The Postman (25 page)

He paused.

“I shall go south personally, then, and try to get them to change their minds.”

That brought on an immediate tumult.

“Gordon, that’s crazy!”

“You can’t …”

“We need you here!”

He closed his eyes. In four months he had welded an alliance strong enough to delay and frustrate the invaders. He had forged it mostly through his skill as a storyteller, a posturer … a liar.

Gordon had no illusions that he was a real leader. It was his
image
that held the Army of the Willamette together … his legendary authority as
the Inspector
—a manifestation of the nation reborn.

A
nation whose only remaining spark will soon be stone cold dead if something isn’t done damn quick. I
can’t lead these people! They need a general! A warrior!

They need a man like George Powhatan
.

He cut the uproar by holding up a hand.

“I
am
going. And I want you all to promise me you’ll not agree to any crazy, desperate enterprises while I’m away.” He looked directly at Dena. For an instant she met his gaze. But her lips were tight, and after a moment her
eyes clouded and she jerked her head aside.

Is she concerned for me?
Gordon wondered.
Or for her plan?

“I’ll be back before spring,” he promised. “I’ll be back with help.”

Under his breath he added:

“Or I’ll be dead.”

It took three days to get ready. All that time Gordon chafed, wishing he could simply be off.

But it had turned into an expedition, the Council insisting that Bokuto and four other men accompany him at least as far as Cottage Grove. Johnny Stevens and one of the southern volunteers rode ahead to prepare the way. After all, it was only fitting that the Inspector be well heralded.

To Gordon it was all a lot of nonsense. An hour with Johnny, spent going over a prewar road map, would be enough to tell him how to get where he was going. One fast horse, and another for remount, would protect him as well as an entire squad.

Gordon particularly resented having to take Bokuto. The man was needed here. But the Council was adamant. It was accept their terms or not be allowed to go at all.

The party departed Corvallis early in the morning, their horses steaming in the bitter cold as they rode out past the old OSU athletic field. A column of marching recruits passed by. Muffled as they were, it was nonetheless easy to tell from their chanting voices that these were more of Dena’s girl soldiers.

The troop performed eyes right as the men rode by. Dena’s expression was masked by distance, but he felt her gaze, nonetheless.

Their farewell had been physically passionate and emotionally tense. Gordon wasn’t sure if even prewar America, with all its sexual variations, had ever come up with a name for the kind of relationship they had. It was a relief to be getting away from her. He knew he would miss her.

As the women’s voices faded behind him, Gordon’s throat was tight. He tried to pass it off partly as pride in their obvious courage. But it wasn’t possible to completely rule out dread.

The party rode hard past barren orchards and frosted countryside to make the stockade at Rowland by sundown. That was how close the lines were—one day’s journey from the fragile center of what passed for civilization. From here on it would be bandit country.

In Rowland they heard new rumors—that one contingent of Holnists had already established a small duchy in the ruins of Eugene. Refugees told of bands of the white-camouflaged barbarians roaming the countryside, burning small hamlets and dragging off food, women, slaves.

If it was true, Eugene presented a problem. They had to get by the ruined city.

Bokuto insisted on taking no chances. Gordon glowered and hardly spoke at all as the expedition wasted three days on frozen, buckled asphalt roads, skirting far to the east of Springfield then south again to arrive at last at the fortified town of Cottage Grove.

It had been only a short time since a few towns south of Eugene had been reunited with the more prosperous communities to the north. Now the invaders had nearly cut them off again.

On Gordon’s mental map of the once great state of Oregon, the entire eastern two-thirds were wilderness, high desert, ancient lava flows, and the mountainous ramparts of the Cascades.

The gray Pacific bounded the rain-shrouded coast range in the west.

The northern and southern edges of the state, too, were virtually impassible blotches. In the north the Columbia Valley still glowed from the bombs that had tortured Portland and shattered the great river’s dams.

The other blot spilled a hundred miles into the southern edge of the state from unknown California—and centered on the mountainous canyonland known as the Rogue.

Even in happier times the area around Medford had been known for a certain “strange” element. Before the Doomwar it had been estimated that the Rogue River Valley held more secret caches, more illegal machine guns, than anywhere outside the Everglades.

While civil authority was still struggling to hang on, sixteen years ago, it was the hyper-survivalist plague that struck the final blow, all over the civilized world. In southern Oregon the followers of Nathan Holn had been particularly violent. The fate of the poor citizens of that region was never known.

Between the desert and the sea, between radiation and the Holnist madmen, two small areas had come out of the Three-Year Winter with enough left to do a little more than scratch as animals … the Willamette in the north and the towns around Roseburg in the south. But in the beginning, the southernmost patch seemed surely doomed to slavery or worse at the hands of the new barbarians.

Then, somewhere between the Rogue and the Umpqua, something unexpected happened. The cancer had been arrested. The enemy had been stopped. To find out how was Gordon’s desperate hope, before the transplanted disease took hold fully in the vulnerable Willamette Valley.

On Gordon’s mental map an ugly red incursion had spread inland from the invader beachheads west of Eugene. And Cottage Grove was now nearly cut off.

They got their first glimpse of how bad things had become less than a mile out of town. The bodies of six men hung by the road, crucified on sagging telephone poles. The corpses had not been left unmarked.

“Cut them down,” he ordered. Gordon’s heart pounded and his mouth was dry, exactly the reaction the enemy had wanted from this exercise in calculated terror. Obviously the men of Cottage Grove weren’t even patrolling this far out anymore. That did not bode well.

An hour later he saw how much had changed since the last time he had visited the town. Watchtowers stood at the corners of new earthen ramparts. On the outside, prewar buildings had been razed to make a broad free-fire zone.

Population had swollen three-fold with refugees, most living in crowded shanties just inside the main gate. Children clung to the skirts of gaunt-faced women and stared as the riders from the north passed by. Men stood in clusters, warming their hands over open fires. The smoke mixed with a mist from unwashed bodies to make an unpleasant, aromatic fog.

Some of the men looked like pretty rough customers. Gordon wondered how many of them were Holnist infiltrators, only pretending to be refugees. It had happened before.

There was worse news. From the Town Council they learned that Mayor Peter Von Kleek had died in an ambush only days before, trying to lead a patrol to the aid of a besieged hamlet. The loss was incalculable and it struck Gordon hard. It also helped explain the mood of stunned silence on the cold streets.

He gave his best morale speech that evening, by torchlight in the crowded square. But this time the cheers of the crowd were tired and ragged. His address was interrupted twice by the faint, echoing crack of gunshots, carrying over the ramparts from the forest hills beyond.

“I don’t give ’em two months, once the snow melts,” Bokuto whispered the next day as they rode out of Cottage Grove. “Two weeks, if the damsurvivalists try hard.”

Gordon did not have to reply. The town was the southern
linchpin of the alliance. When it collapsed, there would be nothing to prevent the full force of the enemy from turning north to the heartland of the valley and Corvallis itself.

They rode south in a light flurry of snow, climbing the Coast Fork of the Willamette River toward its source. The dark green pine forest glistened under its white blanket. Here and there the bright red bark of myrtlewood stood out against the gray banks of the half-frozen stream.

Still, a few obstinate Mergansers fished the icy waters, trying in their own way to survive until spring.

South of the abandoned town of London, they left the diminished river. There followed a long, uninhabited stretch, featured only by the overgrown ruins of farms and an occasional tumbled-down gas station.

It had been a silent trek, so far. But now, at last, security lightened a bit as even the suspicious Philip Bokuto felt sure they were beyond the likely range of Holnist patrols. Talking was allowed. There was even laughter.

All of the men were over thirty, so they played the Remember Game … telling old-time jokes that would have no meaning at all to any of the new generation, and arguing lightheartedly over dimly recollected sports arcana. Gordon nearly fell out of his saddle laughing as Aaron Schimmel gave nasal impressions of popular television personalities of the nineties.

“It’s amazing how much of our youth gets stored away, ready to be recalled,” he commented to Philip. “They used to say one sign of getting old is when you remember things from twenty years ago easier than recent events.”

“Yeah,” Bokuto said, grinning, and his voice took on a querulous falsetto. “What was it we were just talking about?”

Gordon tapped the side of his head. “Eh? Can’t hear you, fellah.… Too much rock ’n’ roll, way back when.”

The men grew accustomed to the cold bite of wintry mornings and the soft pad of horses’ hooves on the grass-covered Interstate. The land had recovered—deer grazed these forests once again—but man would for a long time be
too sparse to come back and retake all the abandoned villages.

The Coast Fork tributaries fell away at last. The travelers crossed a narrow line of hills and a day later found themselves by the banks of a new stream.

“The Umpqua,” their guide identified.

The northerners stared. This chilled torrent did not empty into the placid Willamette, and thence the great Columbia. Rather it carved its own untamed way westward toward the sea. “Welcome to sunny southern Oregon,” Bokuto muttered, subdued once again. The skies glowered down on them. Even the trees seemed wilder than up north.

The impression held as they began passing small, stockaded settlements once again. Silent, narrow-eyed men watched them from eyries on the hillsides, and let them pass on by without speaking. Word of their coming had preceded them, and it was clear that these people had nothing against postmen. But it was just as obvious they had little use for strangers.

Spending a night in the village of Sutherlin, Gordon saw up close how the southerners lived. Their homes were simple and spare, with few of the amenities still owned by those in the north. Hardly anyone did not bear visible scars from disease, malnutrition, overwork, or war.

Although they did not stare or say anything discourteous, it wasn’t hard to guess what the locals thought of Willametters.

Soft
.

Their leaders expressed sympathy, but the hidden thought was obvious.
If the Holnists are leaving the south, why should we interfere?

A day later, in the trading center of Roseburg, Gordon met with a committee of headmen from the surrounding area. Bullet-spalled windows looked out on scenes recalling the destructive seventeen-year war against the Rogue River barbarians. A blasted Denny’s, its yellow plastic sign canted and melted, showed where the enemy had been turned back from their deepest thrust, nearly a decade ago.

The wild survivalists had never penetrated as far since. Gordon felt certain the site for the meeting had been chosen to make a point.

The difference in mood and personality was unmistakable. There was little curiosity about the legendary Cyclops, or about the flickering rebirth of technology. Even tales of a nation rising from its ashes in the far lands to the east brought only mild interest. It was not that they doubted the stories. The men from Glide and Winston and Lookinglass simply did not seem to care all that much.

“This is a waste of time,” Philip told Gordon. “These hicks have been fighting their own little war for so long, they don’t give a damn about anything but day to day existence.”

Does that make them smarter, perhaps?
Gordon wondered.

But Philip was right. It didn’t really matter what the bosses, mayors, sheriffs, or headmen thought anyway. They blustered, boasting of their autonomy, but it was obvious there was only one man whose opinion counted in these parts.

Two days later, Johnny Stevens rode in from the west on a steaming mount. He looked neither right nor left, but leapt from his horse to run to Gordon, breathless. This time the message he carried was three words long.

“Come on up.”

George Powhatan had agreed to hear their plea.

The Callahan Mountains bordered Camas Valley from Roseburg seventy miles to the sea. Below them, the main fork of the little Coquille River rushed westward under the shattered skeletons of broken bridges before meeting its north and south branches under the morning shadow of Sugarloaf Peak.

Here and there, along the north side of the valley, new fenceposts outlined pastures now covered with powdery snow. Chimney smoke rose from an occasional hilltop stockade.