CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

“Them bodies are smelling,” said Vaclav.

They had been for some time.

“Tough. We need ’em to get through the gates, smell or no smell,” replied Raleigh. “Only way them Chinese are gonna let us in, is if they think we’re bounty hunters. These are the bounty.”

The Hard Men, as the Boy thought of them, were held up in a ravine south of Auburn.

They were waiting for MacRaven.

“Those Chinese up in the outpost are gonna smell ’em out here first. Then where will we be?” continued Vaclav.

“Shut it,” replied Raleigh. They sat in silence, the wagon at the center of the perimeter, each man up on an edge of the sloping ravine, waiting.

When MacRaven did arrive, he was alone. His ashen-faced warriors absent.

For a while MacRaven and Raleigh talked in whispers a little way up the ravine, away from the wagon. Then Raleigh summoned the Boy. “Get over here, kid,” he whispered.

MacRaven rested a warm hand on the Boy’s shoulder.

Don’t show him you don’t trust him, Boy. Don’t even flinch in the slightest.

“Raleigh tells me you done good in the ambush. All right then, I got a new mission for you. If you’re in? Good,” said MacRaven without waiting. He was dressed in the mishmash battle armor of the tribes. His breastplate was an old road sign covered in hide. His shoulders were padded and reinforced with bent hubcaps. He wore a skirt of metal chain across his pants. His smile, like some hungry beast’s, encompassed more than just the Boy, as if the whole world were a meal, waiting to be taken in and devoured between his long teeth.

In time, Raleigh and the Boy were on the wagon and on the old road into Auburn.

A foul odor rose from under the hide tarp as the last of the afternoon washed out the brown-and-yellow landscape.

“We do this right and there’ll be rifles aplenty for all of us,” said Raleigh as he drove the team forward, away from the other Hard Men.

As the wagon full of bodies bumped its way along the track, the Boy watched Horse recede, his lead trailing to a stake, Vaclav smiling at him as they drove up the ravine and out onto the main road leading down to the gates of Auburn.

“Chinese got a rifle factory somewhere and the chief thinks it’s here. So we got to do this right,” said Raleigh between clicks and chucks of encouragement to the wagon team.

In the quiet, only the creak of the wagon could be heard beyond the clop of the team.

“Have you ever been to San Francisco?” asked the Boy.

“Nah. We came from up north, working in what used to be Canada. We rode together for years until MacRaven. Then, well, he was the man with the plan, know what I mean?”

“And what’s the plan?”

Raleigh cast a glance at the Boy over his drooping handlebar mustache.

Overplayed it, Boy.

They rode on in silence.

But the voice of Sergeant Presley was there and the Boy thought about what he heard in it.

The mission for you, Boy, is still the same. Find I Corps. Give them the map. Whatever’s about to happen here ain’t your concern.

But they’re going on to San Francisco. If the Army still exists there, then MacRaven and the tribes are going to come at the Army from behind.

This army won’t be any match for I Corps, Boy. We had guns, tanks, helicopters. We’d chew this bunch up and spit ’em out.

He remembered the day Sergeant Presley had said that. They were hiding in the rocks, watching a village outside the dead lands of Oklahoma City—a village of salvagers being overrun by streaming bands of wild lunatics. The savagery had been brutal. They’d ridden three days just to get clear of that mess.

He remembered Sergeant Presley, his breath ragged in the cool night of that ride.

We had guns, tanks, helicopters. We’d chew this bunch up and spit ’em out.

But Sergeant Presley’s gun had run out of ammo long before he’d ever met the Boy.

They’d seen the wrecks of countless war machines in their travels across the country.

They’d seen the burned hulls of melted tanks.

Downed and twisted helicopters.

Jets scattered across wide fields, only the wings and tail sections remaining to tell nothing of what had happened.

Even guns used as clubs by lunatics who didn’t know any better.

He thought of the tribes on the march even now, closing the distance to this Chinese outpost.

Just like that village of salvagers outside Oklahoma City, Boy.

Sergeant, if I Corps had been fighting the Chinese all those years ago, over two hundred miles to the west, how do the Chinese have a settlement here?

I don’t know, Boy. Stick to the mission.

I heard you say that many times, all the times I ever asked you what happened to those tanks and helicopters and jets we passed. Each time you said the same thing.

I don’t know, Boy. Stick to the mission.

We don’t know nothin’ and orders is orders, Boy. You find I Corps and report. Tell ’em …

And yet there was the Chinese outpost, two hundred miles east of Oakland.

And there was Horse.

And there was drawing on cave walls.

And there is the mystery of what will become of me after I deliver the map.

Who will I be then?

And this voice was his alone.