The Hero King (12 page)

It’s a good thing I was patient. I needed twenty minutes to catch anything, and then it was just a brief announcement giving the time and a frequency to turn to for news on the hour—fifteen minutes off.

“Timon, you’d better keep watch over the horses. We’re going to wait for the news,” I said. The horses were up out of the cellar and tied along the north side of the house, in what little shade there was early in the afternoon. I sat half out of the van with the door open. I couldn’t have sat all the way inside without taking off my elf swords. Lesh and Aaron stood close. There was a lot of static on the radio. I switched over to the frequency mentioned in the announcement, then turned off the radio to save the car’s battery. But I didn’t have a working watch with me, so I turned the radio back on almost immediately. I was afraid to miss even a single word of the broadcast when it came.

“It is now two p.m. central daylight time,” an anonymous voice said. “Here is the news we have. Yesterday, the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged a considerable number of nuclear warheads
.

“There are no numbers yet, but damage in this country is extensive and there is no way to even begin to estimate casualties. There is no contact of any sort from any of the nation’s thirty largest metropolitan areas
.

“All members of the Reserves and National Guard are immediately activated and directed to take charge of local rescue efforts and emergency requirements. It may be days before any real help can be organized
.

“There are major rural areas of the country that have not been touched by the bombs and missiles. Power and other utility services appear to be spotty everywhere, though
.

“To the best of our knowledge here, the fighting has stopped, but international news is almost impossible to come by. We will be on the air every two hours, dawn to dusk. I’m sorry, we don’t have much solid information yet. There is no telephone service, little power, and only scanty radio contact with other parts of the country. We can’t even guess how long it will be before we have any of those services
.

“We will return to the air at four o’clock.”

“That’s it?” Lesh asked when the voice stopped and the static took over the frequency again.

“That’s it,” I said. “The war was just yesterday.”

“St. Louis is one of the thirty biggest cities, isn’t it?” Aaron asked.

“Easily. Well, no use sitting around. We’d better start riding. We’ve got a long way to go.”

“They said some of the rural areas are okay,” Aaron said.

“Those may be the areas we have to be most careful of.”

    I didn’t have a map, but I had a decent idea of the route we had to take. I figured that the natural hazards that would pose the most trouble were the rivers. No matter how we went, to get from Louisville to St. Louis we would have to cross at least two major rivers, and I wanted to hold it to just two. That meant that we had to head southwest along the Ohio River, and find a place to cross it between the Wabash coming down along the Illinois-Indiana line from the north, and the Cumberland River coming up from the south. Then we had to head across southern Illinois to find a place to cross the Mississippi.

We would look for intact bridges, but I wasn’t ready to hold my breath. Even bridges that hadn’t been too close to a mushroom would have to stand up against debris and raging water being hurled downstream from other areas. Many of the backcountry bridges, and even some of the main-road ones, had all they could do to support their own weight in the best of times.

We started riding.

Aaron surprised me. Although he looked awkward in the saddle, he didn’t have any trouble staying aboard.

“I managed a few lessons in Varay,” he told me.

Obviously, he had absorbed enough.

“You’ll have time to get a lot better before this trek is over,” I told him.

Aaron nodded. Then he said, “You agreed to try this even though you think it’s impossible.”

“It makes looking for a needle in a haystack as easy as finding the ground when somebody kicks your legs out from under you,” I said. “Even if any of them are alive, there’s almost no hope of finding them.”

“If that’s the way you feel, why did you agree? Just to keep your wife from trying?”

“Mostly. But even if I had been willing to take away her rings and keep her under guard to make sure she couldn’t try to find her family for herself, I think I would have welcomed the excuse. Sitting around Basil for who knows how many weeks waiting for the elflord to find something, playing king and trying to act as if there was any point to it, that would have driven me completely out of my skull. I operate close enough to the edge without that.”

“If it helps ease your mind, the search may not be as hopeless as you think,” Aaron said. I turned to look at him.
“If
her parents and her brother are alive, I may be able to home in on them. The brother’s wife and kids, that’s something else, but if we get within—I’m not sure—maybe a hundred miles of the others, I think I’ll be able to guide us the rest of the way.”

“You think?”

“It’s a stretch for me, as they say, but yes, I
think
I’ll be able to. I’m not positive.” He shrugged. “A hundred miles may be a bit far. The distance is all guesswork. But, whatever, the signal should grow stronger as we get closer to them.”

I thought about my first ride to Castle Thyme, back when I was trying to rescue
my
parents, before I knew that Dad was already dead. Parthet had homed in on Mother finally, but at that point we were only about five miles from her. Of course, Parthet had said that he was vaguely aware of her for quite a while before that. Maybe it
was
possible.

“If they’re alive,” I said. “That’s still a long shot.”

When we left the house, we rode due south. I wanted to avoid as much of the Louisville metropolitan area as possible. Grass would be easier on the horses than pavement, and I wasn’t sure how close to a ground zero I wanted to get, even with Aaron’s magic shields. Going south, all the way around Fort Knox, would add miles to an already long trip, but we might have a month to spend if we needed it. Or not.

There was destruction all around. For the first hour or so, I was strangely drawn by the havoc the war had unleashed. The ruins, the broken and smoldering trees, all might have been from the mind of an artist with a particularly vivid—and gruesome—vision of the Apocalypse. There were hills that looked as though they were modeling clay that someone had smashed a fist into. We saw bodies stripped of flesh, little more than bones with just a few shreds of muscle and meat attached.

But after that first hour or so, my mind went numb. I simply couldn’t absorb any more. Blank. There were the four of us and our six horses, the only living creatures around—no people, no dogs or cats, not even any birds. The vultures hadn’t even gathered to pick the bones yet. Maybe there were no vultures left to perform the office.

It must have been six o’clock before we saw anyone at all. By that time, we were well south of the city, about due east from the northern portion of Fort Knox, almost to Highgrove on US 31W. Three men were standing in front of a little country grocery and gas station. If the building hadn’t been badly burned and ready to fall, I would have thought that they were looters, but they couldn’t have gotten much from that wreckage. They were armed. I wasn’t looking for trouble, so we gave them a wide berth. Since we were mounted and they were on foot, that was no trouble.

“We might be safer staying close to the hot spots,” Aaron said. “Less chance of having to fight off people.”

I nudged my horse, Electrum, a little to the right, southwest instead of south, and the others followed my lead.

“You ever get down this way with your folks, Aaron?” I asked.

“Naw. We used to go to Florida or California every year for vacation. I think I had a whole closetful of Mickey Mouse stuff at home. Don’t think I ever touched most of it once we got back from whichever Disney place we’d been to last. But my dad couldn’t get enough of it. He used to say that Mickey was a soul brother.”

It didn’t get much of a laugh.

    We rode until sunset and used the shortened twilight to make camp and eat supper. The sun was a muddy red as it got close to the horizon, and the red seemed to bleed all the way across the western sky.

At a guess, we might have been eight miles from the Federal Gold Depository, fairly close to the edge of the Fort Knox reservation, but there was no way I could be positive of our exact location. We had crossed Interstate 65 well north of where I killed the dragon, and had angled more to the west. I was navigating by dead reckoning, but if I had our location approximately correct, all we had to do then was ride due west until we ran into the Ohio River, somewhere near Shawneetown, Illinois, a few miles downstream from the Wabash. The only population center we would approach in that stretch was Owensboro, with maybe sixty thousand people … before the war.

Aaron put an extra shield around us when we camped, not against radiation, but to make us harder to see if anyone came near, something like the veil Parthet had put over us in eastern Varay to hide us from a dragon. We kindled a fire and prepared supper without magic, though. I still had a large supply of packaged almost-instant camping meals. We would use those as long as possible. Despite the flair Aaron showed for every magic he attempted, I wasn’t eager to find out what a meal conjured up out of nothing but magic might taste like.

We had to treat this as an excursion into enemy territory, just as was my trek north along the Isthmus of Xayber years before. Maybe the dangers weren’t the same, but they could be just as great. People running from the horror of nuclear war couldn’t be expected to observe all the niceties of civilization. To put it mildly. And a lot of civilization hadn’t been very civil even before. Hungry people might covet our horses, or whatever supplies they might be able to take off our dead bodies.

“How much of this will we have?” Lesh asked before I turned in for the night. He was as shaken by the devastation as I was, and he had fewer ties to this world.

“I don’t know. Maybe today was the worst we’ll see, at least until we get close to St. Louis. It’s probably just as bad there. In between, who knows? Remember, the radio said that some rural places were okay.” Relatively okay maybe, but I doubted that anyplace was anything near normal.

“How long do you figure this ride will take?” Aaron asked.

“It must be nearly three hundred miles to St. Louis,” I said. “Something like that, anyway. All things considered, we may be lucky to manage twenty-five miles a day.” I thought that was a properly pessimistic estimate. There was no telling what we would face—in addition to a couple of major rivers.

    I woke a little before dawn, not with my danger sense clanging, but just because I was sleeping lightly. I had spent a disturbed night, part of it apparently in conversation with the recurring dream of the Congregation of Heroes. I still hoped that it was
just
a dream.

I sat up and stretched, feeling troubled, less rested than I should have been. Dreaming about my father, Vara, and all of the other dead men who had been Hero of Varay in turn always did that to me. Timon was on guard. He spotted the movement as I sat up and came toward me. The sky was thickly clouded, but there was still a faint trace of illumination in the night, mostly a touch of red reflected from the base of the cloud cover. I wasn’t sure if the red was a reflection of distant fires or a more direct remnant of the nuclear exchange.

“An eerie night, sire,” Timon whispered. He had waited a moment to speak, probably wondering if I had awakened because I sensed imminent danger. When I didn’t leap to arms or call the others, he assumed that I hadn’t.

“Eerie,” I agreed. “Have you heard any noises?” We had camped fifty yards off a road, back in an area where there were rock outcroppings to hide us from prying eyes—in case Aaron’s magical blanket wasn’t enough. There was a little grass in the lee of the rocks, grass that hadn’t burned when the nuclear explosions seared everything in their path.

“Naught but the wind,” Timon said. “Not even a cricket.”

A long night, I thought. Too long. I stared at the clouds. They must be awful thick, I decided. To the east, there was still no recognizable hint of dawn. I didn’t think nuclear winter was supposed to start with a total blockage of sunlight, just with enough debris held in the air to keep out a significant portion of the light in the frequencies that plants need to grow.

“The days may be dim for a while, Timon,” I whispered. “As if the Titan Mountains had been pulverized into the finest dust and scattered to the winds.” Sunset the night before had been short but fiery. I expected sunrise to be about the same.

If it came.

Lesh yawned and stretched as if he were waking in his own bed. Then he sat up quickly as he remembered where he was. Aaron propped himself up on an elbow as if he had been awake for some time.

“A fire?” Lesh asked softly.

“We might as well,” I said. “I think we’re still too close to ground zero for anyone to be prowling around.” I wondered how many warheads had been targeted against the area. It had to be at least two, maybe three. There was an Army quartermaster depot across the Ohio River in New Albany, as well as all the targets on the Kentucky side. No single bomb could be certain to take out both Fort Knox and the depot, forty-odd miles away.

Lesh had stockpiled enough bits of usable wood the night before, stuff that was charred but hadn’t completely burned. There were tons of it around. Aaron lit the fire and Lesh and Timon went about preparing breakfast.

“I had nightmares,” Lesh said when he had a chance to talk to me a little apart from the others. “I’ve never had nightmares in all my life.”

“You’ve never had such good reason,” I told him. “Nuclear war—that’s more concentrated evil than all the elflords in Fairy rolled into one. If an H-bomb went off over our heads now, maybe even five or six miles straight up, not all the magic in creation could save us.” Lesh looked up at the sky. There was finally a little light coming from the east.