The Postman (34 page)

The idea was tempting. South was one direction their pursuers wouldn’t expect them to go.

But that would mean crossing the river. And anyway, if Gordon remembered correctly, the Salmon River was a long way south of here. Even if it were practical to sneak through a couple of hundred miles of survivalist baronies, there just wasn’t time. With spring here, they were needed back home worse than ever.

“We’ll wait up in the hills until pursuit’s gone past,” he said. “Then we might as well try for the Coquille.”

Johnny, forever cheerful and willing, did not let their dim chances get him down. He shrugged. “Let’s go get the canoe then.” He jumped into the frigid, waist-deep water. Gordon picked up a sturdy piece of driftwood to use as a gaff, and followed a little more gingerly. The water wasn’t any less bitterly cold the second time. His toes were starting to go numb.

Together they had almost reached the belly-up canoe when Johnny cried out and pointed,
“The mail!”

At the fringe of their eddy, a glistening oilskin packet could be seen drifting outward, toward the swift center of the current.

“No!” Gordon cried. “Let it go!”

But Johnny had already leaped head first into the rushing waters. He swam hard toward the receding package, even as Gordon screamed after him. “Come back here. Johnny, you fool! It’s worthless!

“Johnny!”

He watched hopelessly as the bundle and the boy chasing it were swept around the next bend in the river. From just ahead there came the heavy, heartless growl of rapids.

Cursing, Gordon dove into the freezing current and swam with all his might to catch up. His pulse pounded and he inhaled icy water along with every desperate breath. He almost followed Johnny around the bend, but then, at the last moment, he grabbed an overhanging branch and held on tightly … just in time.

Through the curtain of foam he saw his young friend tumble after the black package into the worst cascade yet, a horrible jumbling of ebony teeth and spray.

“No,” Gordon whispered hoarsely. He watched as Johnny and the packet were swept together over a ledge and disappeared into a sinkhole.

He continued staring, through the hair plastered over his eyes and the blinding, stinging droplets, but minutes passed and nothing emerged from that terrible whirlpool.

At last, with his grip slipping, Gordon had to retreat. He drew himself hand over hand along the shaky branch until he reached the slow, shallow water at the river’s bank. Then, mechanically, he forced his feet to carry him upstream, slogging past the wide-eyed women to the ruined bark canoe.

He used a driftwood hook to draw it after him behind a jutting point in the canyon wall, and there he pounded the little boat to pieces, smashing it into unrecognizable flinders.

Sobbing, he kept striking and slashing the water long after the bits had sunk out of sight or drifted away.

They passed the day in the brambles and weeds under a tumbledown concrete bunker. Before the Doomwar, it must have been someone’s treasured survivalist hideaway, but now it was a ruin—broken, bullet-scarred, and looted.

Once, in prewar days, Gordon had read that there were places in the country riddled with hideouts like this—stockpiled by men whose hobby was thinking about the fall of society, and fantasizing what they would do after it happened. There had been classes, workshops, special-interest magazines … an industry catering to “needs” which went far beyond those of the average woodsman or camper.

Some simply liked to daydream, or enjoyed a relatively harmless passion for rifles. Few were ever followers of Nathan Holn, and most were probably horrified when their fantasies at last came true.

When that time finally arrived, most of the loner “survivalists” died in their bunkers, quite alone.

Battle and the rain forest had eroded the few scraps left by waves of scavengers. Cold rain pattered over the concrete blocks as the three fugitives took turns keeping watch and sleeping.

Once they heard shouts and the squish of horses’ hooves in the mud. Gordon made an effort to look confident for the women’s sake. He had taken care to leave as little trail as possible, but his two charges weren’t even as experienced as the Willamette Army scouts. He wasn’t at all
sure they would be able to fool the best forest trackers who had lived since Cochise.

The riders moved on, and after a while the fugitives were able to relax just a little. Gordon dozed.

This time he did not dream. He was too exhausted to spare any energy for hauntings.

They had to wait for the moonrise before setting out that night. There were several trails, crisscrossing each other frequently, but Gordon somehow kept them going in the right direction, using the semipermanent ice on the north sides of the trees as a guide.

Three hours after sunset, they came upon the ruins of a little village.

“Illahee.” Heather identified the place.

“It’s been abandoned,” he observed. The moonlit ghost town was eerie. From the former Baron’s manor to the lowliest hovel, it seemed to have been picked clean.

“All the soldiers an’ their serfs were sent up north,” Marcie explained. “There’s been a lot of villages emptied that way, last few weeks.”

Gordon nodded. “They’re fighting on three fronts. Macklin wasn’t kidding when he said he would be in Corvallis by May. It’s take over the Willamette or die.”

The countryside looked like a moonscape. There were saplings everywhere, but few tall trees. Gordon realized that this must have been one of the places where the Holnists had tried slash-and-burn agriculture. But this country was not fertile farmland, like the Willamette Valley. The experiment must have been a failure.

Heather and Marcie held hands as they walked, their eyes darting fearfully. Gordon couldn’t help comparing them to Dena and her proud, brave Amazons, or to happy, optimistic Abby back in Pine View. The true dark age would not be a happy time for women, he decided. Dena had been right about that much.

“Let’s go look around the big house,” he said. “There might be some food.”

That
sparked their interest. They ran ahead of him to the abandoned manor with its stockade and abatis surrounding a solid, prewar house.

When he caught up they were huddled over a pair of dark forms just within the gate. Gordon flinched when he saw that they were skinning and flaying two large German shepherd dogs. Their master couldn’t take them on a sea voyage, he realized a little sickly. No doubt the Holnist Baron of Illahee grieved more over his treasured animals than over the slaves who would die during the mass exodus to the promised lands up north.

The meat smelled pretty ripe. Gordon decided he would wait a while, in hopes of something better. The women, though, weren’t quite so finicky.

So far they had been lucky. At least the search seemed to have swept westward, away from the direction the fugitives were headed. Perhaps General Macklin’s men had found Johnny’s body by now, falsely confirming the trail toward the sea.

Only time would tell how far their luck would last though.

A narrow, swift stream swept north from near abandoned Illahee. Gordon decided it could be nothing other than the south fork of the Coquille. Of course there were no convenient canoes lying about. The torrent looked unnavigable anyway. They would have to walk.

An old road ran along the east bank, in the direction they wanted to go. There was no choice but to use it, whatever the obvious dangers. Mountains crowded in just ahead, hulking against the moonlit clouds, blocking every other conceivable path.

At least the going would be quicker than on the muddy trails. Or so Gordon hoped. He coaxed the stoic women, keeping them moving at a slow, steady pace. Never once did Marcie or Heather complain or balk, nor were their eyes reproachful. Gordon could not decide whether it was courage or resignation that kept them plodding on, mile after mile.

For that matter, he wasn’t sure why
he
persevered. To
what point? To live in the dark world that seemed certain to come? At the rate he was accumulating ghosts, “crossing over” would probably feel like Homecoming Week anyway.

Why?
he wondered.
Am I the only Twentieth-Century idealist left alive?

Perhaps
, he pondered.
Perhaps idealism really
was
the disease, the scam, that Charles Bezoar had said it was
.

George Powhatan had been right, too. It did you no good to fight for the Big Things … for civilization, for instance. All you accomplished was getting young girls and boys to believe in you—to throw their lives away in worthless gestures, accomplishing nothing.

Bezoar had been right. Powhatan had been right. Even Nathan Holn, monster that he was, had told the essential truth about Ben Franklin and his constitutionalist cronies—how they had hoodwinked a people into believing such things. They had been propagandists to make Himmler and Trotsky blush as amateurs.

 … 
We
hold these truths to be self evident …

Hah!

Then there had been the Order of the Cincinnati, made up of George Washington’s officers who—halfway embarked one night upon a mutinous coup—were shamed by their stern commander into giving their tearful, solemn vow … to remain farmers and citizens first, and soldiers only at their country’s need and call.

Whose idea had it been, that unprecedented oath? The promise was kept for a generation, long enough for the ideal to set. In essence, it lasted into the era of professional armies and technological war.

Until the end of the Twentieth Century, that is, when certain powers decided that soldiers should be made into something more than mere men. The thought of Macklin and his augmented veterans, loosed on the unsuspecting Willametters, made Gordon heartsick. But there wasn’t anything he or anyone else could do to prevent it.

Not a whit can be done about it
, he thought wryly.
But that won’t keep the damn ghosts from pestering me
.

The South Coquille grew more swollen with every mile
they slogged, as streamlets joined in from the enclosing hills. A gloomy drizzle began to fall, and thunder rumbled in counterpoint to the roaring torrent to their left. As they rounded a bend in the road, the northern sky brightened with distant flashes of lightning.

Looking up at the glowering clouds, Gordon almost stumbled into Marcie’s back as she came to a sudden halt. He put out his hand to give her a gentle push, as he had been forced to do more and more often the last few miles. But this time her feet were planted.

She turned to face him, and in her eyes there was a bleakness that went beyond anything Gordon had seen in seventeen years of war. Chilled with a dark foreboding, he pushed past her and looked down the road.

Thirty yards or so ahead lay the ruins of an old roadside trading post. A faded sign advertised myrtlewood carvings for sale at fabulous prices. Two rusted automobile hulks lay half settled into the mud in front.

Four horses and a two-wheeled cart were tethered to the slump-sided shack. From under the canted porch roof, General Macklin stood with his arms folded, and smiled at Gordon.

“Run!” Gordon yelled at the women and he dove through the roadside thicket, rolling up behind a moss-covered trunk with Johnny’s rifle in his hands. As he moved, he knew he was being a fool. Macklin still might have some faint wish to keep him alive, but in a firefight he was already dead.

He knew he had leaped on instinct—to get away from the women, to draw attention after himself and give them a chance to get away.
Stupid idealist
, he cursed. Marcie and Heather simply stood there on the road, too tired or too resigned even to move.

“Now that ain’t so smart,” Macklin said, his voice at its most amiable and dangerous. “Do you think you can manage to shoot me,
Mr. Inspector?”

The thought had occurred to Gordon. It depended, of course, on the augment letting him get close enough to try.
And on whether the twenty-year-old ammo still worked after its dunking in the Rogue.

Macklin still had not moved. Gordon raised his head and saw through the leaves that Charles Bezoar stood beside the General. Both of them looked like easy targets out there in the open. But as he slid the rifle’s bolt and began to crawl forward, Gordon realized, sickly,
there were four horses
.

There came a sudden crashing sound from just overhead. Before he could even react, a crushing weight slammed onto his back, driving his sternum onto the rifle stock.

Gordon’s mouth gaped, but no air would come! He could barely twitch a muscle as he felt himself lifted into the air by his collar. The rifle slipped from nearly senseless fingers.

“Did this guy really waste two of ours last year?” a gravelly voice behind his left ear shouted in cheerful derision. “Seems a bit of a
woos
to me.”

It felt like an eternity, but at last something reopened inside him and Gordon was able to breathe again. He sucked noisily, caring more about air at the moment than dignity.

“Don’t forget those three soldiers back at Agness,” Macklin called back to his man. “He gets credit for them, too. That makes five Holnist ears on his belt, Shawn. Our Mr. Krantz deserves respect.

“Now bring him in, please. I’m sure he and the ladies would like a chance to get warm.”

Gordon’s feet barely touched the ground as his captor half carried him by his collar through the thicket and across the road. The augment wasn’t even breathing hard when he dumped Gordon unceremoniously on the porch.

Under the leaky canopy, Charles Bezoar stared hard at Marcie; the Holnist Colonel’s eyes burned with shame and promised retribution. But Marcie and Heather watched only Gordon, silently.

Macklin squatted beside Gordon. “I always did admire
a man with a knack for the ladies. I’ve got to admit, you do seem to have a way with ’em, Krantz.” He grinned. Then he nodded to his beefy aide. “Bring him inside, Shawn. The women have work to do, and the Inspector and I have some unfinished business to discuss.”

“I know all about your women now, you know.”