The Memories of Milo Morai

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Milo and Wahrn turned the skinned, gutted and partially butchered deer carcass over to the women, set about first removing the useful hooves and teeth, cracked open the skull and spooped out the brains for use in tanning the hide, then pegged out the hide itself for fleshing and scraping. Everything done, the two men strolled down to the shallows at the edge of the shrinking lake to lave their bodies of the blood and sweat and squashed insects.

As they washed themselves, standing waist-deep in the sun-warmed water, ignoring the brushings and nippings of fingerling fish busy at feeding on the blood and salt sweat on their calves and thighs, Wahrn beamed, “So, please tell me, Milo, what ever happened to this unfortunate officer, this Colonel Crippen? Did he and his men all die of the strange disease, too?”

Milo shook his dripping head. “Not during the weeks I stayed with them, Wahrn . . . though what happened to him and them after that is anybody’s guess, of course. They were the epitome of a hard-luck bunch, but I hope they all got back to Sacramento alive and in one piece.

“I kept them near to where I’d found them, though I did move to a better campsite. Those mountains were aswarm with rabbits that year, so I rigged dozens of rabbit snares, showed them all how to build shelters and bough beds, collected edible wild plants and showed them how to heat rocks in a fire, then use them to simmer a meat-and-plant stew in a green hide. I found a frigid spring-fed stream nearby and badgered them all into washing themselves and their clothing, then did what little I could to aid them in repairing it.

“After a week or so of hot, regular meals, sleep and regular, controlled physical exercise, I marched them slowly, in short stages, south, down to a tiny village I’d swung wide of on my way up into the mountains. The few people still left there were all dead, and animals had been at most of the bodies, so many were by then little more than skeletons, ill concealed by flapping rags. That’s how fast the Great Dyings ran their deadly course, Wahrn; only a week or so before, that village had been active, with armed men standing guard over it, yet bare days later, it was a village of only the dead.

“Dave Crippen made some noises about burials, but I pointed out that his men still might be a little wary of such onerous details and that, in any case, Nature was well on the way to recycling the corpses. The colonel was also stubbornly insistent on contacting his superiors in Sacramento, but all of the village telephones proved to be dead and we could find no way of powering such few radio transmitters as we came across.

“However, the village, small as it was, did provide us with a fair amount of food, some firearms—mostly shotguns, hunting rifles and pistols, though with two or three military-type weapons, as well—modest quantities of ammunition, clothing and boots, tools and utensils, as well as enough rugged vehicles to mount us all and gas to fuel them.

“I headed us south and west, back to the house hidden in the blind canyon. I severely cautioned them all, then led the convoy through my outer defenses, noting as I did so that these defenses had obviously claimed more victims since I had left. But the house, when at last we got to it, proved inviolate; no one had had what it took to get that far in. The blackened, rusting vehicles and the rotted human remnants in my man-traps had vastly impressed the covey of State Military Reserves.

“When we passed one particularly gruesome example of the fate of trespassers on posted land, Crippen gulped and asked,“You built all these things, Mr. Moray? Where in God’s name did you learn to do things this brutal? I’ve figured out days ago that you were ex-military, but I didn’t know that even the Marine Corps would teach such dirty tricks as this to be used in warfare.”

“You learn to do what you have to do to keep your own men alive and kill or incapacitate as many as possible of the enemy in any damned way you can, Crippen,” Milo replied, adding, “I was never a Marine, though I was a U.S. Army Ranger officer . . . among other things.”

When they finally made it out of the brushy woods and into the clearing and the house was visible, Crippen perked up out of his dark brooding and said, “Why, I know this place. I was once at a small conclave of State Military Reserve officers here. I didn’t recognize the approach because the other time I came in by chopper, from up north. This is General Jerry Noonan’s place. You say everybody was dead when you first got here, Mr. Moray?”

“Jerry Noonan?” asked Milo. “Isn’t he that retired type who has been asshole-deep in politics these last few years? I’ve read about him, I think. But where the hell would a retired Army officer get the kind of loot it must have taken to build and outfit a place like this?”

“From his wife,-Mr. Moray—his second wife was one of the heiresses to the Stiles fortune. But I don’t think that money was the only reason he married her, despite rumors to the contrary; yes, she was a bit older than he was, but they seemed quite happy and devoted to each other nonetheless.”

Milo tried hard to repress a shudder as an icy chill ran down the full length of his spine. Which one? Which of the little girls he had adopted, fathered, raised as his own, was that aging woman he had buried here?

Exercising iron self-control, he asked, “You met her, then, Colonel Crippen? Do you recall her Christian name?”

Crippen wrinkled his brows, then responded, “Why ... I believe it was some French name . . . ahh, Gabrielle, I think. Yes, that was it, Gabrielle Stiles Noonan. Why?”

“Oh, no particular reason, just curiosity,” said Milo, but thinking of little Gaby as she had been when first he saw her, riding in a dog cart at the farm in Loudon County, Virginia, more than fifty years ago. And he remembered her as a gangly thirteen-year-old with an achingly beautiful face, competently handling the reins of the big Thoroughbred she sat so easily, greeting him when he returned from the Korean War.

Her voice still had its little-girl quality, but her words had been those of an adult woman, spoken in the pure, accentless French of her mother. “You, monsieur, are a pure and unadulterated man, and if Mama still did not live, I would make you mine, immediately. Please promise me that when the time comes for me to marry, you will find for me a brave, gentle and tender officer just like you. I so wish that you really were my father by blood, monsieur, for a son like you would be my dearest pride and treasure.”

Gaby’s first husband, a young USMA graduate, had died in Milo’s arms, early on in the country’s involvement in the Vietnam quagmire. That was when she and her brother had gotten involved in the leftist-controlled antiwar movement. Gaby, thankfully, had possessed intelligence, maturity and strength of will to get out of the thing before it irrevocably warped her mind as it did so many others. Her brother, on the other hand—and despite Milo’s attempt to drag him out of it, away from bad companions—had sunk into violently radical Marxism and perversion and had finally taken to the drugs that ended his life so prematurely.

When the Army had brought Milo back from South-east Asia in the early 1970s and hurriedly retired him because, according to the Department of Defense records, he was far too old a man to remain on the active list, he had gotten involved with various foreign governments that proved more than willing to hire the services of an officer with such impressive credentials, regardless of his official age. Spending, as he had been, more and more time out of the United States and never knowing just what fate the future might hold for a man in such perilous places and situations, he had deposited a largish chunk of fluid assets in a Swiss bank account for personal use and possible emergencies, then instructed the law firm which had handled his and the estate affairs since the mid- 1940s to draw up a new document dividing the Stiles fortune and properties among his three living adoptive children—Gaby, Melusine, twin of by then dead Michel, and Per, by then in hospital getting used to a replacement for the leg a landmine had taken.

Once he had signed the documents, made the transfers official, he had taken advantage of certain aspects of his new employment to drop out of sight of all who had known him in his earlier life, even “his” children. He found it quite a relief to thus change identities, for all that the people among whom he now moved never, ever asked questions the answers to which might be embarrassing, lest someone so question the interrogator; not that Milo could have given an intelligent answer to many of the inconsistencies, anyway. He, least of all, understood just why, at an estimated minimum seventy years of age, he looked no whit different from the Milo Moray who had enlisted in the United States Army years before the Second World War.

In the company of his family and those who had known him for long periods of time, his unchanged, unchanging physical appearance had been an embarrassment, to say the least. Here, in this new life, his peers simply assumed that he had had skilled plastic surgery at the same time he had changed his name and obtained new, forged passports and documents, for not a few of them had done one or more of these very things at some time or some place in their checkered pasts.

For some years, until the venerable attorney died of old age and a bad heart, Milo had been able to keep track of the three kids and their ups and downs of life through John Bannister. Per had taught at West Point, briefly, gone out to Montana to personally check on some family holdings there and ended up marrying and settling down in that state; he had taught him-self to ride horses again, sired several children and eventually, trading shrewdly on his war record and fortune, entered quite successfully into first state, then national politics.

Poor little Melusine had had a rougher time of it. Her judgment with regard to people had proved almost as faulty as had been that of her deceased twin and had resulted in a succession of unhappy, mercifully short marriages to handsome but shallow men who had all developed to be far more interested in her wealth, the status and material objects it could buy, than in her. Finally, disillusioned and teetering on the verge of insanity, sodden with alcohol and addicted to various drugs, the miserable woman had left a hospital to live in the adjacent convent of the nursing order. After some years, she took holy orders and signed her third of the patrimony over to the church. Bannister had assured Milo that her letters and the single, brief meeting he had had with her had convinced him that Melusine Moray had at last found happiness and true contentment. At the turn of events, Milo had not been able but to wonder just what her true father’s opinion would have been; though deeply religious in his own way, General Jethro Stiles’ opinions of organized religions in general had been unprintable in any known language.

Gaby had remarried at about the time Milo had been forcibly repatriated and pensioned off. He had taken part in the wedding ceremony, had again given her away to a young paraplegic a couple of years her senior, a man who had been a classmate of her late husband’s and who had, like him, been one of Milo’s junior officers in Vietnam. Thanks to modern medical advances, Gaby had had two children by her second husband before he died by his own hand in one of his periodic fits of despondency, whereupon she had settled down to making a full-time job of raising her children.

But after old Bannister had died, Milo had grad-ually lost any really personal contact with the survivors of his onetime family, which explained why he had not even known of his Gaby’s marriage to the vital, charismatic former-general, Noonan, who had among other things been frequently mentioned as a prime contender for the then-in-power party’s next presidential campaign, which now, of course, would never take place.

In the huge, sprawling home that had been Noonan’s, even Crippen and his men were not unduly crowded, and although all of the frozen and refrigerated foods were long since spoiled and had to be buried, there still were enough supplies of canned and otherwise preserved foods to keep them adequately, with venison and other game brought in by Milo, Master Sergeant Lyon and two or three other experienced hunters.

After three days of hourly broadcasts, they finally got a response from the state capital at Sacramento. Crippen had had to go to great lengths and into meticulous and personal detail before he was able to achieve belief as to his identity. Since no one had seen him and his force or radioed of his whereabouts since his column had left Barstow, he and all of them had been assumed dead either of the plagues or of hostile action.

Once they were certain that it really was Colonel Crippen, however, the governor himself began to transmit, sounding very tired and more than a little distraught. “David? It’s truly you, then? How many men are with you?That few, huh? Well, even that many is better than none at all, I suppose. How far from here are you?At Noonan’s place? How the hell did you . . . never mind. Have you got transport? Good, get up here just as fast as you can with all the arms you can scrape up and plenty of ammo. We’re in terrible need of more disciplined troops; half the city is dead or dying and the other half is starving and on the verge of riot and rebellion. . . . No, I won’t order you, David. I know that you and those with you must have gone through pure hell already. But I plead with you, rather. You’re needed desperately, colonel . . . no, I guessit’s general, now, since you’re the highest-ranking State Military Reserve officer left alive.”

Two days later, while helping to make certain that all of the vehicles were in tip-top condition, Milo accidentally found General Noonan’s hidden armory of what had, until recently, been completely illegal weapons and equipment. Strong and strictly enforced federal and state and local laws had forbidden the ownership by private citizens of such things as hand-held surface-to-air missiles, anti-armor rockets, light mortars, grenade launchers and automatic firearms, not to mention grenades, other military explosives and chemical-warfare agents. Stacked along one side of the rock-walled room was enough small-arms ammunition to start a small war.

When at last they all departed, in vehicles now altered to provide somewhat less comfort but much more protection, they were become far more formidable a force than anything just then moving through the all but deserted landscape of the once-populous State of California. Such few individuals and small groups as they saw along Route 40 took but a single look at the bristling rifles and automatics and afforded the column a wide—a very wide—berth.

At one point, where three semis parked athwart the road served as a roadblock, a single rocket blasting the centermost trailer apart served as a more than sufficient reason for the scruffy types manning the point to recall urgent business . . . elsewhere. After the last of Crippen’s vehicles had cleared the obstruction, Milo drove the three tractors into roadside ditches and set them all afire. The three-wheeled trail bike that he found there he put to immediate and personal use.

They smelled Barstow long before they got within sight of the place. There were corpses everywhere anyone looked, and the shots they fired off in the hopes of bringing anyone still living out onto the streets only served to send overfed buzzards scurrying and flapping about over their grisly interrupted repasts. There were flies everywhere, thick, metallic-sheened swarms of them, and the rotting, rat-gnawed bodies still on the perimeter defenses housed clumps of fat, writhing, wriggling maggots, shiny white or yellow.

The Crippen column wasted no more time, only seeking out enough gas to top off their tanks, retrieving a few weapons and some ammunition, then heading west on Route 58 toward Bakersfield and points north.

Milo determined that Edwards Air Force Base must still be at least partially manned. He never saw anyone or got any answer to his shouts, but he was fired on from at least three points of the fortified main gate. Crippen readily agreed to bypass Edwards.

Bakersfield, when they got there, was Barstow on a far larger scale, sans a perimeter worthy of the name, but including signs of fires, combats and large-scale lootings. It, like Barstow, stank too badly to contemplate staying any longer than absolutely necessary, so they fueled and left the town and its current occupants to Nature’s undertakers.

That night, in their well-guarded camp at what had been a restarea, Milo announced his intention to Crippen. “You’ll make it now, general, if anybody can and if you pay attention to Sergeant Weeks. I’ll be leaving you in the morning, west, into the mountains, taking only what I originally had, plus that trail bike, some spare gas and water and two or three days’ worth of food.”

Crippen snorted. “You’re loco, Moray, you know that? Just how long do you think you’ll last alone? Who’ll care for you if you get hurt or sick?

“Besides, a man like you would be invaluable up in Sacramento now. I’ll probably make a lousy, piss-poor general officer, but you, now, you’d make a fine one.”

“No, thank you, Crippen,” replied Milo. “I’ve been a general, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you’ll find, just much more work and a crushing load of responsibilities and . . .”

Just then, Master Sergeant Weeks dropped his coffee cup and, wide-eyed, exclaimed,“Now I recollect you, sir! Gen’rul, thishere is nobody else but the man the ARVNs calledle saint diabolique. Back when he was a very unofficial U.S. Army observer with the French, he escaped someway from Dien Bien Phu, th’ough the whole fucking Vietminh army and ever’thin’. He come back as a U.S. army adviser and then stayed there for over ten years, off and on, a whole helluva lot of it up in them damn mountains with the Montagnards, and they purely worshiped him, too, they claimed he was a god come down to earth in the shape of a man, that he could grow back any part he lost like a fence lizard grows back a tail and that couldn’ nuthin kill him. I know, gen’rul! I never did see him ’cept at a distance, but I talked to ’Nards and ARVNs as had done knowed him.”

Turning to Milo, the sergeant demanded with respect, “Why don’t you look your age, sir? You’re a whole lot older’n I am.”

Milo had not fielded such a question in a long time, but he still remembered how. “I have always prided myself in keeping fit, sergeant. And did you ever hear of plastic surgery?”

They talked on into the dark night, but Crippen, knowing within himself that he would not be able to change Milo’s mind, made weaker and increasingly weaker attempts to dissuade his savior’s departure, then ceased entirely. The last couple of hours before all retired for what was left of the night were filled with Milo’s reminiscences and anecdotes from his years as a mercenary officer in Africa, the Middle East and various parts of Central and South America.

When the Crippen column headed north, Milo revisited the Bakersfield area long enough to loot a couple of good bows, arrows and accessories and some odds and ends of general camping equipment, then made his way up into the mountains again, seeking to breathe air clean of the cloying stench of decomposing humanity.

Something over a month later, he came down, found a jeeplike vehicle and drove directly to the Noonan place with its generator and powerful short-wave radio. After cleaning the main refrigerator-freezer, he stalked and shot a fat, sizable doe, gathered wild fruits and vegetables from the woods and settled down for a while with the radio.

But it was days before he raised an answering set. Sacramento was unresponsive, by day or by night, and he tried both, at different times each day. It was at night, nearly midnight, that he at last got an answer, such as it was.

“Where are you located, unidentified station? Are you private, governmental or commercial, or are you military?”

“You want to know one hell of a lot without divulging anything yourself,” Milo replied bluntly. “But in answer, I’m a private station a bit northeast of what used to be San Diego, California. Now, who are you and where are you?”

“I am . . . we are, rather, we were a scientific research facility, located in . . . Florida, and that’s all you need to know. Have you been able to raise Washington, D.C.?”

Milo answered. “I haven’t tried ... at least, not recently. It was nuked, you know, one of the first urban areas hit, and hit by more than just one missile, I’ve been told. If you’re some kind of hush-hush government outfit, how come you didn’t know that?”

“What we are or were and our sponsorship and funding is none of your concern,” was the somewhat haughty reply. “Who, exactly, are you? How many of you are there?”

“There’s just me, buster. I’m a retired Army officer, speaking to you from the home of the late General Jerry Noonan. Now tell me a bit more about you. What part of Florida are you in? Did as many die off there as did here?” asked Milo, not really expecting a straight answer from the fanatically security-conscious type on the other radio.

“The Cent . . . ahh, we are in north-central Florida,” said the disembodied voice, somewhat hesitantly. “How many died out there?”

“What I’ve seen of California is wall-to-wall corpses, old and young, male and female, of every race and color,” Milo stated baldly. “I’d guesstimate that at least, at least ninety percent of the former population of this state is dead of disease, starvation, violence or just plain fear. What percentage died back east, there?”

After a longish pause, the voice said stiffly, “That is classified information.”

Exasperatedly, Milo snapped, “Buster, you take your fucking stupid, now-needless and silly security shit and shove it way up your arse. Hear me? Either that or jam it up whoever has been prompting you there. There’s not all that much gasoline left for the generator powering this radio, and I’ll be fucked if I’m going to waste airtime on a turd-brained fuck-face and his peckerhead stooge. End of transmission!”

His second contact, later that same night, was an anomaly and a one-in-a-million chance both rolled into one. He received and replied to a South African military field-radio transmission and found himself, to his surprise and pleasure, talking to an old friend from his own days in Africa, an officer named Meileneaux.

“Jan, is that you? How the hell are you, you old reprobate? I’d’ve thought they’d’ve hung or shot you, by now.”

“And just who the bloody hell are you, Yank? Get to hell off this band immediately, or I’ll have you shot. This is a military transmission, an urgent military transmission. Hear me?”

“I don’t think you can shoot that far, Jan. I’m near the western coast of North America . This is Milo, Milo Moray, Jan.” Milo chuckled into the microphone.

“Milo? It’s really you, Milo? Damn, it’s good to hear your voice again, though I’d much rather see you—we could certainly use you, just now. The kaffirs are dying like so many flies, both the good ones and the bad, the coloreds and a good many of the Asians, too. But this far, damn-all of us. I’ve just accepted the unconditional surrender of the Cuban forces for all of Angola—they were damned near all that were left alive in the whole bloody country. Their senior commander, one Jaime Villalobos something-or-other, seems bloody well anxious to sign his lot up with us, and Pretoria will likely accept him and them. If we stay well and the damned pitiful kaffirs keep dying, we’ll end owning most of the damned continent we . . .

Then, heartbreakingly, the voice dissolved into static and Milo never again was able to raise response from that wavelength, try as he might and did.

The next morning, he monitored a governmental broadcast from Sao Paulo, Brazil. The entirety of the broadcast, done in both the Brazilian dialect of Portuguese and in New World Spanish, was a grim warning that Brazil definitely possessed nuclear cap-ability, owned appropriate means of delivery and would not hesitate to nuke the population centers and military installations of anyone who violated Brazilian borders “during the current state of emergency.” Milo could raise no reply to any of his attempts to transmit to Sao Paulo . However, during the course of one such attempt, he picked up an answer from a totally unexpected quarter.

Vasili Vlasov identified himself as captain of a factory ship which also was flagship of a present mini-armada of his ship and three trawlers, proceeding from the South Pacific to Vladivostok. His command of English was marginal, at best, but Milo spoke excellent Russian, fortunately.

He had tried to put in at a Chilean port and been fired upon; one of his original four trawlers had been hit and sunk there, and another had been damaged by shellfire.

“The bastards accused me and the Motherland of having started this entire insanity, of initiating the nuclear exchanges and of having filled the air of all the world with poisons and deadly germs. Why did the United States of America do this atrocity to Russia and the rest of our world? Can you tell me that?”

Milo sighed. “Captain Vlasov, a couple of months back, I sent transmissions to, received transmissions from and/or monitored transmissions from most parts of the world. The consensus then was that neither your country nor mine started the short, deadly fracas . . . we just finished it and ourselves, and quite possibly all of our species, too.”

Vlasov’s heavy sigh came over the airwaves. “It’s as I suspected, Tovarich Moray, just as I suspected all along, then, I suppose. Who do you think did start it?”

“The majority of the people I listened to or talked to, a couple of months or so back, before the really large-scale dyings started, suspected three instigators—Libya, Israel, and India, in just that order of probability.”

“Most likely those damned aggressive, land-hungry, warmongering, racist Israelis, then,” rumbled Vlasov. “It was many times said that they would not be happy until they owned the entire Middle East and all of North Africa, as well.”

“My vote would go against Libya, captain,” stated Milo. “The inhabitants of India always hated each other far worse than they hated non-Indians, and teetering on the verge of a three- or four-sided civil war as they were, I doubt seriously that they would’ve gone outside of India in search of trouble.

“But Libya, now, that’s another kettle of fish, captain. Ruled over by an aging, egomaniacal dictator who has alienated every neighbor with which he shares a border and quite a few countries far removed from his borders, as well. He considered himself to be the savior of both Islam and all of Africa, at one time or another. I suspect that he finally lost the last vestige he still owned of sanity and commenced hurling nuclear missiles at every real and imagined enemy and that he kept it up until he ran out of missiles or until Egypt and Israel put paid to his long-overdue accounts.”

“Hmmm,” muttered Vlasov. “That makes a good bit of sense to me, tovarich. Before Vladivostok went off the air, they reported to us that the first nuclear strikes were all in the far southwest of the Motherland, and in parts of Rumania, Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria, even a few in both Greece and Turkey and at least one on Rome, in Italy. It was days later, I have heard, that the big strikes on the Motherland were launched from China and the United States of America . Yes, Libya could very well indeed be the culpable country. But what can now be done to retaliate, to punish such infamy, and who is now left capable of doing anything to them?”

“From what little I heard, in my earlier days on this radio,” said Milo dryly, “Egypt, Israel and France took care of the matter quite thoroughly. Libya’s population centers are now mostly flat and probably glow in the dark.”

“Good!” snapped Vlasov, forcefully and with clear feeling. Then he said,“Tovarich Moray, you have the sound of an honest man, and you must be a very strong man, as well, to have retained your reason in and among the horrors you have described in that place. I will tell you, I will go aboard one of the faster trawlers and we will steam to the Port of San Diego . You can meet us there, come aboard and return with me to Vladivostok. What do you say, tovarich?”

“San Diego was nuked, captain, hit by two or three smaller missiles, probably launched from just offshore by submerged submarines.”

After a few moments of rustling paper noises, Vlasov asked, “Well, then, we could as easily put in to, let’s see . . . Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or San Francisco, if you could easily get that far north in time to meet us. If as few people are now alive in the whole world as you have estimated to me, I think that we few must begin to forget outdated nationalism and band together in true internationalism.”

“You’re right, of course, Captain Vlasov—Vasili—but your worthy sentiments have come a bit too late for any of us, I’m afraid. Yes, I could get to any of the cities and ports you’ve mentioned, were I not afraid of going close to them, that is.”

“Nuclear destruction?All of them?All of those lovely, lovely cities, tovarich?”

“Yes, Vasili, and not just them, either. Portland, Seattle-Tacoma, Vancouver, in Canada, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Norfolk, Philadelphia. And that’s just on this continent. If you have an alternate home port or even if you don’t, steer clear of Vladivistok, my friend. I intercepted a transmission from a Japanese Self-Defense Force frigate that had seen that port hit and were so rattled that they didn’t even encode their message to their base.”

“Frankly, I have long thought that that was what happened, but I have tried hard to delude myself into the thought that it was not that way. It was easier thinking, you see, Tovarich Milo, for my dear wife, some of our children and most of our grandchildren live . . . lived nearby to the port. I suppose that I am alone, completely alone, now. Since it is so, then I just must make my family those brave mariners and fishermen who depend upon me.”

“That’s the best thing you can do, under the harsh, bitter circumstances, my friend Vasili,” Milo assured the suffering man. “It clearly demonstrates to all the great strength of your character, your self-discipline, your dedication to the welfare of your subordinates. You’re one hell of a lot like me. If only I could’ve met you sometime . . .”

“Tovarich, I still could bring a trawler for you. Give me the name of a nonradioactive port and I will quickly plot a course and tell you when you must be there.” The Russian’s invitation bore the undertones of a plea.

“No, Vasili,” replied Milo. “No, you—any men like you—are surely needed desperately in your mother-land, just now. You must return to help those who have survived everything so far to survive the coming winter. Coming here to fetch me would likely add weeks to your journey home, and those weeks could cost lives, many lives. I could not be happy with those lives on my conscience. Besides, I must soon see what I can do about succoring some of my own people, I suppose.”

Milo never again was able to communicate with those Russians or any other, unless the broadcasts he monitored from Erevan, in Soviet Armenia, were counted. All through one twelve-hour period, the same message was broadcast by several people speaking some twenty different European and Asian languages. The message was the same in every language that Milo could understand and probably in those he could not understand, as well: it was the announcement of establishment of a completely free and independent State of Armenia, comprising parts of the Russian Caucasus, eastern Turkey, Iraq, Iran and northern Syria. Even as he listened to the broadcasts, Milo wondered if and how the Armenians would be able to conquer and/or hold so much territory. After that one day, there were no more broadcasts from the environs of Erevan, nor any response to his attempts to reach them.

He stayed on the radio until the underground gasoline tank was dry, then drained the tank of the vehicle in which he had arrived as well, using an absolute minimum of electricity for other things in order to keep the radio on the air. But all things must have an eventual end, and at long last the generator ground to a halt for lack of fuel. Had there been more than just the one storage battery, he might have rigged up a bicycle generator to keep them charged enough for a few air hours each day, but there was only the one left, and it would not have been sufficient for the needs of Noonan’s elaborate and powerful and energy-gobbling equipment.

He spent one day tripping or disarming all of the booby traps guarding the approaches to Noonan’s place, cleaned the house and secured it against weather or animals, but did not lock the closed doors. The next morning, he shouldered his gear and weapons and set his feet to the steep, narrow trail that led up the back wall of the box canyon, headed once more for the mountains. Such remnants as now remained of mankind could wait for a while.