, I fade back into blackness.

Then I awaken from a restless sleep. Before I open my eyes, I feel a bed of dried leaves underneath me, and hear a burning campfire snap a few feet away, along with a gurgling river beyond it. I look up at dark green branches, but when I try to sit up, my left temple explodes with excruciating pain.

On one of my first retrievals I had a tooth extracted—unnecessarily, I should add, and without any painkiller; this is at least as bad. As I drop back, a sharp pain like a sword thrust burns in my side. Vertigo carries me back toward unconsciousness when Danae appears above me.

She props me up slowly and holds a cup of warm soup to my lips. Abruptly, hunger and thirst push the pain aside and I almost choke from trying to swallow without breathing.

“What happened?” I croak. The liquid eases my headache and I see that we are in a small glen.

“You got clobbered upside the head by a rock the size of my fist. Little Crow said it’s a good thing your skull is so hard.”

Danae tries to sound cheerful, but her eyes are bloodshot, and tears have washed small streams across her dusty face. She forces a trembling smile as several more enormous tears roll down her cheeks. I cannot help wincing as she removes a bandage from the side of my head.

“How long was I out?” I ask.

“Five days,” she says, her voice breaking. “We almost lost you. It was pretty iffy for a couple days, until we got you down off the mountain.”

“So we made it to the other side?”

“Yeah. It started snowing right after the accident, but Little Crow was right about it just being light flurries.” Danae applies an herbal compress to my left temple, and then wraps a new bandage on my head carefully as she continues. “You needed a litter, so he made one of those triangle things you hauled the generator with. Saffron pulled it most of the way, but dragging the litter slowed us down quite a bit.”

“Where is Little Crow?”

“He and Malsum are out hunting. They found some sort of tracks that got him quite excited.”

I swallow another cup of soup. Then, without willing it, I am out again. When I wake up, it is dark and I am lying next to a campfire.

“So, you want to build your shelter under a tree with broad leaves, the kind that slope away from the trunk so they funnel the rain away. Then you take the branches and lean them upside down like this…” Little Crow holds up a small forked branch, explaining some basic woodcraft to Danae. This time I manage to sit up on my own.

“What kind of nonsense are you filling her head with?” I interrupt Little Crow.

“The kind that might keep her alive,” Little Crow laughs. He comes over and crouches next to me, then gives me a light clap on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you back in the world of the living. I started thinking you liked it there in the spirit world.”

“They wouldn’t have anything to do with me, so they sent me back,” I respond. “Danae tells me we made it through the mountains.”

“Yes,” he says, and resumes his place by the campfire. “A couple hundred yards from here, the forest gives way to the grasslands. As we came down the slope, I think I saw your town in the distance. I’d say it’s a two-day ride, once you can travel again. But there’s a problem.”

“Really?” Danae and I echo each other. This must be news to her as well.

“Malsum and I tracked a large band of nomads. They’ve been living in this area for at least a year, probably two hundred men and about half that many women, plus a number of children.”

“Disciples?” I ask.

“No!” Little Crow snorts with a laugh. “Southern men. Can’t understand a damn word they say, but they are so clueless I could sneak in their camp and climb into bed with their women, and they wouldn’t be any wiser. Plus they destroy everything, like a swarm of locusts. Their camp is about an hour from here, and they wiped out or drove away most of the game. So they’ve started raiding the farms and ranches out on the plains. We’ll need to watch out for them.”

Based on Little Crow’s description, these are probably Hombres. I have no particular fondness for these wandering bands of predominantly Hispanic nomads that have ravaged the North American Midwest since the Crash, but they are better than Disciples. Mostly.

Ironically, post-Crash America has become remarkably similar to pre-European America. Like the Native American tribes that once roamed the landscape, Hombre bands forage for sustenance and maintain a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. And like the Native American peoples, many Hombre tribes are peaceful and hospitable, even if wary, while other bands are downright vicious. Little Crow is right: we will have to be cautious, because there is no telling which kind of Hombres these are, unless we run into them.

Over the next couple of days, my head pain subsides and I regain my strength, starting with short walks and working up to a brief ride one evening at dusk. Danae dotes over me like I am a sick little kid. I suspect she would make a wonderful mother one day, if she ever decides she wants to be one.

The next morning, Little Crow takes me to see the roaming band he found, but we leave Malsum behind, as much to protect Danae as the Hombres.

Like he said, the group is spread out in a small valley. We crawl through some brush to a ridge that overlooks the encampment, where we watch the Hombres for several hours.

In the first years following the collapse of technology and the ensuing holocaust of an extended nuclear winter, virtually all organized society vanished. There was nothing to stop the onslaught of chaos and anarchy which occurred in the absence of any government, as waves of human migrations swept over the breadbasket of the Americas in a pattern as old as humans have been around. In fact, Australia was the only continent not ravaged by migrations, while Asia is still reeling from continued movements of population.

Before the Crash, corporations took over 98% of North American farming, and made enormous strides in exploiting the majority of farmland on the other continents as well, particularly Africa. Human farming could not approach the efficiency of automated farming with robots, but an unfortunate consequence was that virtually all food production ceased when the robots went berserk, and ravaged both crops and equipment before self-destructing. Aside from scattered Amish communities, few remaining humans were equipped with the knowledge to maintain the farms, let alone the tools to manage even small homesteads.

Hordes of starving humanity swept over the former heartland, picking clean what little they could find until, finally, they turned against each other in cannibalistic horrors that became legend. Scattered remnants survived those first months and years—called the Demon Days—to form the bands of Hombres. One of them is now spread out in the small valley below.

Little Crow is right: they seem to have been here for a while. Long enough to build up a sizable mound of trash in a small ravine. And they are comfortable enough with their position that they have gotten slack with their sentries, when they even have any.

They are Hombres, but I have never heard of them this far north before. The Disciple territory has served as an effective if unintentional buffer to the south, so somehow this band must have been cut off from their southern homeland.

Little Crow and I retreat cautiously back down the ridge and return to our small encampment. Danae has a stew simmering in a small kev-alum Dutch oven that Little Crow brought. The advanced material has the strength and durability of cast iron, with the weight of aluminum. The survivalists certainly were well prepared.

Based on the pile of feathers I find down by the stream, I suspect that Danae’s stew meat is some sort of fowl. While eating, we agree to leave for Georges in the morning. I lie awake much of the night. Maybe I have slept too much in the past few days, but I keep thinking about that generator, and asking myself why the Disciples want it so much. The brilliantly twinkling stars offer no answers.

As soon as the sky begins to lighten, we break camp and head out. The air is cold but the sky is clear, and when the sun finally comes up, it quickly warms us. Little Crow and Malsum lead the way alongside the stream, which has worn a shallow cutout across the plain.

It is only ten feet deep, but wide enough that it forms a sort of roadway for us to follow while we stay out of view of anyone on the plains. Due to the clear skies, we do not worry about flash floods, but now and then Little Crow hops off his horse and scrambles to the top of the small ravine we are following to scan the horizon.

Just before noon, he scurries back down, and warns us that a small party of Hombres is approaching.

“I speak their language a little,” I tell Little Crow as I swing down off my mount. “If we can’t avoid contact, maybe I can warn them off.” Little Crow gives me a skeptical shrug.

I unhitch and load my pistol crossbow while Danae unwraps her sling and picks out a handful of ammo from stones lying on the ground. After tying up our horses, Little Crow instructs Malsum to stay put, and we ease our way up to the top of the ravine. If they catch us at the bottom, it will be like shooting fish in a barrel.