The Postman (22 page)

Still, there remained plenty of dust, riding the high winds. Now and then the cold air ventured south again, carrying reminders of the Long Chill. Vapor crystalized around the grains, forming complex, fractal hexahedrons. Snowflakes grew and fell
.

Obstinate, Winter arrived one more time to claim a dark country
.

Gusts sculpted whirling devil shapes in the blowing snow—flurries that seemed to rise, ghostlike, from the gray drifts, fluttering and darting windblown under the frosted trees.

A heavily laden branch cracked, unable to bear the weight of one more dingy snowflake. The report echoed like a muffled gunshot down the narrow forest lanes.

Snow delicately covered the death-glazed eyes of a starved deer, filling the channels between its starkly outlined ribs. Flakes soon hid faint grooves in the icy ground where the animal had last pawed, only hours ago, in its fruitless search for food.

Taking no sides, the dancing flurries went on to cloak other victims as well, settling soft white layers over crimson stains in the crushed, older snow.

All the corpses soon lay blanketed, peaceful, as if asleep.

The new storm had erased most signs of the struggle by the time Gordon found Tracy’s body under the dark shadow of a winter-whitened cedar. By then a frozen crust had stanched the bleeding. Nothing more flowed from the unlucky young woman’s slashed throat.

Gordon pushed away thoughts of Tracy as he had briefly known her in life—ever cheerful and brave, with a slightly mad enthusiasm for the hopeless job she had taken on. His lips pressed together grimly as he tore open her woolen shirt and reached in to feel under her armpit.

The body was still warm. This had not happened long ago.

Gordon squinted to the southwest, where tracks—already fading under the blowing snow—led off into the painful ice-brightness. In a flat, almost silent movement, a white-clad shape appeared beside him.

“Damn!” he heard Philip Bokuto whisper. “Tracy was good! I could have sworn those pricks wouldn’t have been able to—”

“Well, they did.” Gordon cut him off sharply. “And it wasn’t more than ten minutes ago.”

Taking the girl’s belt buckle, he heaved her over to show the other man. The dark brown face under the white parka nodded silently, understanding. Tracy had not been molested, or even mutilated with Holnist symbols. This small band of hyper-survivalists had been in too much of a hurry even to stop and take their customary, grisly trophies.

“We can catch ’em,” Bokuto whispered. Anger burned in his eyes. “I can fetch the rest of the patrol and be back here in three minutes.”

Gordon shook his head. “No, Phil. We’ve already chased them too far beyond our defense perimeter. They’ll have an ambush set by the time we get close. We’d better just collect Tracy’s body and go home now.”

Bokuto’s jaw clenched, a bunching of tendons. For the first time his voice rose above a whisper. “We can
catch
the bastards!”

Gordon felt a wave of irritation.
What right does Philip have to do this to me?
Bokuto had once been a sergeant in the Marines, before the world fell to ruin nearly two decades ago. It should have been
his
job, not Gordon’s, to make the practical, unsatisfying decisions … to be the one responsible.

He shook his head. “No, we will not. And that’s final.” He looked down at the girl—until this afternoon the second best scout in the Army of the Willamette … but apparently not quite good enough. “We need living fighters, Phil. We need fierce men, not more corpses.”

For a silent moment neither looked at the other. Then Bokuto pushed Gordon to one side and stepped over the still form on the snow.

“Give me five minutes before you bring up the rest of the patrol,” he told Gordon as he dragged Tracy’s body into the leeward shadow of the cedar and drew his knife. “You’re right, sir. We need angry men. Tracy and I’ll see to it that’s what you get.”

Gordon blinked. “Phil.” He reached forward. “Don’t.”

Bokuto ignored Gordon’s hand as he grimaced and tore Tracy’s shirt open wider. He did not look up, but his voice was broken. “I said you’re right! We have to make our cow-eyed farmers mad enough to fight! And this is one of the ways Dena and Tracy told us to use, if we had to.…”

Gordon could hardly believe this. “Dena’s
crazy
, Phil! Haven’t you realized that by now? Please, don’t do this!” He grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him around, but then had to step back from the threatening glitter of Bokuto’s knife. His friend’s eyes were hot and agonized as he waved Gordon away.

“Don’t make this harder for me, Gordon! You’re my commander, and I’ll serve you so long as it’s the best way to kill as many of those Holnist bastards as possible.

“But Gordon, you get so frigging
civilized
at the worst of times! That’s when I draw the line. Do you hear me? I
won’t
let you betray Tracy, or Dena, or me with your fits of Twentieth-Century sappiness!

“Now, get outta here,
Mr
.
Inspector
 … sir.” Bokuto’s voice was thick with emotion. “And remember to give me five minutes before you bring up the others.”

He glowered until Gordon had backed away. Then he spat on the ground, wiped one eye, and bent back to the grisly task awaiting him.

At first Gordon stumbled, half stunned, as he retreated down the gray-sided meadow. Phil Bokuto had never turned on him that way before, waving a knife, wild-eyed, disobeying orders.…

Then Gordon remembered.

I never actually
commanded
him not to do this, did I? I
asked
, I pleaded. But I didn’t order him.…

Am I completely sure he isn’t right, at that? Do even I, deep inside, believe some of those things Dena and her band of lunatic women are preaching?

Gordon shook his head. Phil was certainly right about one thing—the stupidity of philosophizing on a battlefield. Out here survival was enough of a problem. That other war—the one he had been waging each night in his dreams—would have to wait its turn.

He made his way downslope carefully, clutching his drawn bayonet, the most practical weapon for this kind of weather. Half his men had put aside their rifles and bows for long knives … another trick painfully learned from their deadly, devious enemy.

He and Bokuto had left the rest of the patrol only fifty meters back, but it felt like much more as his eyes darted in search of traps. The whirling snow-devils seemed to take on forms, like the vaporous scouts of a faerie army that had not yet taken sides. Ethereal neutrals in a quiet, deadly war.

Who will take responsibility …?
they seemed to whisper at him. The words had never left Gordon, not since that fateful morning when he had chosen between practicality and a doomed charade of hope.

At least this particular raiding party of Holn survivalists had fared worse than usual, and the local farmers and villagers had done better than anyone would have expected. Also, Gordon and his escort party had been on an inspection tour nearby. They had been able to join the fray at a critical moment.

In essence, his Army of the Willamette had won a minor victory, losing only twenty or so men to five of the enemy. There were probably no more than three or four of this Holnist band left to flee westward.

Still, four of those human monsters were more than enough, even tired and short on ammunition. His patrol only numbered seven now, and help was far away.

Let them go. They’ll be back
.

The hoot of a horned owl warbled just ahead of him. He recognized Leif Morrison’s challenge.
He’s getting better
, Gordon thought.
If we’re still alive in a year, it might even sound real enough to fool someone
.

He pursed his lips and tried to mimic the call, two hoots in answer to Morrison’s three. Then he dashed across a narrow glade and slid into the gully where the patrol waited.

Morrison and two other men gathered close. Their beards and sheepskin cloaks were coated with dry snow, and they fingered their weapons nervously.

“Joe and Andy?” Gordon asked.

Leif, the big Swede, nodded left and right. “Pickets,” he said tersely.

Gordon nodded. “Good.” Under the big spruce he untied his pack and pulled out a thermos bottle. One of the privileges of rank; he didn’t have to ask permission to pour himself a cup of hot cider.

The others took their positions again, but kept glancing back, obviously wondering what “the Inspector” was up to this time. Morrison, a farmer who had barely escaped the rape of Greenleaf Town last September, eyed him with the simmering look of a man who had lost everything he loved, and was therefore no longer entirely of this world.

Gordon glanced at his watch—a beautiful, prewar chronometer provided by the technicians of Corvallis. Bokuto had had enough time. By now he would be circling back, covering his tracks.

“Tracy’s dead,” he told the others. Their faces blanched. Gordon went on, weighing their reactions. “I guess she was trying to cut around past the bastards and hold them for us. She didn’t ask my permission.” He shrugged. “They got her.”

The stunned expressions turned into a round of seething, guttural curses.
Better
, Gordon thought.
But the Holnists won’t wait for you to
remember
to get mad next time, boys. They’ll kill you while you’re still deciding whether or not to be scared
.

Well practiced by now at the art of lying, Gordon continued
in a flat tone. “Five minutes quicker and we might have saved her. As it is, they had time to take souvenirs.”

This time anger battled revulsion on their faces. And burning shame overcame both. “Let’s go after ’em!” Morrison urged. “They can’t be far ahead!” The others muttered agreement.

Not quickly enough
, Gordon judged.

“No. If you boys were sluggish getting here, you’re much too slow to deal with the inevitable ambush. We’ll move up in skirmish line and retrieve Tracy’s body. Then we’re going home.”

One of the farmers—among the loudest demanding pursuit—showed immediate relief. The others, though, glared back at Gordon, hating him for his words.

Stand in line, boys
, Gordon thought bitterly.
If I were a
real
leader of men, I’d have found a better way to put backbone into you than this
.

He put away his thermos, not offering any cider to the others. The implication was clear—that they didn’t deserve any. “Hop to it,” he said as he slung his light pack over his shoulders.

They did move quickly this time, gathering their gear and scrambling out across the snow. Over to the left and right he saw Joe and Andy emerge from cover and take their places on the flanks. Holnists would never have been so visible, of course, but then, they had had a lot more practice than these reluctant soldiers.

Those with unlimbered rifles covered the knife men, who dashed ahead. Gordon easily kept up, just behind the skirmish line. In a minute he felt Bokuto fall in beside him, appearing as if out of nowhere from behind a tree. For all of their earnestness, none of the farmers had spotted him.

The scout’s expression was blank, but Gordon knew what he was feeling. He did not meet Bokuto’s eyes.

Ahead there came a sudden, angry exclamation. The lead man must have come upon Tracy’s mutilated body. “Imagine how they’d feel if they ever found out the truth about that,” Philip told Gordon softly. “Or if they ever discovered
the real reason why most of your scouts are girls.”

Gordon shrugged. It had been a woman’s idea, but he had agreed to it. The guilt was his alone. So much guilt, in a cause he knew was hopeless.

And yet he could not let even the cynical Bokuto sense the full extent of the truth. For his sake Gordon maintained a front.

“You know the main reason,” he told his aide. “Underneath Dena’s theories and the promise of Cyclops, beneath it all you know what it’s for.”

Bokuto nodded, and for a brief moment there was something else in his voice. “For the Restored United States,” he said softly, almost reverently.

Lies within lies
, Gordon thought. If you
ever found out the truth, my friend …

“For the Restored United States,” he agreed aloud. “Yeah.”

Together they moved ahead to watch over their army of frightened, but now angry men.

“It’s no good, Cyclops.”

Beyond the thick pane of glass, a pearly, opalescent eye stared back at him from a tall cylinder swaddled in cool fog. A double row of tiny, flickering lights rippled a complex pattern over and over again. This was Gordon’s ghost … the specter that had haunted him for months now … the only lie he had ever met to match his own damnable fraud.

It felt proper to do his thinking here in this darkened room. Out in the snows, on village stockades, in the lonely, dim forests, men and women were dying for the two of them—for what he, Gordon, supposedly represented, and for the machine on the other side of the glass.

For
Cyclops
and for the
Restored United States
.

Without those twin pillars of hope, the Willametters might well have collapsed by now. Corvallis would lie in ruins, its hoarded libraries, its fragile industry, its windmills and flickering electric lights, all vanished forever into the lowering dark age. The invaders from the Rogue River would have established fiefdoms up and down the valley, as they had done already in the area west of Eugene.

The farmers and aged techs were battling an enemy ten times more experienced and capable. But they fought anyway—not so much for themselves as for two
symbols
—for a gentle, wise machine that had really died many years ago, and for a long-vanished nation that existed now only in their imaginations.

The poor fools.

“It isn’t working,” Gordon told his peer, his fellow hoax. The row of lights replied by dancing the same complex pattern that burned in his dreams.

“This heavy winter has stopped the Holnists, for now. They’re kicking back in the towns they captured last autumn. But come springtime they’ll be back again, picking away at us, burning and killing until, one by one, the villages sue for ‘protection.’