Ingolf swore admiringly and shook his head; Jose did think ahead. But then, the Tejano had been a wandering paid soldier for a long time, nearly as long as the profes sion had existed post-Change. He’d told a lot of stories, including some where the hired soldiers robbed the ones who hired them. And others where the employers were suddenly struck with the thought—after the fighting was over—that dead men didn’t draw pay.
Jose’s loyal to his friends, he thought. That’s for damned sure.
“Let’s get going,” he said, lifting his saddle and blan ket off a crate stenciled to proclaim that it was full of TV remote controls, whatever those were, from South Korea, wherever the hell that was. “I want to be a long way from here by dark.”
* * * *
Central Illinois
October 30, CY21/2019 A.D.
The prairie’s just so goddamned huge, Ingolf thought. That was the biggest thing about it: the sheer size, and around here it was nearly flat, with a roll you had to concentrate to see over an hour or so of jogging along at walk-trot-canter-trot-walk. In a generation the grasses had conquered anew the empire that the settlers’ steel plows had ripped away, and the wildfires had burned out most of the remnants of house and barn and fence.
Tall grass rippled in endless green-bronze surging waves under the mild dry breeze, to a horizon infinitely distant in every direction. The sound of it was an endless sssssSSSSSSsssss, growing and then fading again as each wave went by, over and over, like ocean foam on a sandy beach. Even the noonday sun seemed to hang unchanging for a while overhead.
The scent it baked out of the grass was like lying in a haymow, but wilder and with a spicy tang to it. And there was the first hint of winter to come; it was just cool enough to be comfortable in a mail shirt with a padded gambeson beneath, but the crisp air held a hint that told you a blizzard could hit anytime from now on and leave you hip deep in snow.
The land wasn’t much like the forested hills and tilled river valleys of Ingolf’s home, but the weather gave him a pang of nostalgia for the long cool days of Indian sum mer along the Kickapoo. Homelike too were the geese and ducks that made ragged Vs in the afternoon sky above, their honking a lonely chorus to accompany the beat of hooves and creak of saddle leather.
He’d spent a lot of time in country like this, in Iowa and Nebraska and southern Minnesota. The only trees were clumps marking old windbreaks around farm-steads, and many of those were dead and burnt. A few maple and burr-oak saplings had taken root in breaks in the asphalt—it protected them from the fires and com petition from the grasses. This wasn’t his kind of country, but it was a kind he’d ridden often enough, and that was almost a homecoming.
“Don’t get overconfident,” he said, sensing the growing cheer of his companions. “We’re not home until we cross the Mississippi—or catch up to Jose and the guys.”
Singh grunted. “If we ever do, after the way we’ve had to go back and forth,” he said.
Which was fair enough. The last delay had been when they tried to take a shortcut and got stranded in thousands of square miles of renascent wetland the maps didn’t show, before finding the trail again—you couldn’t just barrel down the old interstates, not these days. This road was a guess at Jose’s probable choices. Too many bridges and overpasses were out. He couldn’t even rely on his second-in command taking exactly the same route back as they’d used coming out, since the local wild men would be on the lookout for that.
He could have gone farther south, to cross the Illinois where it runs north and south instead of east and west, Ingolf fretted.
This had been a secondary road in the old days, two lane blacktop, and it lay on natural high ground, running northward to cross the Illinois River and connect with old US 80, which would give a good run west to cross the Mississippi at Muscatine. The grass alongside the cracked remnants of pavement was mostly big bluestem, seven or eight feet tall in this season, where it hadn’t been flattened by the weather; you had to stand in the stirrups to see over it. The heads branched out into three lobed “turkey feet” over long reddish blue stems thick as a man’s little finger.
Now and then they passed the tilted, rust tattered remains of a silo or barn; a drumlike booming came from one where the breeze buckled a stretch of sheet metal like a saw flexing between two hands, echoing with lonely persistence over the empty land.
It’s just as dangerous here as the East Coast, even if it isn’t as spooky, he reminded himself. More so, perhaps.
The hordes from the Chicago metroplex had met those from Peoria and even East St. Louis here, and the die-off had been bad; many had been so ignorant of country life that they’d perished fighting for scraps in the shadow of grain elevators and silos still mostly full.
The children of the survivors were perhaps a bit less like two legged rats than the ones farther east; for one thing they’d been joined over the years by desperate outlaws and broken men drifting in from Iowa and north Missouri over the Mississippi. A few had taken to trading across the river in hides and furs, and most of them didn’t eat human flesh anymore. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t rob and kill—and they had horses and bows and shetes to do it with, many of them.
A stirring in the long grass brought his bow up, but it was only a mob of feral cattle. There was no point in shooting, since they had the better part of a yearling elk across one of the packhorses. The herd crossed the old roadway eastward in a bawling, surging mass as they be came aware of the humans, their heads up in fear. Sev eral hundred went by; animals had crossed the river too, and bred back swiftly in these rich empty lands.
They’d seen plenty of deer and elk and beaver as well, and sign of catamounts and wolves, bears and tigers, even a few buffalo. These cow-beasts were lean and rangy and long of horn, but their smell was nostalgic. His father had been a great cattle breeder, and had made Readstown famous throughout the Kickapoo Valley for his Angus and Holstein studs bred up from stock . . . acquired . . . right after the Change.
Kaur came trotting back across the fields from the northwest, riding bent over so that she was invisible until she was in earshot except as a ripple in the grass. She shouted their cry—“The Villains!”—to alert them and reined in, throwing him a casual salute as she came within speaking distance. The brother and sister were ragged and filthy; everyone in the little group was, after two months of flight and occasional fight winning their way west. She and Singh still managed to look as if they were about to be inspected, somehow.
“I saw their campsite, Captain,” she said.
“Good! Whereabouts are they headed?”
“The bridge is still up at Spring Valley,” she said, point ing back with her bow hand. “Just go one road over; it’s US 89 on the map, straight north on that. But once you’re up out of the river flats and the old townsite on the north bank the land is black for a couple of miles—that was as far as I went—prairie fire. Still smoking. Jose left the ‘proceeding as normal’ sign at the bridge.”
“Thought there’d been a fire,” Ingolf said—they’d seen the smoke passing from east to west ahead of them earlier that day. “Well, we’ll get through the burn fast as we can.”
Not having any grain for feed cut how hard and long you could push horses, even switching off with your other mount several times a day; particularly if you wanted them to have any reserve for an emergency, when losing a horse meant losing your life. They stopped to let them graze for an hour or so. He ate some of the elk they’d cooked that morning with notable lack of enthusiasm.
“What I’d give for fresh bread and French fries and catsup,” he said.
“Or some vegetables,” Singh agreed. “Or an apple.”
He looked around at the ground where they squatted, then dug at it with his bowie for a moment, pulling up a clump of bluestem. He had to lean back to do it, with all the strength of his body behind it before the main stem cracked audibly. Some of the roots were as thick as a pencil, and the ground that clung to it was a fine dark gray whose
clods would be coal black when they were wet.
“This is good land,” the Sikh said. “It seems a pity it isn’t farmed.”
Ingolf nodded; the thought had occurred to him and Jose. “Yeah,” he said. “But you’d need at least a thousand people to make a settlement here in the wild lands—and a fort, windmills, all sorts of stuff besides stock and tools and enough to keep you for a year or two until you had a big enough crop in. Not safe otherwise.”
Kaur snorted and picked a piece of gristle out from between her teeth. “I will not farm again,” she said quietly.
Ingolf tossed a gnawed rib aside and wiped the back of one big hand across his mouth before taking a swig from his canteen. “Let’s get to it.”
There was the usual short delay as a horse decided it wanted to stop for the night right here, but they were all hobbled and easy to catch. The short route to the bridge lay off the slightly raised roadbed; as they turned into the grass visibility shrank to less than the length of a lance, but that worked both ways—they were no longer visible themselves. Pushing through the tall coarse growth slowed the horses, and you had to watch out for pits and traps; old basements and foundations, pieces of farm machinery that had lain out for better than twenty years, and tangles of elderly barbed wire. Posts burned but the wire endured until rust broke it, unless someone harvested it to make chain mail or a new fence.
The iron-shod hooves crushed a path, and trampled nodding yellow-petaled black eyed Susans like giant daisies, clusters of purple-blue ironweed with flocks of silver spotted skippers hovering about them, and blue gentian. Quail burst out from under their hooves occasionally; Kaur nailed one to the ground with an arrow before it could flog itself into the air, bent in the saddle and scooped it up, then dropped back to the packhorse that held their meat.
“Bit of a change.” Ingolf nodded.
They came up onto another road. He grunted in satisfaction at the sight of saplings crushed down where they’d taken root in broken spaces in the pavement; that and a neat circular space trampled flat in the long grass meant that Jose and the others had come through here with the wagons. He looked at the campfires and over at Kaur.
“Last night?”
“Last night.” She nodded with satisfaction.
“By God, if we’re lucky we may actually catch them by first dark!”
The river ran through a depression in the flat land with scalloped sides, an irregular ribbon of woods through the grasslands, bare-branched gray except where faded yel low and dark red tatters told of autumn’s blaze and burn. The road bridge was a metal truss on concrete piers; a fresh gash in the railing on the western side showed where someone, almost certainly the Villains, had pushed an ancient truck over the side. It stood like a new island downstream, the water rippling around it, shedding the rust of a generation to join the Mississippi.
Ingolf sniffed. The scent of burning was strong now, and there was still a little gritty ash drifting in, making him blink watering eyes. They all wet down their bandannas from their canteens and tied them across their mouths before they left the ruins of the little city of Spring Valley.
Out on the flatlands north of town the grassland was burned down to stubble, leaving an empty plain of blackness. Smoke drifted over it from patches still smoldering; nothing stood above ground level save the charred stumps of trees and an occasional snag of wall. The des olate appearance was deceptive; in a single season this would be lush prairie again, growing all the stronger for the layer of ash. The tall grasses kept much of their bulk down belowground, and however hot the flame it didn’t kill out the roots. The seeds of some of the other plants needed fire to germinate. Every season’s fire gnawed away a little more of the works of men, though.
He coughed into the damp cloth. “I hope our folks got out in time,” he said, worry in his voice.
They all nodded, familiar with the dangers of a prairie fire. In old dry grass like this the wall of flame could be twenty or thirty feet high, traveling faster than a gallop ing horse and ready to scorch out the lungs of anything it caught. He stood in the stirrups where the road turned west and peered under a sheltering hand, squinting against the midafternoon sun.
“Doesn’t look like the fire’s still going,” he said. “Not enough smoke.”
Singh nodded. “The wind’s shifted,” he pointed out. It was in their faces now, carrying gusts of smoke and ash. “It’s usually westerly around here anyway. That would push the fire back onto the burned ground.”
Ingolf jerked his head in anxious agreement. “Think the wild men could have set it?” Kaur said, jogging along a little ahead.
“Could be. Could be they did it to drive game—it’s time for their big fall hunts.”
Or they could have done it to cover an attack, Ingolf thought. Or even if they didn’t, they’d take the chance to kill and rob anyone caught in it.
By unspoken common consent they legged their horses up into a canter on the shoulder of the road. Out in the burned over fields small explosions of crows and buzzards took off from the blackened corpses of animals caught in the fire. After a half mile Ingolf swore and got out his binoculars for an instant.
“That’s the wagons, all right. Hup!”
They rocked up into a hard gallop. The five big ve hicles were strung out on the road in marching order. One was burning, the stores-wagon, with little bitter gouts of flame when the flames hit something like linseed oil or the varnish on a spare bow. The four with the loot weren’t; someone had taken the trouble to lash down the spare tilts over the everyday ones and lace everything tight, which gave sparks few places to light on vehicles mostly made of pre-Change metal. For the rest, from the signs they’d just taken all the horses and bolted when it became clear the fire was going to hit, which was sensible.
He and Kaur and Singh threw their lassoes over bits of the burning wagon, snubbed the lariats to the horns of their saddles and backed the animals, pulling it lurch ing and smoking a safe distance from the others. The horses snorted and protested, but they were too well disciplined to really balk. Then they turned west again, riding hard.
“Shit,” Ingolf swore; it was far too serious for uff da.
The first body was an ostler named Sauer they’d hired east of Kalona; he’d quarreled with his farmer and been turned out of his cottage and job, but he’d always pulled his weight on the trip. Sauer had burned, and died of it. The rest of the bodies were hidden by a heaving carpet of buzzards and crows and ravens, but they were just off the scorched zone, where streaky fingers of black stretched into the bronze-brown of untouched prairie. The bluestem was trampled flat for several hundred square yards. Carrion birds took wing in a black cloud as the riders came up, revealing the arrow stubs.
“Hit them as they came out of the smoke,” Singh said grimly, pointing to where a ragged line lay, along with several dead horses.
Ingolf nodded, his throat too tight to speak. A straggling trail of bodies showed where the pursuit had gone.
“These took one with them each,” he said with angry pride, reading the signs on the ground.
A circle of bodies marked where Jose and about a dozen had made a last stand. The suddenness of it winded him, like someone starting a fight with an unexpected punch in the gut; half an hour ago he’d been looking forward to seeing the man again, and now there he lay on his back with the stubs of two arrows through his mail shirt and most of his face gone from the birds. There was blood on the broken shete that lay near his hand; he’d gotten that much at least.
Six years I knew you, he thought. Battle and hunt and camp and barroom. We saved each other’s lives more times than I can count. You taught me better than half of what I know. Go with God, brother.
He dismounted and knelt for a second with head bowed over clasped hands, asking that there be mercy for the soul of Jose Menendez, onetime sergeant in the Lomas Altas Emergency Guard, of late troop leader in Vogeler’s Villains. Then he covered the ravaged face with a broken shield.
And
for you, Greg, Tommy, Dave, Will, he thought, fury building. You all deserved better than this.
Singh was gray-faced and shaking. “The wild men will suffer for this; their tents will burn and their women will weep,” he said thickly. “We will avenge them, we will—”
“Wait!” Kaur said. “Would the wild men leave their armor? Harness on the horses?”
Ingolf took a deep breath and then another, scrub bing a hand across his face, the rough leather of his glove scratching and pulling at the hairs of his cropped beard.
“Think, you cheese-head hayseed, goddamnit,” he whispered savagely to himself.
His eyes darted about. “Yeah, and the arrowheads, and everything else . . . cloth, tools, shoes . . . they’d have stripped the bodies bare and dug out all the broken arrows. And scalped them. And butchered the dead horses for their meat and hides. All that this bunch took was the live horses and the shetes and knives and bows.”
“You are right,” Singh said.
He pulled a broken lance shaft out of a horse’s torso with a grunt, then stabbed it into the ground to clean it off. The three of them stood around it and looked, with Kuttner still mounted and keeping an eye out.
Ingolf grunted again. The lance head was about eight inches long, fastened to the mountain ash shaft with a skillfully forged tubular socket heat-shrunk onto the wood. It wasn’t quite the style of any he was familiar with, but it was far too well made for a wild-man troop, even this far west. And . . .
He took it from the Sikh and held it so the westering sun caught the surface and showed irregularities, especially where dried blood stuck. A rayed sun was etched into the steel.
“Kaur!” he said. “Your shete!”
She drew and held it out beside the broken lance; the design on the sun figure was identical.