The Last Pilgrims (5 page)

Gareth stretched out his wounded arm and,
wincing quite a bit, swung his legs over the side of the bed,
before finishing his thought. “You know what he’ll do if he gets to
Bethany.”

“Lay back down, fool!” Phillip interjected.
“I don’t need you falling out of bed, fainting, or passing out from
the excess of beer.”

Gareth laughed. “I need to stretch a bit,
and I’ll need to be more mobile if you are going to hang me any
time soon.”

Phillip gave in and helped
him to his feet, probably figuring that he indeed needed to start
moving about. At first, he wobbled a bit, but soon steadied himself
against the bedpost.

“I’m still not sure about
what you are telling me, Gareth,” Phillip said, shaking his head.
“You are talking about the Duke marching five-hundred to a thousand
men
or more
across the desert, in the height of summer, with no supply
lines and very little support along the way. They’ll have to carry
everything they need along treacherous terrain and unmaintained
roads. I-10 hasn’t been a highway in almost two decades. It’s more
like the surface of the moon since most of the pavement has been
dug up or removed. The Duke is either very stupid, or very sure of
himself.”

“Well, Ghost, I don’t think that he’s
stupid. But he is certainly arrogant, which will work to our
advantage.”

“So, you’re sure that he’s coming?” Phillip
asked, head cocked to one side, eyes squinted at Gareth.

“I am.”

“Then, we’ll just have to make sure that he
never gets to Bethany.”

Ruth Wall stood as still as the old ugly
mannequin in Mrs. Palmer’s sewing shop down in Bethany, her spear
poised only inches above the dark mouth of the coon den. She was
backed into a salt cedar bush, leaning on the lowest branches for
her balance, moving nary a muscle as she waited for the huge
she-coon to stick her head out.

Minutes passed, and she started to be
concerned. The sweat was beading down her face and the drops were
gathering on the tip of her nose. She blew upwards, hoping to
disperse the gathering droplet before it dripped down into the
opening of the hole—scaring off the she-coon.

She looked up for just a moment, feeling the
slight breeze on her face as she turned her head very slowly
towards the sun. It was almost four o’clock, nearly time to be
heading back home.

Just as she had almost convinced herself to
give up and head back to the ranch, the she-coon made her
appearance. Warily, the creature poked her head out of the den.
Like lightning, the spear came down with tremendous force and
pinned the animal’s head to the ground. Ruth drew her knife
effortlessly from her homemade leather sheath. She bled out and
gutted the coon in minutes.

Ruth tossed the coon into her hunting bag,
picking up her walking stick, her bow and a quiver full of arrows.
She gave a short whistle for Louise, her yellow blackmouth cur dog
and, feeling quite satisfied with herself, glanced back at the sun.
After re-checking the time, she started her short hike back
home.

Louise came trotting back from the edge of
the woods where she had been laying in the shade, trying to stay
cool. She was a good pig dog, which was almost a necessity in these
parts, but didn’t care for coon hunting one bit. Louise lived and
breathed for chasing and hunting pigs.

At fourteen years old, the redheaded Ruth
was quite an accomplished hunter—not nearly as good as David, her
older brother, but pretty good nonetheless. Her father told her
that she was the best female hunter he had ever seen, and that was
praise enough for Ruth.

Hunting was almost a full-time job,
especially when there were guests to feed. In particular, now that
the Aztlani assassin Gareth was staying with them and was eating
them out of house and home. Not to mention all of the militiamen
hanging around as guards and escorts. For a ranch owned by
pacifists, home had come to resemble an armed camp.

Ruth loved to hunt, so she wasn’t
complaining. Still, it seemed like a thankless task, as she did
notice that Gareth seemed never to be full. Even when he was sick
and delirious with a fever from his infection, he still had a huge
appetite. Ruth was just glad that she didn’t have to do all of the
brewing it would take to keep up with his penchant for Vallensian
beer. Gareth still couldn’t figure out how the Vallenses had icy
cold beer in the summertime, which was a good source of humor,
since no one would tell him about the icehouse.

The ghostmen usually provided for
themselves, and prepared most of their own meals out in the woods
away from the house. Her father, being the kind man that he was and
a gracious host, would still impose on them to send a few men each
day for a full-on supper at his table. Though they really didn’t
like any attention and were uncomfortable in the company of many
people, they appeared to be tremendously honored to be asked to sit
at the table with Jonathan Wall. Despite their discomfort, there
were usually at least two of them at supper every night, most
likely just to please and honor her father.

She was glad that there was nearly always
fresh game for the table. Father told her that just about everyone
had figured it all wrong before the crash. In almost all of the
post-apocalyptic literature, he said, it was usually predicted that
over-hunting would have wiped out all of the game after a collapse.
He explained that, because most writers had a bias towards
industrialism and the status-quo (he called it a
Normalcy
Bias
, or the
Ceteris Parabus
fallacy), they
automatically assumed that almost everyone was going to survive any
collapse.

The books, many of which Ruth had read,
usually did predict millions of deaths, but generally assumed some
kind of eventual return to “normal,” irrationally assuming a return
to the system her father believed had caused the real crash when it
happened. In reality, the true number of deaths had dwarfed the
fictional estimates. Most people didn’t even realize how at risk
they were. Father called them ‘unviable’, and said that, throughout
their entire lives, they had existed suspended on nothing and
sustained by a system that could never last.

The fact that only a small percentage of the
entire population actually survived through the first few years
after the crash didn’t surprise her father, and it had changed
everything. There was
no
shortage of game, at least not in
Texas. In fact, there was such an abundance of game that many of
the predators that had once been abundant in Texas had returned and
were fast multiplying. The wild pigs had actually become a
nuisance. Like mesquite trees, they were fine and beneficial in
reasonable numbers, but of late, they had become a real problem.
They had no respect for fences, could devastate a wheat field in a
single night, and were constantly destroying property.

Ruth could not even remember a time when
there had not been wolves, mountain lions, and even some bears.
According to her father, before the Industrial Revolution all of
these predators had once been quite at home in Texas. However,
prior to the collapse, only coyotes, some bobcats, and the
occasional mountain lion lived in Central Texas, and the bears and
wolves had been mostly eradicated.

Whenever her father talked about the times
‘before the collapse’, she was fascinated. To her it all seemed
unreal. Just imagine the foolishness of those people! They didn’t
even know how to hunt or grow their own food! Ruth would hush and
listen intently when the older folks talked about that time. She
really couldn’t get a good hold on what it had been like back then.
It all seemed so bizarre. Father had said that there were over 25
million people living just in Texas before the collapse! Ruth shook
her head as she tried to imagine it. Some things she would never
really grasp. She could understand it, but it wasn’t truly
real
to her.

But it
was
real. She had read many of
the books in Father’s library. She especially enjoyed reading the
history books that portrayed life as it had been in the last fifty
years before the crash. It sounded like another world.
It was
another world.

The fun part was when the older people would
talk about technology.
What magic!
She had seen some of the
devices, although they were all powerless now. ‘Phones’ no bigger
than a stone, which were used to talk to people anywhere at any
time without any delay. There were also computers, all linked
together to share information across a huge ‘web’ called the
‘Internet’. As a result, you could find out anything in the world
just by typing questions on your computer. It all seemed very
useful, but Father said that people soon became addicted to the
technology, and risked their lives and the lives of their families
by being dependent on it. The Vallenses were referred to as
‘legalistic’ or ‘quaint’ for rejecting most of the technology, or
at least any dependence on it.

As Ruth walked along, deep in thought, she
noticed the tell-tale silence of Louise locking into a ready and
listening stance. Then, like a shot and without any command, Louise
rocketed into the oak grove down by the creek.
Pig.

She moved with practiced precision. Before
Louise even reached the trees, Ruth had dropped her game bag and
her stick, and had drawn an arrow from her quiver, smoothly feeding
it onto the bowstring and drawing it back. She knew from where
Louise went into the trees, and from the sound of her bark, just
where the pig would most likely come out.

She took a deep calming breath, just as her
brother David had taught her, willing her heart rate to steady, as
she sighted down the arrow. Just before the feral hog broke through
from the trees, with Louise snapping at her heals, Ruth had a
strange and untimely thought.
I wonder if Tim is
watching
.

The thought passed in an instant. Timothy
was responsible if he was hit by an arrow, she reasoned. She
calculated the lead, and let the arrow fly, watching as it found
its mark, striking the hog just above and behind the left shoulder,
traveling into the chest area, piercing organs along its path, and
exiting low and on the right side of the pig’s underbelly.

The stunned hog slowed down enough for
Louise to catch up with it. The dog grabbed it by the back leg and
spun it to the ground, evading the hog’s head as it swung around
gamely trying to gut the dog with a swipe of its 3-inch tusks. As
Ruth approached, Louise finally pulled back, barking up a
storm.

This was the most dangerous time, when the
boar was wounded but not dead, so she advanced slowly in a crouch
with her knife drawn and ready. She trusted that Louise would have
intercepted the pig if it had tried to charge her, but she was
cautious anyway.

After a few minutes, the pig had lost all of
its energy, and—giving up—it lay its head down in the dust. Ruth
moved in quickly and carefully, pinning the head down with her
foot, as she jabbed her knife into the pig’s neck, cutting the
carotid artery. She made a clean slice across the pig’s throat to
give the blood a route out of the body, then dragged the
rear-section of the pig uphill in order to use gravity to
facilitate the bleeding.

She guessed that the hog weighed somewhere
in the neighborhood of 90 to 100 lbs. Not a huge pig, but it would
provide anywhere from 35 to 40 lbs of meat for the Wall’s table
tonight. She was glad that the pig hadn’t run off with her arrow,
as she and Louise would have had to track it in this heat for a
quarter of a mile through the brush. That happened more often than
not. This kill-shot had been nearly perfect, and had destroyed at
least three major organs as it passed through the pig. According to
David, piercing three organs was the ideal if you wanted to drop
the pig where it stood.

As soon as she was sure the pig had bled out
completely, she went to work almost mechanically, gutting it, using
the hillside to provide gravity to make her work easier. She made
certain to keep most of the organ meats, but threw a small handful
to Louise as a treat and a reward.

“Nice kill, Ruth! Not bad at all…
for a
girl
.”

Ruth turned around to see Tim watching her
from the edge of the woods. She figured that he’d be around here
somewhere. Tim was one of Phillip’s ghostmen. He was 18 years old,
and it had become obvious in the past week that it was his job to
watch over her like some kind of bodyguard. She was unsure of how
she felt about that.

Tim did a good job. She usually couldn’t
figure out where he was, though it had become a bit of a game
between them, as she was always trying to locate him whenever she
was hunting. She almost never could. He kept his distance, moved
almost soundlessly, and was never upwind.

“That was an expert kill-shot, Timmy. Not
one of you ghostmen, not even Phillip, could have done it better,”
Ruth boasted, working with her knife without pause on the pig
carcass.

“I don’t know; I’ve seen Phillip kill a pig
without even loosing the arrow. He just thought about it and the
pig surrendered.”

“Whatever, Timothy,” she retorted in a
mocking tone. “Hey, be a pal and help me get this meat back to the
house.” They trussed the pig carcass onto the walking stick and
carried it back to the house between themselves.

Ruth really didn’t like hunting for pigs in
the summertime. Pigs were usually winter food, but their numbers
had multiplied so much over the last few years that it had become
necessary. As a result, they were hunted in large numbers even in
the summer. The Walls didn’t mind the extra meat. When they didn’t
have visiting guests (which wasn’t very often), they would grind
the meat into sausage, lacto-ferment it, smoke it in the stone
smokehouse, and dry it. Dried, smoked sausage was one of the
primary foods for the Walls whenever they travelled, because it was
perfectly preserved without any added processing. It was also very
convenient because it could be carried in a backpack, a pocket, or
a satchel, ready to eat at any given moment.