Summer of the Apocalypse

Chapter Fifteen BACK ROADS

Eric was unhappy. Dodge and Rabbit stood in front of him in a gully removed from the road. Farther down, just out of earshot, Teach argued with Ripple, his gestures wide and sweeping. She stood defiantly, arms across her chest, chin thrust out. High and bright, the sun glared off tiny mica specks in the surrounding rocks, while a fresh breeze swept the bitter smell of cordite away. Federal’s blockade was out of sight, but only the curve of the canyon hid them from it.

Eric shaded his eyes and said, “This has to be my last word, boys. As long as we were just hiking, you could come along, but men with guns are too dangerous. Go back to Highwater with Ripple. Teach says she knows a safe way. He and I will go on alone.”

“Grandpa, you’ll need our help,” said Dodge. He jammed his fists on his hips and glared. Eric could see Troy in him, clear as if his son were there. He wanted to hold him, and for a moment, tears quivered beneath the surface. Dodge was younger than Troy was before the disastrous deer hunt that changed everything between them. Troy had never read with him again, had never said again, “I love you, Dad.” He cupped the side of Dodge’s face; the skin felt smooth and warm. His eyes glistened. The brown orbs reflected back the sun. “You will be helping,” said Eric. “I’ll travel better knowing you are safe.” Dodge’s lips set grimly, and his ten-year-old expression looked tragic and adult. He nodded, then turned away. Eric almost ran after him. The thought that Dodge might grow to hate him the same way Troy did made him queasy. Rabbit picked up their backpacks and followed. When Ripple finished her argument with Teach, she joined the boys, and the three of them climbed over a ridge above the road and disappeared.

Teach’s voice rumbled quietly behind him. “They’ll be off the road.” He clasped Eric’s shoulder. “Of course, she’s like a shadow, that one. I don’t expect Federal’s men could catch her in these mountains if she didn’t want to be caught, and from what I’ve seen of Rabbit, he could hold his own too. About the only mortal there is your grandson, and he’s got a touch of quickness himself.” Eric grunted uncomfortably. “They’re just kids. I’m responsible to the boy’s father.”

“Hah,” Teach chuckled. “All you had to do was lie like a rock and Federal’s gunners walked right by.” He pointed after the children. “Keep your eyes to your hind side. My guess is they’ll double back and trail us anyway. We’re gonna have to catch them, then send them on their way.” Eric thought for a second. The breeze rustled in the pines on the other side of the road, carrying the smell of water rolling past sun-hot rocks. “You’re right. They probably will.” His spirits lightened. He thought, you can’t crush a ten-year-old’s spirit. Dodge wouldn’t hate him. Only a teenager can truly hate his parent. “Don’t know what I was thinking. Of course they’ll do that. So, let’s take off. How far do we have to go to get there?”

Teach scratched his chin. “Only a dozen miles if you were a crow. Crow wouldn’t fly as much up and down as we’ll have to walk though.”

Teach took him up the road away from the blockade, then pushed through a screen of creek-willow. Wet ground sucked at Eric’s boots for a few steps until the path climbed steeply up and turned into a series of rock handholds. Within a few yards, it was all Eric could do to keep moving. “Not much…” he gasped, “of this, is there?”

Teach grunted and heaved himself out of sight. He helped Eric to the top, where a long grassy trail paralleled a stretch of man-high rusted iron conduit that reached in both directions around the curve on the mountain.

“Part of old Boulder’s water supply,” said Teach. “The intake is in Barker Reservoir upstream.” A shower of red flakes fell from the pipe when Eric rubbed it. He wiped the red stain onto his pants.

“Does it still work?”

“You’re looking at the longest unbroken section, I think,” said Teach. “Machinery’s all rusted or busted at the high end, and it’s got dozens of ruptures. Whole piece a few hundred yards long is gone a couple of turns from here.”

They began walking. The service path, a pair of ruts at first, grown over with thin mountain grass, deteriorated, and soon they were pushing through thick, pungent brambles. Eric swore and pulled a long thorn from the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb.

Making a path in front of him, Teach continued, “We can follow this to Kassler Lake, about six miles from here. Then we’ll take the maintenance road under the Bear Canyon power line to The National Center for Atmospheric Research. That’ll put us on Boulder’s southwest corner. Unless Federal’s drummed up a whole hell of a lot of men, we shouldn’t have any trouble getting into town. If he’s got all the roads covered, I’d be surprised. Must be fifty of them.”

“How far total did you say?” asked Eric. A mile of this and he’d be done for the day. He was leg-weary. But it was more than that, he knew. It was age. Plain old age. The first few days were fine, but lately, any path uphill strained in his chest and sent creepy tingles into his arms. He’d caught himself walking a couple of times today, lost. Not just where he was, but who he was and why he was there. For a few seconds, the effect had dizzied him. Boulder was gone. His son was gone. It was like he’d been dropped into the world, a blank slate, and it took a shaking of the head, a look at his own wrinkled and liver-spotted hands to bring himself back. It occurred to him, while he watched Teach pushing aside a bush to make his way easier, that he might not finish this trip. He could drop any moment. No one would blame him. His seventy-five years felt like a long, dry desert road. Behind him it reached, fine and distinct, but the wind was blowing fierce and he couldn’t see much before him. Just dunes.

Leda had said something to him once about dunes. They’d been walking away from the Wal-Mart where they had found fresh clothes. The street was hot, and his new shirt collar rubbed a sunburn he hadn’t realized he’d had (following a few feet behind her, watching her walk, he was thinking about the sound of water, hearing the water fall in the shower, soft then loud, a sudden splash as she must have moved beneath it). She said, “Have you ever been to the Great Sand Dunes National Monument?” A moment of shame stopped him from answering. It didn’t feel right to be thinking of her in the shower. It seemed like a tiny betrayal. “Yes,” he said, finally, and she didn’t comment on his pause. “The park ranger there said the dunes marched. I thought it a funny word, ‘marched,’ since they looked so solid, but he said they did and he said they swallowed everything in their way. Then he read us a poem.” She looked back, shyly Eric thought, the color high in her cheeks. “It’s the only poem I’ve ever memorized. Do you want to hear it?” He said, “Sure,” and she recited the poem. Later he had looked it up and memorized it himself. Steeply, the hillside sloped away from them, and to keep from falling, Eric braced his hand in the dirt, careful to avoid the spiny milk-weeds that sprang up everywhere. In places, the aqueduct’s footings hung suspended above the ground that had once held them sturdy. He breathed unevenly, and the poem came back to him, all of it. He hadn’t really thought about it in years. Her hair had dried in shiny dark ringlets that fell to her shoulders, and as he half slid, half walked behind Teach, he remembered her low-throated voice.

“Shelley,” she’d said, and waved her hand at the city where smoke rose in the distance, and the silence sounded like the end of an epitaph.

“Eric,” said Teach, and Eric gasped. His next step would take him over a ledge and a sixty foot drop. Pine tops fell smoothly away to the bottom of the valley, where a glitter revealed an otherwise hidden stream.

“Sorry,” he said, disoriented. Leda’s voice echoed in his head. “I wandered.” He backed away and leaned against a hip-high, gray boulder sticking from the hillside, gnarled as an old knuckle.

“This might be a place to catch the kids,” said Teach. “They’re clever, but the only way through is right here. No cover. We hide ourselves up in those trees and wait awhile, then we can send them home.” He’s taking this rest for me, thought Eric, and the knowledge didn’t make him angry. He sighed thankfully. If I could get off my feet for a few minutes, I’ll feel better. A half hour maybe, and I’ll be strong until sunset.

Teach cleared an area under a crooked pine for them, then dragged a heavily limbed dead-fall in front for cover. His back against the tree, Eric had a perfect view of the way they had come. The conduit curved around the side of the mountain, more clinging to it than resting on it. Below, the mountain steepened into a short cliff, and a face of unbroken rock set at a steep angle rose above. If Troy, Rabbit and Ripple were following them, there would be no place here to hide. Sunlight stretched shadows up the valley. Eric guessed they had only a couple of hours left before they’d need to bed down.

“How far from Kassler Lake now?” said Eric.

Sitting cross-legged on the ground beside him, tightening his boot’s leather lace, Teach answered without looking up. “Another four miles or so. We’ve got a little dirt road to cross in about a mile.” The lace snapped. He dug into his pack, found another length of leather, and began restringing the boot. “Don’t believe we’ll make the lake today at this rate,” he said without rancor. “Not many miles, but it’s all slow going.”

“I’m sorry,” Eric said, and he was about to say something more about brittle bones, but Teach interrupted.

“I like the pace.” Pushing the stiff string through worn holes, Teach kept his head down, then said,

“You’re almost a legend, you know. My boys are half convinced you’re part god or ghost. You’re of cities, television, cars… that stuff.”

Not knowing what to say, Eric rested his head against the pine’s trunk.

After many minutes of silence, a clatter of rocks in the valley startled Eric out of a near doze. I am tired, he thought. He crawled to the edge a few feet away. A line of deer ran up the stream, their hooves striking rocks as they went.

Teach said, “I heard that during the Gone Time you couldn’t see animals unless you went to a zoo.” Eric grinned. He liked the big, friendly man. “I’ll bet you believe a lot of half-truths. Where I come from, I’m constantly straightening people out about it.”

“Now’s a good time. Educate me. Like, start by telling me about being there, things I haven’t heard before.” Teach ruffled his beard, knocking dust into the air.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard.”

“Start with yourself. Gone Time’s a long time gone now. Doesn’t it seem almost like a fairy tale to you?” Teach asked.

Eric thought about Leda’s poem. For a moment, it was if he could have lifted up his hand and touched her, her freshly washed face, her half-smile as she recited the words. “No, not like that,” he said. “In some ways I feel more there now then I did then. Does that make sense?”

“Some,” said Teach. The clatter of deer hooves had faded. Eric strained to hear, but all that was there was the water music of the stream.

“I miss odd parts of the Gone Time,” said Eric. “Contrails, for example.” Teach looked up, interested.

“Jets, 30,000 feet up or even higher left cloud tracks called contrails. On a clear, blue day, the jets wrote their path across the sky. You’d hear them, humming away, and when I was a kid I’d look for where the sound was. Jets were so fast their sound couldn’t keep up, but they’d leave those contrails so you could find them, a tiny pin of silver reflection pulling that long cloud. I miss that.”

“Yeah,” Teach said. “That would be something.”

“Chocolate bars.” Eric shifted, felt beneath him and found a pine cone under his thigh. Its rough surface was tacky with sap on one side. He flicked it away. “I remember walking into a store and standing in the candy aisle, the smell of chocolate heavy as a quilt. You’d peel away the aluminum, and there it was, dull, dark and delicious. Umm, the thought’s enough.”

“My dad complained he missed cigarettes.”

Eric hardly heard him. He half closed his eyes. “On Christmas, they used to string all the trees on Littleton Boulevard with tiny, white lights. When it snowed and those lights were on, it was like a postcard.” He remembered walking down the street one bitter night when he was five or six, holding the little finger on his dad’s glove. Snow squeaked underfoot, and lights filled the trees. Breath froze in his nose.

“That doesn’t sound bad,” said Teach. “Ripple’s hard on the Gone Time. I hope her version of it isn’t the one that survives.”

“Maybe it will be like memories,” said Eric. “We’ll remember the good stuff and forget the bad. I’m not an apologist for the evils Ripple talked about. She’s right in some ways, but I think we’re losing more by throwing technology and science and knowledge away than we gain by becoming… becoming… barbarians.”

Teach stood up and tested the newly strung boot. “I don’t feel like a barbarian.” With his rough leather vest, short skirt and homemade pack, with his full beard and long hair, Teach looked barbarian to Eric.

“But you know what I’m talking about,” said Eric. “You’ve read about the Gone Time and the things we did. The cities… well, that’s a part, but a small one. The books hold what the Gone Time really has to offer: the science, the mathematics, the poetry. When we get to Boulder, that’s what we’ll find, the knowledge to beat whatever makes my people sick. That’s what I’ve tried to instill in Rabbit and Dodge; it’s what my son never learned, that knowledge and knowing where to go to get it is the difference between man and animal. No matter how far back we slide, as long as there are books, we have a chance.”

He thought Teach looked embarrassed. Eric sat up a little straighter. His legs really did feel a bit better now. “I’m sorry,” said Eric. “I know I’m preaching to the choir. You’ve read books too.” Teach didn’t speak. He walked around the screen of dead pine and peered up the valley. He slapped his hand against his leg. “Dang, I’ve an idea we’ve been had,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m gonna check something. Stay here and I’ll be back in a half hour or so.” He grabbed a piece of jerky from his pack. “One for the road, as my dad would say.” He stepped around the screen again, then paused. He said, “Oh, Eric.”

“Yes.”

After Teach spoke, Eric sat dumbfounded while the big man sprinted to the steep part of the mountain beneath the aqueduct, then vanished around the corner in less than a minute, covering the same ground that had taken Eric fifteen minutes to traverse.

What Teach had said was, “I can’t read. I never learned.

Eric sputtered, then said, “But I thought… I mean… Who taught Ripple?”

“Taught herself,” said Teach. “She couldn’t have been more’n six or seven years old either. Amazing, huh?”

While the afternoon wore on, and the sun dropped closer to the horizon, Eric thought about teaching six-year-old Troy to read. For hours they sat at the kitchen table, drapes drawn wide, a pile of primers and paper at one end.

“Can I say the alphabet again, Dad?” Troy had asked, and he smiled when Eric nodded. Troy’s forehead knitted into a series of wrinkles as he struggled with the letters after “P.”

“What’s this word, son?” Eric said and pointed at C-A-T under a cartoon picture with goofy eyes.

“Cat, Dad. Everybody knows that.”

“Did you read the word, or do you know the picture?”

“Read it.”

Eric found the D-O-G flash-card, covered the picture and asked, “And what’s this word?”

“Cat,” said Troy.

Eric sighed and slumped in his chair.

“Fish?” said Troy hopefully.

Eric shook his head no.

“Why don’t we go scavenging, Dad? I’m tired of reading.”

Out the window, Eric saw the long, prairie grass waving in the breeze. The day before they’d dug through the rubble of a Radio Shack, looking for parts. The only useful item was an intercom kit. All afternoon they’d worked together assembling it. Troy bubbled over each transistor slipping into place, and the intricacy of the wire patterns. Just before they’d finished, Eric had realized that it ran on batteries, which they didn’t have, but Troy didn’t seem to care. He thought it was an art project.

“Yeah,” Eric said. “Maybe we can find a Hooked on Phonics book.” Footsteps woke Eric. When he rolled to see who was coming, deepening purple above, orange streaks on the horizon, and the creaks in his back and neck told him that he’d slept against the tree for some time.

“Ouch,” he said, rubbing his neck.

Teach squatted next to his pack. “Good thing I wasn’t a bear. You looked a lot like dead meat to me.”

“What’d you find out? Are they following us?” asked Eric.

Teach pulled gently on his beard. “We’re gonna have to leave at first light. From the looks of their trail, I was right about them not heading to Highwater.”

Eric smiled. He could imagine Dodge and Rabbit putting their heads together to do what they’d done days ago, follow their grandfather.

“Did you send them back?” He thought, they are good boys. Once caught, they’d do what they were told. Willful kids though; you have to catch them first.

Teach shut his eyes and sighed deeply. “I trailed them until I ran out of light. They’re not behind us. They doubled back, skirted the blockade and are headed to Boulder on their own.” Eric’s hands felt suddenly clammy.

Teach said, “They’re moving into more danger than they can possibly know.”