Armageddon's Children (37 page)

Cheney padded along, then turned toward one of the larger piers and nosed his way over to the crumbling building. He stopped at the door and waited, not looking at Hawk, barely lifting his head as Hawk came up beside him.

River was inside, he was saying.

Hawk hesitated, and then moved in front of Cheney. He held the prod in front of him as he stepped through the door. Inside, light streamed through broken windows and collapsed sections of the upper flooring and metal roof to chase back the shadows. There were two floors and dozens of rooms, and the building was deep and high. Again Hawk hesitated, wary of entering a largely unfamiliar place. He had been in this building once or maybe even twice, but not for long and only to look for useful supplies. It had been several years since he had last entered it.

There was nothing he could do but continue. He sent Cheney on ahead, hoping he would find a trail. It wasn’t all that easy given the amount of trash and the confluence of smells that permeated every surface. The building smelled of the bay, but also of dead things, mildew, and defecation. There didn’t seem to be anything living in it, but you never knew. Shadows rippled in the corners of the rooms he passed, disturbed by the sunlight. Hawk kept the prod in front of him. He couldn’t imagine what River was doing here.

They wound their way to the back of the building and finally outside again. Now Hawk really was confused. But Cheney kept moving forward, heading for a large storage shed set back against the edge of the dock inside a barrier of heavy metal fencing. It was a structure that seemed somewhat sturdier than the building they had just left, although its metal surfaces were badly worn and rusted.

Cheney stopped before the fencing and growled.

Instantly River appeared in the doorway of the shed. “Cheney!” she exclaimed, shock mirrored on her child’s face. Then she saw Hawk and gave an audible gasp. “No, Hawk! You can’t come in here!”

She said it with such force that for a moment Hawk felt as if she might be right, that he had somehow trespassed and would have to turn around and leave. Her words sounded dangerous, and she had gone into a defensive crouch that suggested she was ready to fight.

“Tell me what’s wrong, River,” he answered.

She shook her head fiercely, then broke into tears and stood shaking in front of him. “You told me…the rules,” she sobbed. “I know…what I’ve done. But I…had to!”

He had no idea what she was talking about. “River,” he said quietly, “let me come in. What’s going on in there?”

“Just…go away, Hawk,” she managed. “I won’t come…back home…or anything. Just go away.”

Leaving Cheney where he was, Hawk walked the perimeter of the fence, found the hidden section that swung open, and stepped inside. River rushed to stop him, but he was through before she reached him. She brought up her fists as if to knock him back through the opening, then simply collapsed in a heap on the heavy planking, crying harder than ever. Hawk had never seen her like this. He knelt beside her, stroked her dark hair gently, then put his arm around her shoulders and sat next to her.

“Shhhh,” he soothed. “Don’t cry. There isn’t anything we can’t work out between us; you know that. Nothing we can’t solve.”

She cried some more, and then said suddenly, almost angrily, “You don’t understand!”

He nodded into her hair. “I know.”

She didn’t say anything more and didn’t move; she just sat there as the sobs died away. Then she stood and without a word started for the shed. He rose and followed. It was dark and cool inside, but there were brightly colored hangings on the wall and stacks of packaged goods and blankets. Ropes hung from hooks, and books were stacked to one side on makeshift shelves. Someone had lived here recently.

A low moan from the shed’s deepest recesses caught his attention, and he peered into the gloom.

The Weatherman lay on a mattress suspended atop a low wooden bed frame, his ancient face twisted with pain, his hands moving under the blankets tucked about him. Hawk took a quick look at the blotches on his face and backed quickly away.

“He has the plague,” he said. “You can’t stay here, River.”

She replied in a whisper so soft he could barely hear her. “You don’t understand. I have to.”

“He’s an old man,” Hawk objected. “I like him, but it’s—”

“No,” she interrupted quickly. “He isn’t just an old man.” She paused, struggling to get the words out. “He’s my grandfather.”

SHE TOLD HIM
her story then, of her family and of how her grandfather had brought her to Seattle.

Even before there were only the two of them, she was always his favorite. A quiet, introverted girl with a waif’s big eyes and a skinny, gawky body that she found embarrassing, she followed him everywhere. For his part, he seemed to enjoy her company and never told her to go away like her brothers always did. He enjoyed talking to her and told her things about herself that made her feel better.

“You are a special little girl,” he would say, “because you know how to listen. Not many little girls know how to do that.”

When she cried, he would say, “There is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who you are. They tell you what is important. Don’t ever be ashamed of them.”

He was tall and strong then, even though he was already old, and she had heard that he had once been a professional athlete back before they stopped having teams. She imagined that must have been a long time ago, years before she was born, but he never talked about it. He mostly talked about her, and he was the only one who did so. No one else ever even paid attention to her except when they needed something. Her brothers ignored her. Her mother was a strange, distant presence, physically there, but mentally off in a place only she could visit. She barely acknowledged the rest of the family, lost in distant stares and words spoken so softly that no else could hear. River’s grandfather said it was because her father had broken her mother’s heart.

River didn’t know if this was so, but she supposed it was. She remembered very little about her father. She remembered that he was a big, noisy man who took up a lot of space and made her feel even smaller than she was. She was only three when he left. No one ever knew what caused him to go, but one day he simply walked out the door and never came back. For a long time, she thought he would. She would stand in the yard and look for him in the trees, believing he might be hiding there and daring them to find him. Her brothers laughed at her when she told them what she was doing, and eventually she tired of the game and gave up.

They lived in a small woodlands community north of the big Washington State cities, out on the Olympic Peninsula where it was still heavily forested and mountainous and empty of people and their problems. Their isolation protected them, they believed, and so they stayed in their small community, a group of about thirty families, waiting for things to change back for the better, keeping hidden and secret as the rest of the world slowly receded into a distant furor they knew about only from listening to radio and from infrequent encounters with travelers.

But her grandfather was wary.

“You must never go out alone,” he would tell her, even though the others said it was safe and nothing would happen to her.

He didn’t explain, and she didn’t ask. She believed what he told her, and so she was careful not to go anywhere by herself. She was reminded of the disappearance of her father, even though she did not believe anything bad had happened to him. But when her youngest brother vanished one sunny afternoon without even the smallest trace, she knew that it was because he had ignored her grandfather’s warning. The others laughed, but she knew.

Then, two months later, when the red haze passed overhead, even though it was gone in less than a day, he told her not to eat or drink anything taken from the earth. She did as he said, but the others didn’t listen. When they began to get sick and die, he warned them they would have to leave, but they didn’t listen to him then, either. They refused to leave their home, insisting that things would get better, that the sickness would pass. They believed themselves protected in their sheltered enclave, so far removed from the rest of the world. They believed themselves safe from its horrors.

Even though she was only nine by then, she knew they were wrong in the same way they had been wrong every time before.

It was only after all but fifty of them had died, her mother and brothers included, that they acknowledged that her grandfather was right and made preparations to leave. They built rafts to ferry themselves down the waters of Puget Sound in search of a new place to live. There were islands all along the western shoreline; one of them would provide them with a safe haven to disembark and start over.

They set out in good weather, four rafts in all. Within twenty-four hours, a storm caught up with them. Winds reached fifty miles an hour on the open water in a matter of minutes. The trailing raft was lost, capsized with all its goods sunk and its passengers swept away. Plague surfaced on the second raft a day later, and the passengers on the other two made the decision to abandon it, leaving those aboard to fend for themselves. Some talked afterward about the need for sacrificing the few for the good of the many. Fear set in as the journey wore on, and everyone began to realize how much danger they were in. It was going to get much worse, her grandfather told her privately. Bad enough that they were going to have to leave the others because sooner or later their behavior would turn irrational and everyone left alive would be at risk.

Two nights later, while the rafts were tied up in a small cove and the others were sleeping, her grandfather woke her, held his finger to his lips, and led her into the dark. She looked back once or twice as they slipped away, but no one saw them go. They walked inland through forests and fields, past empty farms and houses, skirting the towns and keeping to the countryside. They foraged for food, which her grandfather seemed to know something about. Most of what they found was bottled or packaged, so they were not afraid to consume it. They slept in empty buildings when they could and outside when there was nothing else. Her grandfather had stuffed blankets and medicines and changes of clothes into a backpack, and they were able to get by.

Then, five days into their journey, somewhere west of the islands that dotted the waters across from Seattle, her grandfather came down with plague. He turned hot and feverish, and his skin darkened in broad purplish patches all over his body. She didn’t know which form of plague he had contracted, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if she had because she was too little to understand which of the medicines would help. She tried them all, one at a time, but none of them seemed to make any difference. She washed him with cool water to help keep his temperature down and tried to make him drink so that he wouldn’t become dehydrated. For a time he tried to coach her by telling her what he thought would help, suggesting what she might do for him. But his sickness turned worse, and he became incoherent. He raved as if he had lost all reason, and she became afraid that someone—or something—would overhear. She gave him sleeping medication because she didn’t know what else to do. She kept bathing him in an effort to lower his fever, kept trying to get liquids into him, and waited for him to die.

But, against all odds, he recovered. It took weeks, and it was a slow, torturous process. Afterward, he was never the same. His hair had gone white. His face was marked by the struggle he had endured, his once strong visage lined and pinched and gaunt. He was frail and gnarled in a way old men become when all of their youth has been bled out of them. It happened in the span of about four weeks, and even after he was sitting up and eating and drinking again, he was only a ghost of himself.

She looked at him warily and tried to hide how afraid she was for him. But she could tell by the way he looked back that he knew.

They set out again, but he was no longer her grandfather of old. He sang ditties and spoke in odd rhymes. He talked incessantly about the weather, about forecasts, storms, fronts and pressure ridges, and things she had never heard him speak of before. None of it made much sense; it frightened her in a way even the ravings hadn’t. He only rarely spoke of anything besides the weather. Nothing else seemed to matter to him.

At night, he would wake her sometimes with his muttering, talking in his sleep of black, evil things coming to get them. She would wake him, and he would look at her as if she were a stranger.

When they reached the shores of Puget Sound, they began walking south until they found a rowboat. Without so much as a word about what he intended, her grandfather loaded their few possessions, placed her aboard at the stern, climbed in after her, and pushed off. It was nearing sunset, and darkness was almost upon them. He didn’t seem to notice. He rowed them toward the islands, seated with his back to them, facing her, his haunted eyes fixed on her face. He rowed all night without stopping, and even though it was black all around them, the weather stayed calm. They reached an island sometime just before dawn, pulled the boat ashore, and slept. When they woke, her grandfather rowed them around to the other side of the island, where they stopped again. The following day, he rowed them all the way across the channel to the city.