CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

On the last night, the night before the long climb up into the high valley, the Boy woke. Against the wide dark blue sky of frosty night, the wind swept clouds swiftly across the night. The dark shadow of Horse stirred for a moment.

For the thousandth time the Boy thought now might be the time to leave.

He did not hear the voice of Sergeant Presley.

Maybe I have gone too far down a road I should’ve never traveled. Maybe the voice of Sergeant Presley has finished with me.

Maybe I have gone too far.

The fire was low and the Boy saw the Rock Star, mouth open, staring into the glowing embers.

For a while he lay still, but his weak side was stiff and cold.

How much of the night was left?

He drank cold water from his bag and limped over to the fire to warm his cursed weak side.

All around, the hunters slept. The Boy knew two or three were watching him, watching with the poison on nearby and ready arrows.

The hunters had kept their distance over much of this cold trek across the western face of the Sierras.

Poison.

The Rock Star began to speak.

She did not look at the Boy.

She stared into the flames after he added a log and sparks rose on the night wind.

“I was a girl—little more than—on the day it all went down.”

She swallowed. Her old face was hollow and dry like an empty water skin drained by time.

“I was a survivor though, even before all of the war that come. A survivor in a wasteland of malls and perfect families. My mother worked all the time. Worked so much I never saw her. We communicated by notes left on a little table in our tiny kitchen. One year I left the same note over and over and she never noticed.”

The Boy rubbed his weak calf, working the heat of his good hand into the thin muscle.

“I lived at the mall. I was there when it opened, and there was many a time I was the last out the door at closing. Frank. Frank let me out. Told me to go on home.

“When it all went to hell, we ran. We ran for the mountains. I was in the San Gabriel Foothills when one of them bombs went off south of Los Angeles. We were climbing on our hands and knees. I saw a flash light up everything ahead of me. And then a few seconds later, a hot rush of dry wind.

“We kept on moving, farther and farther up into the mountains.

“All these tribes, all these people of the mountains, I knew ’em all in those first days when we ran from the cities. They was just survivors then, running as fast as they could while the bombs kept falling. I think about that sometimes. I kept looking for my mom in each new group we come across. But it was always someone different to be found. I can see the Mexican woman with the twin boys standing by the body of her husband as we all walked past them on the trail. I can see those boys’ faces in all of them tribes folk down near Sonora. We traded some of our women years back with them when theirs kept making weak babies, worse than what you were born with. I see the bearded guy who got shot for his food in the back of a station wagon that had broke down. I see his face now and again in some of the men and children of the Psychos. He must’ve had kin that run off once we took to his stuff. But we hadn’t eaten in three days. So, it was to be expected. What I’m sayin’—and I’m thinkin’ about it all the more now as we come up to that rave—is, I’ll be seein’ all these people again. Except it’s not them. It’s their children and grands and great-grands. Strangers I passed, sitting among the fires of the refugee camps waiting for help that never came. Dark, muddy rain comin’ down on us. Eatin’ soup. Radio’s gone. No one knows anything and the things people say don’t mean anything to me. I was young and my world was limited to music and movies, or a boy I thought I loved and would run away with and we’d be together. We’d be a real family.

“All of us survivors thought we might make it in the first few weeks after the bombs. But the big winter that come taught us the error of our ways. What little survived that winter—two years long it was—what survived would be burned away in forest fires, taken by raiders, or plain just wore out.

“I was just a girl. I knew movies. I did whatever it took to survive.”

The dark sky above the orange glow of the fire turned a soft morning blue.

“I’m a rock star. I’m the bomb keeper. I’ve loved the grim reaper.” The Rock Star’s voice was strong but passionless, as if these lines were played for the thousandth time too many and to no one in particular.

“Words of power, Bear Killer, dontchu forget about me. Don’t forget I know them words. I’ve carried them from the Before. Carried them from a television inside my heart. From that fairy palace mall.

“Words of power.”