Dies The Fire

Chapter Fourteen

B emused, Michael Havel whistled as he lowered the binoculars and wiped a hand across his dust-caked face; then he made a futile attempt to scratch under the edge of his sleeveless boiled-steerhide jacket.

They were on the flats where the Middle and South Clearwater met, a half mile from the little town of Kooskia, with steep rocky slopes all around them to hold the air and reflect the bright spring sun; the smell of spray from the brawling rivers was tantalizing.

It was a hundred miles south and west from the place the Piper Chieftain had crashed, twice that as feet and hooves and wheels went; weeks of hard slow travel.

"Well, spank me rosy," Havel said, nodding westward. "Those guys look like they're out to get General Custer."

They were also just inside the Nez Perce reservation boundary.

Beyond the waiting men was a bridge over a river gray-blue with snowmelt; beyond that, the town proper-as proper as a place with less than a thousand inhabitants could be-and a high conical hill studded with tall pines-more hills reared a little beyond, green-tawny with new grass pushing up through last year's, and fingers of pine reaching up the ravines. Beyond that were rolling prairies, farming and ranching country; he'd driven through this way before the Change, and flown over it more than once.

It was hard to remember that godlike omniscience, ten thousand feet up with hundreds of horsepower at his command.

Havel wasn't surprised to see armed and mounted men strung across the valley road; every town and community they'd run across that hadn't collapsed kept a watch on the roads and checked travelers. Their scouts had probably reported the Bearkillers coming yesterday or early this morning.

The way some of them were dressed, though:

Several of the horsemen waiting for them a hundred yards further west along the road were in full Indian fig- feather bonnets and face paint and buckskin-stuff you usually didn't see outside a powwow and even there only on the dancers. Two of their mounts were Appaloosas, beautiful animals with dappled white rumps and bold strong lines. Sitting their horses a little apart were white men, in the usual denim-and-Stetson-or-feed-store-cap of the rural West. A lot of the Nez Perce reservation was leased to non-Indians, farmers and ranchers and a few small towns.

"It's quite a sight," Will Hutton agreed, pushing back his helmet by the nasal bar and squinting against the bright sunlight and the sweat that stung his eyes.

"On the other hand, I'm wearin' this stuff, Mike," he went on in a reasonable tone. The leather of his saddle creaked beneath him as the horse shifted its weight from one foot to another. "And it goes back a lot further than Custer."

The Texan had their first complete set of chain-mail armor, a knee-length split-skirt tunic with sleeves to the elbow. All you needed to make it was a wooden dowel, a pair of wire cutters, pliers, and a punch and hammer: plus plenty of patience, which was why they had only one suit so far. Will and his pupils could turn out a boiled-leather vest in an afternoon, and every adult had one now; a chain hauberk took weeks.

Havel took the canteen from his saddlebow and drank; the lukewarm water tasted good, and he poured a little into his hand and rubbed it over his face. Then he offered the water bottle to Hutton, who'd run through two so far today.

The Texan took it gratefully, and tilted it back until water ran out of the corners of his mouth as his Adam's apple bobbed; sweat was pouring off him in rivulets, turning the linked metal rings dark. Nights were still chilly around here in April, and days comfortable-windbreaker weather, but thirty pounds of metal rings absorbed a lot of heat. The gambeson, the long quilted jacket underneath, was even worse. Its padding soaked up greasy sweat like a sponge, too; the powerful odor combined with the scents of horse and leather and oiled metal to make a composite stink not quite like anything Havel had come across before- although it had probably been quite familiar in the army of William of Normandy.

"Yeah," Havel said, taking the canteen back. "But you're dressed up like Richard the Lionheart for a good practical reason, not just because of the way it looks."

Although it does look formidable too.

The gear and helmet added bulk and menace to the older man's lean muscular toughness. Hauberks had to be individually tailored; Havel 's was nearly finished, but Angelica and Signe and Astrid were doing something confidential with it.

I'm not looking forward to wearing that stuff myself, especially when it gets really hot, he thought. But I'd much rather be uncomfortable than dead or crippled.

"That fancy dress may be practical too, so to speak," Hutton said, nodding his head towards the welcoming party. "These're hard times, Mike. People need somethin' to hold on to, besides the things that broke in their hands when the Change came. Might be that those old-time things are what these Indians need to get them through."

Havel thought for a moment, then nodded. "Tell me something, Will: how come you're not running this outfit?"

Hutton grinned. "Two reasons. First is, I'm the only black man in it-you might have noticed we're sort of thin on the ground here in Idaho. Simpler to tell you what needs doing and let you get folks mad at you; 'specially since you take advice pretty good for a dude your age."

"Well, that's honest, if not very flattering. What's the other reason?"

"You were stupid enough to want the job, Mike," Hutton said. "I ain't. 'Boss' is just another word for 'got a headache.'"

Havel snorted laughter, then stood in his stirrups to wave at the reception committee. Several of them waved back, but he waited until another rider cantered in out of the north before he moved.

Josh Sanders drew rein; he was equipped much like the Bearkillers' leader, with boiled-leather protection, sword, shield, bow and helmet.

"That's all of them, Boss," he said, pointing off towards the Nez Perce. "No ambush that I could spot."

Havel nodded; the Hoosier was a first-rate scout, mounted or on foot.

"All right. Report to Angelica"-who was camp boss and in charge when he or Will wasn't there-"and tell her I want her and Will with me while we dicker and. hmmm, all the Larssons. Pam to keep everyone on alert, but don't be conspicuous about it."

Sanders's eyebrows went up. Havel had never liked the blind-obedience school of discipline; when there was time, he preferred to explain things. It cut down on mistakes when people understood why they were doing something; he'd also never imagined he was infallible, and Sanders was smart. Letting your troops' brains lie fallow was wasteful and dangerous.

Besides, he thought, this may be a small outfit now, but Josh'll need to play leader too someday when we've grown.

"We want them to think we're tough but peaceful," he said. "Will and Eric and I can do the tough; women, kids and old people along are more likely to make 'em think we're not looking for a fight."

"That makes sense," Sanders said. "Angelica and the Larssons, pronto, Boss."

He cantered off. Will cocked an eye at Havel. "Mebbeso you're smarter than you look," he said.

Havel chuckled and turned in his saddle. The Bearkiller caravan was about a thousand yards behind him; four wagons now, and nearly fifty people in all, counting kids. They'd pulled off the narrow country road onto a fairly flat stretch of roadside sagebrush-ease of access was one reason they didn't use the Interstates much. Folk had pitched camp and were getting on with the work of the day:

Signe Larsson sighed and reached for the weights as the wagons pulled off to the side of the road.

"No rest for the wicked," she said.

"If you want, I'll swap you a chores day for a weapons training day: " Luanne hinted.

"That is so not funny, Luanne. 'Sides, the cows were such fun for me yesterday. It'd be greedy of me to snatch another day with them."

Luanne grinned, unhitched her horse and vaulted into the saddle, reaching for her lariat as soon as her boots touched the stirrups. Signe began a set of wrist curls with the fifteen-pounders. She sat on the plywood bed of the wagon, with her feet on the pavement, bracing her elbow against her thigh as she raised and lowered the leather-covered steel pipe handle of the weights. The wagon was the first they'd made, rigged up from the Huttons' trailer, and the height was convenient for the effort-the boring, miserable effort that was never finished.

Wrist curls on the right, on the left, stand and raise the weights to shoulder height and lower them sloooowly, waist-to-shoulder in front:

Though the chores would be just as mindless, and the chores are never finished either. God, the good old days, they were awful. You can't even listen to music unless somebody wants to sing, and they're usually terrible.

"How long do I have to go on doing this?" she grumbled aloud.

Her arms and shoulders ached a little, though she did feel a lot stronger than when she'd started this right after the Change. Pamela Arnstein was a few feet away, practicing lunges and cuts at a billiard-sized hardwood ball strung on a line and hung from a fishing pole, moving as if her legs had steel springs inside them.

"How long? For: the: rest: of: your: life," she said, pacing the words to her breathing.

The dulled point of the practice weapon went lock against the wood and knocked loose a chip. Arnstein was wearing a singlet and sweatpants; the flat muscle of her arms and shoulders stood out like straps under sweat-slick skin as she lowered the sword and stood panting, speaking again: "If you want to use a sword with any useful heft, that is. It's why I stopped doing this seriously before the Change," she went on, reaching for a towel and rubbing herself down. "It was just such a drag maintaining the upper-body strength you needed. Goddamn whoever invented testosterone-it's not fair, like an athlete using steroids. And if you think it's hard on you, try getting back into this sort of shape when you're in your thirties. You want to be on the A-list, you keep at it."

"Yes, sergeant-at-arms," Signe said, smiling.

"Swordmistress! Astrid might be listening!"

They both laughed; Astrid loved lurid archaic-sounding names for things, and sheer stubborn repetition had carried the day for her more than once. She sulked horribly when she lost-people had drawn the line at christening the outfit a "host" or a "free company."

"The little beast would probably have had us calling ourselves the Riders of Rohan if it hadn't been for that bear," Signe said.

She began the next set, lifting each weight back over her shoulder and down in turn. It was a rule that every Bear-killer over twelve had to train to fight, but you only had to do enough to make sure you wouldn't be entirely helpless if worse came to worst. If you wanted to be on the A-list, the people called on to fight in non-total-emergency situations, you had to pass some extremely practical tests. Administered in bone-bruising full-contact practice bouts by experts.

All the men and the older boys, everyone except her father and Billy Waters, tried hard to get on the list. She was damned if she wasn't going to make it too.

Of course, I'm not going to get to lie around eating grapes whatever I do, Signe thought ruefully.

Now that they'd stopped, the teams had been unhitched and hobbled and set to graze-not that the scanty grass and sagebrush around here would do them much good, or the little herd of cattle and sheep they'd accumulated. That was one reason they wouldn't be staying long. There was good grazing not far away.

Angelica was lifting down wire cages with chickens in them and letting the birds free to peck around, helped by Jane Waters. Billy Waters stood lounging and doing nothing, until Angelica gave him a scowl and jerked her thumb; then he picked up an ax and went looking for firewood. Ken gave her a nod and started fiddling with a lever-operated machine that was supposed to speed up riveting the rings of chain-mail armor. Annie Sanders rounded up the kids; she was the schoolteacher now, which had turned out to mean she oversaw them doing their communal chores, as well. Eric and a couple of others were unloading the heavier stuff for a one-night camp.

"Strong back, simple mind!" Signe called out to him.

The box he held wobbled, and then sent up a puff of dust as he set it down. He was working stripped to the waist, and-in an objective, grudging, sisterly fashion-she had to admit that Luanne was right; he was getting cuter.

Lost that last trace of puppy fat, she thought. Major improvement in the ass. Too bad he still uses it to think with.

He'd never been plump-more sort of beefy-jock-muscular; now he'd lost the last softness around the edges, gotten ripped and taut.

And his face has firmed up. But he's still a jerk and a teenager. I don't suppose Luanne could do better, considering the meager supply of unattached young guys we've got. But much as I like her, getting enthusiastic about him shows a serious lapse in her taste.

Eric wiped a forearm across his face, where a thin fuzz of yellow beard caught the dust and sweat. He had his old malicious teasing grin on, and hooted back: "Well, then, I suppose you're lowering your IQ weekly with those weights, hey, sis?"

Signe stuck out her tongue, then turned her back, ignoring his horselaugh.

Luanne brought in a cow she'd roped, with its calf bawling along behind. She snubbed off the lariat to a wagon, dismounted, got a bucket of hot water and soap, scrubbed the usual places and began to milk the animal into a galvanized pail. Astrid's Biltis jumped down from some soft spot now liberally dusted with cat hair; probably a basket full of clean laundry, since the animal had a tropism for freshly washed clothing and shed like a bandit whenever the weather got warm.

Which is a lot easier to resent now that the only way to get clothes clean is to beat them on rocks and scrub 'em by hand.

The cat sauntered over to Luanne and began cadging a drink of milk with a weave-around-the-ankles begging routine; she got the first few squirts right into her face, since you weren't supposed to drink that yourself, and then the streams went hissing into the bucket. The cow flicked its tail and did, copiously, what cows and horses were wont to do whenever and wherever they felt like it.

Signe had never minded helping muck out the stables at Larsdalen or the ranch, but.:. I'm getting used to living in a barnyard. Jesus!

Luanne also fended off the calf with a boot now and then, when its indignation at seeing breakfast disappearing overcame its good sense. The cow gave a plaintive moo as Luanne swore and leaned a shoulder into it to get the udder back above the pail, giving it a resounding slap on the rump when it balked.

"Madam, you permit yourself strange liberties!" Signe called, grinning.

"You're channeling cows, now?" Luanne replied.

"Beats milking them," Signe said frankly. Although milking is good for your hand grip too. Which I now know by experience.

The cow shifted and rolled its eyes, obviously weirded out by the whole process, despite several days' practice; at least this one didn't kick: much. So far their cattle were all range beef stock, Herefords and Angus, not dairy types bred for gentleness. Even when they'd become accustomed to milking and didn't need to be secured fore and aft, they didn't like it at all. The amount of work that went into getting a pint of milk out of them was daunting, but nobody they'd met had been willing to part with milch animals.

Yet. It was certainly right up there on the wish list Angelica kept, along with the barrel churn that Ken kept promising to finish.

It had been sort of cool learning how to milk a cow, with Luanne and Angelica teaching her-they were both fun to be around, and Signe had always been good with animals. Doing the milking every second day wasn't much fun at all; it made your hands cramp, not to mention getting your foot stepped on or a well-beshatted tail switched into your face.

Signe put the weights down, waved to Luanne and then went into a set of stretching exercises, head to knee, splits, touching hands diagonally behind your shoulder blades. Both Mike and Pamela insisted on that before you did any serious practice. The two of them had a lot in common, starting with a steady methodical attention to details that left her alternately enraged and awestruck.

She finished the stretches and took her practice sword down from the rack along one side of the wagon, checked that there was no rust on the blade-Mike and Pamela insisted, even with the blunt and nearly pointless blades used for drill-and began a series of cuts, right- and left-handed, to loosen her hands and forearms.

"Good," Pamela said, tossing her a pair of leather bracers. "You're starting to dominate the weapon. Now for real."

"Who would have thought two pounds and a bit was so heavy!" Signe said.

She leaned the sword against her hip for a moment as she strapped the bracers around her wrists-they helped make the bruising, jarring impacts less hard on your tendons. Somewhat less hard; you still had to watch out for the martial equivalent of carpal tunnel.

Pamela grinned. "Anyone who's done more than a few passages with a backsword knows that a couple of pounds is of nearly infinite weight. But don't try to do it all from the shoulder. Back it up from the gut and hips. That's what the rest of your body is for."

After that Signe slipped her targe onto her left arm and began lunges at a solid plank target shaped like a man, with Pamela holding it from behind-and moving it unpre-dictably, along with a running commentary on her form. The impacts ran back up her wrist and arm and back, but as Pam said, you were practicing to ram the blade into someone and out the other side, not pop their zits.

She forced down memories of terror and blood and made herself spring forward, back, again: After a while she stopped, panting. Pamela handed her a tin cup of water and she drank, conscious of the sweat dripping down her face and flanks.

"Thanks, Pam," she said, hesitated, and then went on: "Can I ask you a sort of personal question?"

"Like we have privacy anymore? Sure."

"Tell me: do you think Mike likes me?"

The older woman gave a gurgling laugh. Signe flushed and gave her a glare. "Well, he seems to like you well enough!"

Pamela laughed harder. "Oh, honey, sometimes I forget you're only eighteen!"

"Nineteen in August," Signe said, and ground her teeth slightly at the smile that followed.

"I'm thirty-two," Pamela explained after a moment. "Believe me, Mike thinks of me as a cross between an older sister and one of his Marine buddies. Maybe if I was the last woman in the world, but otherwise-don't worry."

Signe felt her shoulders relax slightly. "You're closer to his age than I am," she said.

"Honey, I'm four years older than him. Let me tell you about another of the manifold unfairnesses of the world from our point of view-" The younger woman nodded reluctantly. Pamela went on: "Besides, if there's any man in the outfit who appeals to me, it's your dad."

Signe goggled at her in horror. "You're kidding! Mom-"

Pamela faced her for a second: "Signe, your mom is dead. I'm real sorry and I would never have looked at your dad if she'd lived, but she didn't."

Signe sucked in a breath. "Sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you. Things have changed so fast: actually, I meant, he's so old. Mom was old, and he's older."

"Well, thanks! He's also the only really interesting conversationalist we've got who isn't already taken. But don't worry about it. We're not teenagers, i.e., not in a hurry. Anyway, you were talking about Mike?"

"Well, he's nice, and we've had fun talking and riding together and: but he's never: you know. Tried anything."

Pamela shrugged. "I don't know why. I do know he thinks you're very attractive-"

"What did he say?" she cut in eagerly.

"He's never said a word, it's just obvious the way he perks up when you're there-he's not much of a smiler otherwise. You know, that stoic Finn sisu thing."

"Well, then why doesn't he want to talk about how he feels?" she said in frustration.

"They never do! Listen to the voice of experience. That's a major reason I ended up divorced lo these many years ago. I wanted to talk about why the relationship wasn't working. As far as he was concerned, if he had to talk about it: well, that meant it wasn't working. I insisted. He walked."

"Weird."

"Men are weird. Very nice in a way, sometimes, but weird. Mike. might actually be smart enough to play hard to get. Or he may think you're just too young for him. A strange man in some ways, very private."

"That doesn't make me very happy," Signe said, quirking a smile. "I most definitely want him."

"I don't think Mike's personal energy field is calibrated for happy. Being around him will never be dull, and it could be a lot of fun, but simple happiness isn't in the contract. Be warned." She hesitated. "Besides: it hasn't been very long since, ah, the incident. Are you sure you want to, mmm, get involved with anyone quite yet?"

Signe flushed. "I wasn't raped!" she snapped bluntly.

"Your call. Just a warning-if you do start radiating make-a-move signals and Mike does try something, it's not going to be a cuddle and kiss on the cheek he has in mind, you know. Not that he wouldn't take no for an answer, but he might be really pissed off if you got cold feet."

They both looked up at a sudden sound; Pamela blew out her cheeks in relief at the interruption. Astrid was on watch a hundred yards from the road, where a little rise gave her a view of the ground falling away to northward, mounted and with an arrow on the string of her bow. She reached down and pulled a brass bugle from her saddlebow and did her best to make it sing; what she got was a flat, sourly off-key blatting hoot instead, but it carried.

Everyone around the little caravan stopped what they were doing and grabbed for a weapon-spear, bow, ax, sword, long knife.

Then they relaxed when she repeated the call twice, paused and blew twice again, and spurred in towards the wagons.

"The all-clear," Pamela said. She slid her working sword back into the scabbard hanging from the wagon, and picked up the practice weapon she'd dropped.

"Looks like Josh's got a message from the boss," Signe replied, putting up a hand to shade her eyes.

"Good afternoon," Michael Havel said as his party drew up to the locals.

"Howdy," a squat weathered man in a billed tractor cap said.

The young Indian in buckskins beside him had a bar of white paint across his face at eye level and carried a short lance with a row of feathers on the shaft; he looked along the line of the Bearkillers and pursed his lips. "Did we interrupt a meeting of your diversity committee?" he said. "Everything except Indians, hey?"

"Unless you count me," Havel said equably.

The Nez Perce gave him a shrewd look. "Yeah, you might have some 'skin in you."

"One Anishinabe grandma, but that doesn't make me an Indian. Anyway, we're just passing through-heading for Lewiston, and then points further west."

Several of the locals glanced at each other. Aha, Havel thought. Something they're not telling me about between here and Lewiston, or in Lewiston. Or both. Have to find out about that. Aloud he went on: "Who's in charge here?"

Both the farmer in the cap and the Indian in paint started to. speak. There was a pause, and the older man spoke carefully: "Sort of a committee. I'm Howard Reines, mayor around here, sort of; this is Eddie Running Horse from the reservation council. That's the highest level of government around here still working."

"Pleased to meet you," Havel said, shaking hands with both. "Mike Havel. We're-"

"The Bearkillers!" Astrid said proudly.

Hope they didn 't see me wince, Havel thought.

Eddie Running Horse seemed impressed, though, and nobody else actually laughed.

Astrid had managed to accumulate a small library of fantasies with lurid covers, scavenged from small-town libraries and abandoned road-stop book racks. They were full of pretentious pseudobarbarian and pseudomedieval names and titles with which she played an unceasing game of pin-the-absurd-name-on-the-donkey.

Some of the books even had useful hints about how to do things, as well as quests for the Magic Identity Bracelet of the Apocalypse, and a lot of the outfit came to hear Astrid read aloud from them evenings around the fires. He had himself, now and then; there really wasn't much else to do after dark but sleep and sharpen your blades or make the night hideous with attempts at song.

If this is what having a kid sister is like, it's a wonder any of them survive to adulthood un-strangled.

He went on aloud: "Yeah, the Bearkillers: long story. I'm boss of the outfit, pretty well."

Reines nodded, face neutral. "How long do you folks plan on staying? We've already moved a lot of our townsfolk and some refugees from Lewiston out to the farms and ranches west of us and they're about full up-"

Running Horse cut in: "Frankly, we just don't have much to spare for road people, after taking care of our own."

Havel 's eyes narrowed; neither leader had sounded very enthusiastic in his welcome, but Running Horse's vibes were downright hostile.

At a guess, because outsiders are very unlikely to be Nez Perce. With thousands pouring in from the towns, they're nervous about becoming even more of a minority.

"Good thing we aren't planning on staying, then," Havel said aloud. "We would like to trade a bit for supplies. Food, useful tools, livestock-but we're not asking for a handout."

He didn't put a hand to his sword hilt, but he did let the metal chape at the end of the scabbard clank against his stirrup iron.

The locals cast careful looks at the Bearkillers. Apart from Will's chain-mail armor, they all wore the steerhide jackets, and they all had bows, shields and helmets; everyone except Astrid had a sword.

That put them a substantial step up on the group facing them, and they probably had the best the Kooskia area could offer. Bowie knives, hunting knives, a machete, hatchets, two bows, improvised spears, ordinary chopping axes lightened for one-handed use by grinding down the pell at the rear of the blade. A few had plywood shields. Nobody had any body armor to speak of unless you counted a leather jacket with some lengths of fine chain sewn to it, and they almost certainly hadn't had the concentrated training his group had-which showed.

They're probably figuring – rightly – that it wouldn't pay to let such well-armed people get too hungry, Havel thought cynically. Another couple of months, and they'd be begging us to stay to help get in the harvest and plant for next year. Probably vagrancy laws will follow after that in short order and any wanderers who don't look too formidable will end up hoeing beans whether they like it or not. Right now, looking formidable will put them in a mood to dicker.

Aloud he went on: "We've got trade goods. Some of you might be interested in taking a look. Also we've got some skilled people-a really good vet, some horse trainers."

If things were a little worse, we'd have to regularly fight for food. Christ, but I'm glad I ended up in Idaho before this happened!

The welcoming committee fell in with them and rode back to the caravan; some of them looked slightly apprehensive, despite their advantage in numbers-Pamela had everyone armed as they went about their chores, and the dozen A-list fighters in camp standing ready. Not obtrusively, threateningly ready, but she wasn't trying to hide it, either.

Havel made polite introductions; everyone dismounted, and politely declined refreshments-that was polite these days. Food wasn't something to take for granted. Since getting out of the woods and into farming country they'd managed to keep themselves in tortillas and beef, especially since Ken Larsson rigged up a portable horse-powered flour mill, but he was glad they'd also managed to find a crateful of multivitamin pills; scurvy might have been a problem otherwise.

It would be a while before anyone had much in the way of fresh vegetables, and canned ones were jealously guarded. Deficiency diseases snuck up on you, and they also weakened resistance to infection.

One of the wagons held their handicraft projects on the move, and some of the products. Havel led the two leaders over to it and showed them what was on offer: lance- and spearheads, arrowheads and arrows, shields, fighting-knives and swords. Those included the first ones Will had run up; with Pamela's help he'd refined the second model considerably, adding a subtle curve to the grip and a forefinger-hold, and making the blades lighter and better balanced. The originals were still superior to anything the locals had, from the way they handled them and throttled exclamations.

"Now, these we can really use," Reines said, eagerly fingering a little pamphlet Pamela had done up on basic sword work, with illustrations by Signe and Astrid. "We do have a fair amount of livestock we could spare, seeing's how we aren't shipping the yearlings out and we can't cut as much hay-"

"Wait a minute, Howie," Running Horse said. "The council's got first say on disposing of assets like cattle and horses for the duration of the emergency. Everyone agreed on that."

"We need weapons, and this stuff looks a hell of a lot better than anything we've been able to cobble up. When we weren't busy staying alive," Reines said. "We especially need weapons with the folks disappearing on the road up past Kamiah."

"Drifters," Running Horse said, making a dismissive gesture. "Road people. Who keeps track?"

Well, that's fucking tactful of you, Havel thought, keeping silent and watching the argument.

"The Smiths disappeared out of their goddamned house," Reines snapped. "And we've had stock rustled."

"Whoa," Havel said softly, raising a hand. "You folks probably don't want to quarrel in front of outsiders."

That shut both of them up, but Reines cast him a look before going on smoothly, the anger leached out of his voice: "That's true. And why don't you folks move in closer? After we have the doc check you over, but you look cleaner than most folks around here, come to that. You could come to dinner at my place: "

Havel and Reines nodded imperceptibly at each other. Running Horse scowled.

Michael Havel looked into the fire, lost in thought- though also conscious of a vague longing for a cup of coffee. They'd camped in an empty space on the outskirts of town for the past week rather than take the offer of vacant houses; it was bad for morale to scatter too much and unsafe, too. In fact, he'd had more than one inquiry about joining up, after the Bearkillers had put on a bit of a dance and BBQ and a fencing display, to repay the do Reines had gotten the town to lay on-once Mr. Running Horse was out of sight. Evidently life in post-Change Kooskia was pretty dull.

Seen that before, too, he thought. Withdrawal symptoms – no TV, no radio, no Internet, no movies, no nothing except the same faces and voices. Even small-town folks were used to being part of a bigger world than you can reach in a day's walk. The way we keep moving makes it a little easier to take. Although I do admire the way Reines has kept things together.

He must have murmured that aloud. Ken nodded from the log he sat on over on the other side of the campfire, stirring the embers with a stick.

"He wasn't mayor before the Change-some sort of real-estate man with a sideline in cattle. Everyone was rather vague on how exactly he'd acquired the office, did you notice?"

Havel shrugged. "He seemed popular enough. And he's doing a good job."

"Uh-huh. We've seen how important a good leader is. The places that just went to pieces, it was where there wasn't anyone to get people moving together in a hurry."

"Some places it just seems to happen on its own, sort of," Havel observed.

Ken snorted: "Yeah, we've seen places like that-all one of them. A committee is the only form of mammalian life with more than four legs and no brain."

"Interesting what he had to say," Havel said. "We could use that livestock and gear; we'd have somewhere near enough horses, and enough stock we'd be independent for meat. The problem is, how do we smoke out his problem? Whoever it is, they've obviously got the smarts to hide when a posse comes looking."

Ken shrugged. "Well, from Reines's point of view, that's the beauty of the deal. We don't get paid unless we get results, he doesn't risk any of his own people, they don't have to neglect vital work, and if it turns out OK he not only gets a solved problem and some powerful political mojo, but he gives Running Horse and his backers a thumb in the eye. I sort of suspect that they've been blocking any real effort to track down the perpetrators just so he won't get any of that."

"You're a cynic," Havel said.

"I've been on the fringes of politics for a long time," Ken said. "You have to be, if you're in business on the scale I am: was. I prefer to think of myself as a realist. On the whole, I'd put my money on Howie Reines-he's got a lot more experience than Running Horse. Of course, there may be a lot more brainpower on the tribal council. I suspect that our young friend in the feather bonnet is convinced that the Great Spirit's struck down the white-eyes' technology so the tribes can make a comeback. Which I admit is about as logical an explanation for the Change as any-though I'm sticking to the Alien Space Bats."

Havel nodded. "Notice something about Running Horse's bunch?"

"The costumes? I'm not surprised at that. Will's right- it's the sort of thing you'd expect, psychologically speaking. Though I suspect they had to read anthropology texts to get the details!"

"Nah, I agree about that. What I noticed was that more than half of them didn't look even part Indian, including some of the ones all gussied up like Chief Joseph on steroids. Give you odds in a couple of generations, there'll be a group here who call themselves Nez Perce-or Tsoop-Nit-Pa-Lu-but look a lot more like me, or even Eric."

Ken gave him a considering look. "You know, you're probably right about that. Wouldn't be surprised if the same thing didn't happen in a lot of other places, too. For that matter, long-term, we're going to see a lot of ethno-genesis going on in the next generation or so."

At Havel 's look of bafflement, he went on: "Tribes, ethnic groups, call 'em what you will. Little groups forming around a community or a leader and starting to think of themselves as a people. Mayor Reines's bunch too, for that matter. Anyone who can do the job-and the first little group will sort of set the tone for those who join up. Like a saturated solution forming around a seed-crystal. It's just starting now, of course, but give it a few years, or generations."

"Yeah, I suppose a lot of these guys like Reines or like Running Horse will go down in the history books," he said aloud. "The ones who pulled things together in their own neighborhood."

Ken shook his head. "I doubt there will be any history books for a long time," he said. "I wouldn't give mass literacy more than another generation, most places-less in some-and a lot of the world's going to lose the concept of writing altogether. Too many lost skills to reinvent."

"We've found a fair number of people who know how to do things the old-fashioned way," Havel pointed out. "Hell, we've already got a blacksmith, and people who can make a saddle starting with cows or run up a house starting with trees."

Ken laughed, a little harshly. "Yup. And that's a bit of a joke, when you think about it. Pre-Change America was rich enough that people could practice black-smithing or weaving or whatnot as hobbies, or make a living turning out high-priced handmade goods for collectors with a lot of disposable income. Handicrafts are rarer in backward areas, apart from a few of the most backward. You don't go on making hand-thrown pots when you can buy cheap plastic and aluminum, not when you're living on the edge. You can't spare time or effort for aesthetics. So in the long run we may be better off that way than, say, Columbia or Kenya. In the short run, mass die-off, of course."

"Irony still functions post-Change," Mike said with a chuckle. There were times when gallows humor was the only type available. The problem was that those were the times you most needed a laugh.

Ken nodded, getting a faraway look. Havel recognized it; the older Larsson looked that way when he was doing the big-picture thing.

Which is useful, within limits, Havel thought. Gotta make strategy drive tactics, not the other way 'round, as Captain Stoddard used to say.

Ken went on: "When we get settled, we should look into how to make rag paper. The acid-based pulp in most modern books doesn't last more than a generation even with careful storage; anything that isn't recopied will be lost by the time your kids are my age. Books will get almighty expensive in the places that hang on to the notion at all. When you're talking a small-scale society that doesn't really need literacy to function, it just won't pay to put in the effort, not when there's cloth to weave and turnips to hoe."

"Hard to keep the history straight, then," Havel said. "That's a pity. I: the things we're all doing, what's going on: that should be preserved."

"Oh, it will be, but not as history. We've fallen out of history, history with a capital H."

Havel raised a brow. "How can you be outside history? Sure, maybe nobody will record it, but it'll still be there."

"Ever read the Iliad or the Odyssey!"

"Yeah, bits here and there. I always preferred Ulysses;. Achilles was an undisciplined glory hound, the sort who's a nightmare to his squad leader. A good soldier needs to be ready to die, but a suicidal one just leaves you with another damned empty slot in the TOE you have to train a replacement for." He paused, then added judiciously: "Unless you need someone to play Polish Mine Detector real bad. Then a glory hound can come in very useful."

"Right," Ken chuckled. "But the point is that nobody wrote those poems. They were composed to be recited aloud and memorized, and they're full of bits from a lot earlier-half a millennium earlier, from the fall of Troy, with some chunks that may have been a thousand years old or more when Homer was singing for his supper. That's how people in that type of culture remember things-just like the sagas, only those got written down sooner. It's not history. It's folk-memory, the time of legends and heroes and myths, and anything that happens gets crammed into that framework. A sense of historical time needs a high civilization, and a particular type of one at that. Barbarians and tribes live in mythic time, legend time, not an ordered progression of centuries going from somewhere to somewhere. It might be better to say they're timeless."

"Like the Kalevala? "

"Yup. Or the Nibelungenleid, where you get Siegfried and the dragon and the cursed Rhinegold all mixed up with real figures centuries apart like Attila the Hun and Theodoric the Ostrogoth."

"And then some looney squarehead makes a real boring experience out of 'em," Havel said. He'd suffered through a video of the complete Ring cycle once, with a girl who was crazy for the stuff.

Christ, the things I did to get laid.

Ken went on: "Most of the Old Testament is the same sort of thing, filtered through literate scribes much later."

"So someone may make a saga out of our friend Howie someday? Or a chapter of Genesis?"

"More like Exodus. Out of a distorted what-Grandpa-told-me memory of him, yeah." Ken got up, pushing off his knees. "Or maybe a memory of you, Mike. You're the one who killed the bear and led his people to the promised land: if we make it. See you tomorrow."

Hmmm, Havel mused. Ken is an interesting guy to have around.

He poked a stick into the fire, watching the sparks fly up towards the bright frosting of stars; it was a little chilly now, with the sun well down.

I should start thinking about the longer term, a little. Once things hit bottom, they'll have to start up again – but in a new way, or a very old way. A strong man is what's needed, leadership, and something to believe in. Someone has to build on the ruins. Ken was right; we're back in the age of legends and heroes. A dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

Orange flames crawled over the low coals of the fire; in them he seemed to see vague pictures, visions of glory amid the fire "Surprise!"

He rose, pivoting smoothly and very fast, the sword coming free of the scabbard with a rasping hiss of steel on greased leather and wood. At the same time he stepped sideways so he wasn't silhouetted against the fire and cursed how it had killed his night sight for crucial seconds. He hadn't been expecting anything And come to think of it, someone trying to kill me wouldn't shout "Surprise!" now, would they?

He straightened up, blinking. People stood before him, a crowd of most of the adults in the outfit-with Signe, Lu-anne, Astrid, and Angelica Hutton in the forefront. Signe and Luanne had his new and all-of-a-sudden-finished hauberk slung between them on a pole run through one sleeve and out the other. Angelica had the gambeson bundled up in her arms. And Astrid:

Astrid was holding out a helmet.

The actual metal was the standard model they'd settled on, a round steel bowl with a leather-and-foam liner, a flat bar riveted on the front to protect the nose, and a leather skirt at the rear-the aventail-covered in chain mail to guard the neck.

This one had some additions. The tanned head of a bear was mounted on it, the top half at least, with the snarling muzzle at brow-level and enough of the fur left attached behind it to hide the helmet's neck flap. Glass eyes stared at him, and the teeth were bared in an artistic, and quite realistic, snarl. He remembered the expression vividly, from the time the beast had been about to eat him.

"Well: " he said, feeling suddenly inadequate. "Well, I guess that's where the bearskin went."

"Angelica and Will showed us how to do the tanning," Astrid said proudly. "Actually it was sort of gross, you use brains. But it looks great now. We wanted to be sure we'd got it right, so we waited and it didn't smell at all. Put it on, put it on!"

Her face was shining.

I can't say no. It would be like: well, like taking candy from a kid. Hell, she is a kid, or was until the Change.

He did spare a glower for the adults, who should have known better than to let her gussy up fighting gear with nonessentials.

The padded coat was easy, closing up the front with an overlapping flap and laces. Luanne and Signe held the mail coat over his head as he ducked, then helped him wiggle into it with a clash and clinking rustle; you could put it on yourself, but it was a pain.

The shifting weight dragged at his shoulders, and he quickly cinched his broadsword belt tight around his waist to stabilize it and transfer some of the burden to his hips. Will had made forearm protectors-vambraces-out of sheet steel, hammered to fit around wooden forms; he slipped on his, then buckled on shin guards, leather covered in thin steel splints, and pulled on leather gauntlets whose backs were covered in more chain mail.

Not bad, he thought critically, doing a few twists and deep knee bends, flexing his hands and swinging his arms, his enthusiasm growing.

Yeah! Way lighter than the field gear I carried in the Gulf. Better distributed, too; not bad at all, once I get used to the way it affects my balance. Bitchin' uncomfortable, though, and no two ways about it. I can feel the sweat starting even after sundown, and Christ Jesus, the thought of an itch in this stuff: but against an unarmored man, you'd be like a tank.

"The helmet, the helmet!" Astrid said, and a bunch of the youngsters took it up.

He took it from her and settled it on his head, fastening the chinstrap. The nasal bar bisected his view, and he found himself unconsciously shifting his head slightly back and forth to keep his peripheral vision up.

Another thing to get used to.

The bear head mounted on top didn't seem to make any difference, or add any real weight. It wouldn't matter in a fight, although the thing was going to look pretty tattered if a couple of edged weapons went through on their way to the metal beneath. He could always switch back to the one he already had after a couple of days.

"And we made the rest of the hide up into a cloak, for colder weather," Astrid said proudly.

At her urging he swung the heavy length of cinnamon-touched black fur around his shoulders, fastening the paws across his chest with a hammered-gold clasp-gold was easy to come by these days and a lot less valuable than food or tools. The curing was professionally doneexactly what he'd have expected of any project the Huttons oversaw-and it had only the musky-sweet new-upholstery smell of well-tanned hide. The claws clicked on his chain mail as he threw the left side back a little to free his sword hilt.

Shit, I must look like a carnivorous Carmen Miranda, he thought. It's a good thing I can't see myself -

Eric and Josh walked up with a full-length mirror from one of the houses. With a flourish they set it down beside the fire, and then he could see himself. For a long minute he gaped, hearing a murmur from all around him as the. Bearkillers took it in, with some townies who'd been hanging around as well.

I look like something off the cover of one of Astrid's god-damned books! he thought. The words "no fucking way" trembled on his lips.

Astrid's face was shining. Suddenly she threw her fists in the air and cried: "All hail to Lord Bear!"

His own shout of revulsion was buried in the chorus as everyone else took it up-except for Eric, who'd actually fallen flat laughing and who lay helplessly hugging himself as he rolled on the ground.

That left Havel grinding his teeth in fury. After a moment, he realized what bothered him more: better than half the spectators weren't laughing at all. In fact, they were taking it just as seriously as Astrid.

Christ Jesus, he thought, stomach sinking. The kid's making a hero-shaped hole and the entire bunch of them are shoving me into it.

"So, does this count as a date?" Signe said. "Here we are, alone at last."

Startled, Havel looked over at her. They were side-by-side on the seat of the wagon, and he was suddenly conscious of the slight summery smell of her, clean sweat and woman.

And she's definitely a woman, he thought, with a wry smile. There's never a bad time to stop and discuss your feelings.

"Ummm: I hadn't actually thought of it that way," he said cautiously. "For one thing, your brother and Pam are under the tarp right behind us, so we're not really alone."

"Oh, don't mind him," she said. "He can't see a thing."

Muffled gagging and retching sounds came from beneath the tarpaulin, then a yelp, as if someone had kicked someone in the shin. Havel felt a sudden impulse to grin enormously. He fought it down, looking around at the long empty stretch of road. They were alone; two horses drawing the wagon, and a pair hitched to the rear: as tempting a target as they could arrange.

Easy pickings, the arrangement said. Come and get it!

It wasn't the sort of trick he'd have pulled out in the hot-and-dirty places the Corps had sent him. Far too blatant and obvious.

Item: Things are different now. No guns and not many good archers yet. You have to get close to someone to hurt them. Item: Odds are these are amateur bandits, just learning the trade, the way I'm learning how to use a sword or shoot a bow.

For a moment he felt an enormous familiar anger at whoever or whatever had done this to his country, to his world, and then it passed away. If he ever had a chance to do anything about it: but until then, put it away.

'Cause those who can't put it away are going to die real soon and never get a chance to do anything about it.

Instead he spoke, his voice light: "That's flattering, Signe, but let's take a rain check. After this is over, maybe? In the meantime, we'd better concentrate on business."

She made a pout and flipped the reins over the horse's back. "Yes, O Lord Bear. Business."

"Now that's a low blow. And yeah, business."

You know, this is business, he realized. Literally. We've dealt with bandits before, and this is on our way, but we've actually been hired to do it.

They went forward at a fast walk amid the clatter and hollow clop of hooves and the creaking of the wagon's fabric. He pulled a strip of jerky from a pocket and began gnawing on it as he watched their surroundings; it tasted like salty cardboard, but it was food.

The land was tending upward, with more grass and less sagebrush as they climbed into a belt of higher rainfall, but not much cultivation yet-it would be another day's travel until they were into wheat country. Before the Change this had been ranching territory, and seasonal grazing at that-virtually nobody actually lived here. Occasionally they passed an abandoned vehicle; once they sped up as a gagging smell told them someone, or several someones, had died inside a four-door sedan flipped upside down.

They passed a few bodies beside the road as well, but birds and coyotes and insects had taken most of the flesh there, leaving only scraps of tendon and wisps of hair blowing in the warm dry wind.

"How could anyone do that?" Signe asked. "Just sit and die?"

Havel shrugged. "Easy," he said, and waved a hand around them at the immense silence and the great blue bowl of the sky.

"It's bigger now. Physically bigger."

"Bigger?" Signe said. " Quieter, yes, but bigger?"

"Yeah, for all practical purposes. I've felt it before, backpacking into real wilderness, the deep empty country. The world gets bigger. OK, now it's like that everywhere: This was pretty thinly settled country before the Change, but that was when you could do thirty miles in an hour even on bad dirt roads. Bam, the Change hits, and suddenly thirty miles, that's two, three days' walk for someone not used to hiking-if you're lucky. Suddenly every distance is fifty, sixty times bigger, or more, and the fastest way to carry a message is feet."

"That never made us sit down and die of fright," Signe said stubbornly.

You know, I really like this girl, Havel thought. She doesn't just accept anything I say.

He nodded. "Yeah, but I wasn't taken by surprise when I went on vacation, and I'm used to being on my own in remote places. Some townie type, say someone from a big city like Seattle or even Spokane , they'd be just as likely to wait a long time for someone to drive by and rescue them as to get going right away. It would even be the sensible thing to do-how could they know things were screwed up worldwide? A lot would die of exposure; it was down below freezing here at night right after the Change. And there aren't even any surface streams around here, and try going twenty-four hours without water. Wait too long and you'll be too weak to move, or you'll collapse on the way."

She shivered. When she spoke again her voice was flat with dread. "Mike: it's probably a lot worse than we've seen, back on the coast, anywhere with cities, isn't it?"

"Worse isn't the word. There probably aren't any words. And it'll all get worse before it gets better," he said grimly. "Your dad thinks that by this time next year, there won't be more than ten, maybe twenty million people at most left in the whole of North America, from Guatemala to Hudson 's Bay."

My, you know how to sweet-talk a girl, don't you, Havel? he asked himself.

All the while his eyes had been moving around them; so had Signe's, come to that. The road wound and turned as it climbed, and sometimes the hillsides rose almost cliff-steep beside them. He checked his precious wind-up watch and looked behind them; a mirror-flash came at the edge of sight, just one quick blink. Impossible to tell from sunlight on a broken bottle or a bit of quartz, if you didn't know what to look for.

That's comforting, he thought. Nice to know help is on hand.

It was another five hours until sunset, and then he'd have to figure out a different trick. He wasn't going to try this in darkness, when nobody could see what was happening or rush to the rescue.

And even in daylight, it's not all that comforting. The rest have to hang well back if they're not going to be spotted.

"Mike!" Signe said. His head came around. "Up ahead!"

He saw only a moving dot, but Signe had unusually keen eyes. He thought for an instant, then decided to take a chance; binoculars were not something any innocuous traveler would have, but he needed to know what was going on. The road a half mile ahead sprang into sight.

Man on a bike, he thought. Then: Correction. Kid on a bike. About ten, and a boy, I think. Also he's bleeding, and looking over his shoulder. I think some genuine bait got in ahead of us.

"That's torn it," he said grimly. "All right, everyone out."

Signe pulled on the reins. Havel switched aside his broad-brimmed hat, pulled the loose shirt that concealed his armor over his head, and clapped on his helmet. Pamela and Eric were out from under the tarpaulin in less time, red-faced and sweating but fully equipped; Pam was in one-third of their current store of chain hauberks, Eric in leather like his sister. They unhitched the horses from the wagon's traces and saddled them while Havel jumped down to the pavement, grunting a little as his boots hit and the mail clashed. It wasn't that the armor was too heavy to run and leap in: : it's just that when I do, it's like being thirty years older.

The boy gave a cry when he saw them waiting and tried to stop, wobbled, and went over.

"Canteen," Havel said; Pamela tossed him one, and he went over to where the slight body rested under the cycle. One wheel still spun.

Havel hooked the broken machine off with a toe, sending it clattering down the steepish slope to their left. He'd been right; it was a boy about ten, with a big shock of sun-streaked brown hair, skinny and filthy and smelling fairly high. He had a slash across one cheek, shallow but clean-edged as if done with a very sharp blade; that was just old enough for the blood to start clotting, and blackish red streaks crusted on his neck and chest on that side. He did a careful once-over to make sure the boy was unarmed- not easy to conceal a weapon when you were in shorts, a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and sneakers-and then went to one knee.

Christ, you have to learn a whole new way of moving in this stuff.

Pamela came up on the other side, evidently thinking the same thing from the cautious way she moved.

"Easy, kid," Havel said, as she put a hand under his head.

The adolescent wasn't really unconscious, just stunned. He sucked eagerly at the warm water, coughing and sputtering, then drinking more; his eyes widened at the sight of Havel 's gear, but he didn't seem frightened of them, just terrified in general.

"They hurt my mom," he said. "They-"

"Son, calm down," Havel said, his voice firm and strong, but not shouting. "Take it from the top. I need to know what's going on, and fast."

The boy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then opened them again. "We-my family and our neighbors- we were traveling east, out of Lewiston, to get away from the sickness."

Havel 's eyes narrowed; Pamela's hands moved with quick skill, checking for temperature and swollen glands.

"Nobody happened to mention that about Lewiston, did they?" she said angrily; then she shook her head, smiling a little in relief, and Havel blew out his cheeks with a whoosh. Medicines were getting scarce.

The boy went on:

"We don't have it! But a lot of people did. We got out a week ago, and we were traveling, going to my uncle's farm outside Kooskia. But we stopped, and they: they: " He started to shake again.

Havel gave him more water, and leaned closer to look into his eyes: "How many? Mounted, or on foot? What happened, and where did they go?"

"A lot-a dozen, maybe. I didn't see any horses. They were all around us, and I just-I saw one of them hit Mom with an ax, and I just got on my bike and went. Please, mister, you've got to help! I just ran away. I ran away from them all."

He started to cry.

"Running was the best thing you could do, kid," Havel said, giving him a quick squeeze on the shoulder. "Trying to fight out of your weight is stupid, not brave. Now how far was it, and what's the ground like?"

Havel looked up at Pamela when he had all the information they could muster; the ambush had taken place about two miles west, well uphill, and just where the road cut through the edge of the plateau. He closed his eyes for a second, calling up the terrain map of the area he'd studied.

"He's undernourished and dehydrated and he's got cooties, but otherwise fine, far as I can tell," Pamela said. "If his party had been on the road for a week, chances are they're clean."

He stood, thinking, weighing distances. "All right, this has fucked up Plan Number One to hell and gone. We've got to keep in contact or they'll get away again. Signe, light the signal and stay with the kid-that's an order!-until the rest of the A-list gets here. We'll leave sign; follow at speed. Keep an arrow on your string until the cavalry arrive and get ready to run if you have to."

He picked the boy up, laying him on the tarpaulin in the back of the wagon.

"Eric, Pam, equipment check. Then water the horses, all they'll drink. Double canteens, take nothing but water, armor and weapons."

Pam pulled out three bundled smocks. Havel groaned inwardly at the thought of putting on another layer, but the thin cotton surcoats were sewn with patches, camouflage-patterned in gray and brown and sage green, better disguise than even the most carefully browned metal. They pulled them on, buckled their sword belts over the cloth and swung into the saddle, giving each other's gear a quick once-over.

Signe already had the smudge pot out on the road and lit, and a column of black-orange smoke rose to the sky. That would tell Will and the rest of the mounted backup Come at speed.

Havel leaned down in the saddle on an impulse; Signe turned, startled, and her eyes flew wide when he gave her a brief hard kiss. He grinned and clamped his legs to his horse's barrel.

"Follow me!"

Hooves thundered, spitting gravel behind them; some of it hit the smudge pot with a sharp metallic tinking.

Havel leaned far over in the saddle to study the marks by the side of the road. Damn, but I'm better than I was, on horseback. Well, a month of continuous practice:

"Bikes and a cart with bicycle wheels," he said.

They'd seen that before, rigged up like an Asian pedicab. His eyes scanned.

"Went off upslope there. Blood trail-big splotch of blood by the side of the road, and then splashes of it; someone got cut badly."

He frowned. "Probably fatally. The splashes get smaller up the hill here, like a body bleeding out. You can track 'em by the way the ants and flies are swarming on it."

"Should we follow?" Eric said, reining his horse half around.

"Patience," Pamela said.

Havel noticed that her eyes went skyward, like his. She hadn't been a hunter until the Change, but she had spent a lot of time before that watching wildlife.

"Patience, my ass. Let's go kill something, as the vulture said," Eric began brashly, but fell silent as the others pointed upward.

"Oh. Shit."

The buzzards were circling, but as they watched one slanted downward.

"I think the killing's been taken care of," Havel said. "I also don't think the locals were looking very hard for the reason people were disappearing. Or maybe whoever did it was rushed this time. Slow and careful, people. If I was one of this bunch, I'd leave an ambush on my back trail. I don't expect them to, but it could happen."

He dropped the knotted reins on the saddle horn and slipped an arrow through the cutout in the riser of his bow-Waters's first really successful model. The horse picked its way obediently upslope with rocks clattering under its hooves; he kept balance without much thought, his gaze on the great bare slopes about them.

What they sought was in a narrow ravine that dead-ended not far ahead. The carrion birds hopped about, a flapping squawking carpet over flesh roughly covered with' piled rocks. The long skinny necks struck downward through the gaps, and there were shreds on their beaks as they came upright to look at the intruders. Then they exploded skyward in a storm of black wings as the humans came near.

Havel grimaced, and murmured words from an old song he'd heard once:

"Loud and cruel were the ravens' cries

As they feasted on the field."

If anyone was watching who really knew what they were doing, the buzzards and crows taking to the air would be a giveaway; he'd just have to hope they didn't know. The pedicab lay on its side, a wheel smashed into a bent tangle; getting it over these slopes had taken a lot of effort. A few meagre bundles of clothing and possessions lay opened and scattered about, looters' leavings.

Then: "There's things we'd better check. Let's get them uncovered."

The corpses hadn't had time to stink much, but the work was grim as they tumbled rocks aside. Eric made a retching sound; for real, this time.

"Butchered" was a term you heard a lot in talk about killing people; he'd seen casualties from shellfire who really looked that way, back in the Corps.

This was the first time it had been literally true. There were four bodies in the ravine; they'd all been gutted, and had the major cuts-thighs, upper arms, ribs-roughly hacked free and removed. He forced himself to note details; whoever did it hadn't dressed out many carcasses.

"Yeah," Havel said, feeling a little queasy himself. "I think we can see why people would be disappearing."

"Why?" Eric burst out. "This is ranching country- there's food!"

Havel shook his head. "Not right around here this time of year. Not if you don't know how to find it; I'd have a tough time living off the country within easy walking distance of the road, and someone from a town, someone who thinks half a mile is too far to walk: "

Pamela nodded. "I'd have problems living off the land here myself, and I do-did-a lot of wilderness hiking."

"So the only animal that's big and easy to catch right after the Change would be: guess what? Once you'd started, you wouldn't want to be found."

Eric was piling the rocks back on. "Because people would kill you," he said fiercely.

Havel nodded, face and voice calm: "Which is exactly what we're going to do," he said. "This bunch have read themselves out of the human race. There are things you're just not entitled to do, even to survive."

Eric reached for his reins. Havel put out a hand to stop him.

"This area's too steep and rocky for horses. They'd make us slow, and give us away, and pin us down if we got into a fight. I hate leaving them, but the A-list can pick them up- we'll be leaving plenty of sign."

The horses were nervous at the smell of blood, snorting and stamping; they ran a rope between two rocks for a picket line, and spilled the oats and alfalfa pellets from their saddlebags on the ground. Then Havel did a slow three-sixty scan of their surroundings, ending with his finger pointing northwest.

"Everyone take a long drink of water before we start," he said. "They're heading that way, and it's not misdirection; that's their base."

He suited action to words and then slung his quiver over his back, stooping to make the first of a series of arrow-signs with small rocks to show their direction.

"Eric, you're point." Because you rustle and clank less than either of us. It's not stealth armor. "Follow the blood trail. Remember what I told you."

"Yeah, look ahead at the tracks, not at your toes," Eric said, with a flicker of a smile. "Look up and around every three paces. Careful where you put your feet."

"And take it slow; remember, we're watching for your signal. Pam, cover my left. I think they're"-he pointed again-"somewhere under that rimrock on the edge of the higher ground. They have to have water, and that's where it would be; and not more than a mile or two away, I think. Let's go."

Eric went ahead, moving surprisingly lightly over the broken ground for a young man over six feet tall and currently carrying forty pounds of gear and weapons. Havel let him get twenty feet forward and then followed, placing his feet with care on the slope of dry sparse grass, low prickly bushes and scattered gravel, careful also not to let the skirts of the armor brush stone. The metallic chinking sound of that carried annoyingly well.

The sun baked down; once they were past the dead-meat smell of the ravine, all he could smell was warm rock, sage, and his own sweat. That flowed until he felt everything inside the armor was oozing lukewarm diluted tallow, and his eyes stung fiercely as driblets squeezed out of the lining of his helmet; all the tighter spots chafed. It all seemed distant, beneath the crystalline awareness of the hunt: a hunt where both sides were prey as well.

Eric flung up a hand, fist clenched. They all froze, and sank quietly to the ground; they were on the upslope of a steep ridge running northwest, and the sun was low enough to be a nuisance.

Havel scanned the terrain and then made a hand signal to his leftfollow me once I'm there.

He pulled the scabbarded sword from the sling on his belt and ran it through loops beside his quiver, leaving the hilt above his left shoulder; that was less awkward when you were doing the creep-crawl-and-run thing.

Then he went forward himself, from one cover to the next, and at the last mostly crawling, holding his bow across the crook of his elbows-it was a lot lighter than an assault rifle, but more cumbersome, and the string was delicate. More sweat ran into his face, and sharp rocks clawed at his elbows and knees. He had to move a lot more slowly, because there was no other way to make chain mail reasonably quiet.

Well, there's one good thing about this damned iron shirt, he thought. Stuff doesn't gouge into you as hard while you're wearing it.

He leopard-crawled into the slight depression where Eric lay and followed his eyes. There was a sentry on the ridgeline ahead of them. A useless sentry, standing right on the ridge out in plain sight of God and radar and leaning on a spear; that was reassuring, since it proved that the killers they sought really were amateurs.

Unless they've got another one decently concealed, and that fool is maskirovka, Havel thought, unshipping his binoculars. After a moment: Nope. Unless I'm missing it completely, that's their one and only.

Smoke drifted up, carrying the scent of roasting meat from the cannibals' camp. Havel spat to clear his mouth of a rush of cold gummy saliva, and made himself study the ground between the Bearkillers and the sentry. It was nearly a hundred yards:

A faint scream came from beyond the ridge, then a series of them, shrill-a woman, or an adolescent, he thought. And the sentry was looking back over his shoulder at his own camp more than down at the approaches to it.

"I'll take him," Havel whispered, handing Pamela the binoculars. "When he goes down, both of you join me pronto."

Eric looked as if he wanted to volunteer, and Pamela looked at the younger Larsson with the wondering gaze you gave the insane; neither of them said anything aloud as Havel slipped out of the hollow and began to crawl upward.

I'll do it because I'm the only one who's hunted men, he added silently to himself. It's not quite like being in a fight. Killing in cold blood's a lot harder on the nerves.

There was a secret to stalking, arid wasn't much different with deer or humans: Don't move when they're looking at you. Deer were harder, since their noses and ears were a lot keener, although they were a lot less likely to kill you.

Back before the Change in a situation like this, back when he was in Force Recon, he'd have gotten close and used a sound-suppressed pistol, or even closer and used a knife and his hands. Now there was an alternative, if he could pull it off.

Closer. Move and freeze, move and freeze-gently, gently, nothing abrupt.

Don't stare. People can feel that. Use your peripheral vision. Think rock, think grass, think sage.

He moved again, a swift steady crawl, completely controlled; his mind was a diamond point of concentration, but open also to every quiver of breeze and rustle of noise, as if he was the land he moved over. It wasn't really something you learned; you learned to stop not doing it. He'd gotten that in the woods from his father, and from Grandma's brothers and nephews, and from his own heart, without putting it into words until he went into the Corps and got his final polish from experts.

All you had to do was stop the part of your mind that was always telling itself stories. Humans had been predators for a very long time, after all, long before language. Just be.

The wind was from the target towards him; the nauseatingly good smell of meat roasting got strong, and then there was a strong whiff of sweat and human waste. It was too rank to be from one man; the campsite must be very bad to smell like this so far away, even compared to the squalor they'd often met after the Change.

Closer, a hundred feet, and he was behind a boulder half buried in the thinly grassed rocky soil. The sun was lower, and he had to squint as he checked slowly around the edge of the lump of basalt.

There.

The cannibal sentry was still standing upright, silhouetted against the evening sun as clearly as a cardboard cutout. Havel flexed his fingers before taking up the bow again. A deep breath, and a quick trained effort of will to empty his mind as he exhaled.

Now.

Havel rose, feet stamping down into the archer's T. The powerful recurved bow came up, stave creaking as he drew to the ear-ninety pounds draw, horn and sinew and wood of the bois d'arc tree. The triangle-shaped arrowhead touched the outer edge of the riser, and he lowered his left hand until the head met the black outline a hundred feet above him. Instinct spoke and the string rolled off his fingers:

Snap.

The string slapped against his arm guard, and the arrow blurred out in a flickering shallow curve, the razor edges of the broadhead glinting as the slight curve in the fletching made the shaft twirl like a rifle bullet. Almost instantly came the flat heavy smack of steel striking flesh, a thick wet sound.

Havel was moving as the shaft left the string; he could feel that the shot was a hit. He covered the hundred feet uphill in a near-silent panther rush, already close enough to see the sentry pivoting, eyes wide in a filthy, hairy sun-scorched face, blood coughing out between his bearded lips in a bright fan of arterial red. The gray goose-feather fletching danced behind his left shoulder blade, and the point and eighteen inches of the shaft dripped red from his chest.

Havel dropped his bow and grabbed the man by the beard with his right hand, burying his left in the tangled hair at the base of his skull. A single wrenching twist, a sound like a green branch snapping, and the body jerked and went limp. He snatched up the spear-it was a sharpened shovel head on a pole-and lowered the body to the ground. Then he drew the arrow free with a single strong pull-he might need it-and hastily pushed the filthy carcass downslope behind him, wiping his gloved hands on the dirt.

The lice and fleas would be looking for a new home, and he didn't feel hospitable.

Eric and Pamela dodged the rolling body as they followed him and flattened themselves below the ridgeline. Havel stood in the sentry's place, leaning on the spear and studying the enemy camp. It wasn't far away; a little nook with a spring trickling down an almost-cliff and some cottonwoods-most cut down for firewood now. There weren't any tents, just arrangements of plastic sheeting and blankets propped on crudely tied branches, and some car seats and improvised bedrolls. A fair-sized fire was popping and flaring beneath pieces of meat on a grill that looked as if it came from a barbecue.

Even from here the stink was enough to make him gag, and he could see the swarm of flies on bits of bodies and casual heaps of human shit-one of the cannibals was squatting as he watched.

Nearby was the source of the screams. It was a half-bowshot away, but he could see that the woman-girl- was in her teens. An older man with shaggy mouse-colored hair and beard was trying to make her eat something, grabbing at her hair and pushing it towards her face; she fought with dreadful concentrated intensity, screaming when she broke free.

That never took her far, because her ankles were tied with a cord that gave her only about a foot of movement, like a horse-hobble. Several of the watchers were crowing laughter, but the man shouted angrily as she managed to rake his face with her nails. He hit her seriously then, and turned to pull an ax out of a stump as she slumped to the ground.

"Oh, I hate it when I have to be a hero," Havel said, tossing the spear aside. "And I'd have just as much chance of hitting her as him if I tried a shot at this distance. Here goes."

He cupped his hands to his mouth. "Hey! You down there! Yes, you, asshole! The Bearkillers are here – here to kill you all!"

The camp below froze like a tableau behind glass. Waxwork figures in some unimaginable future museum:

Evolution of the post-Change cannibal band, he thought crazily. : then burst into activity like maggots writhing in dung.

"Oooops," Havel said in a normal conversational tone as more and more of them appeared, crawling from their nests of cloth or from under the crude sunshades. "Guess they were more numerous than I thought."

They milled about, blinking, scratching. The bushy-haired man finished pulling the ax out of the cottonwood stump and pointed up the slope with it.

"Food!" he shouted. "More food-he came to us!"

The others took it up in a second, a confused brabble of voices rising into a shrilling scream. They surged forward up the slope towards him, waving axes and tire irons and clubs and knives and a couple of improvised spears like the one he'd been holding.

"Let them get fairly close," he went on, looking down at the white faces of his companions. "I don't see any distance weapons at all, but we can't afford to waste arrows. We're none of us what you'd call crack shots with these things yet."

He picked up his bow and reached over his shoulder for a shaft.

"And I really hope Will gets the rest of the A-list here quickly," he said.

"Haakkaa paalle!"

Havel shouted the ancient battle cry as he rose and lunged. The cannibal grinned with yellow teeth, throwing himself backward and rolling downhill in a ball with the haft of his ax held across his stomach.

As he went, half a dozen others popped up from behind boulders or bushes and threw a barrage of rocks. Havel ducked down and lifted his shield, swearing, keeping his sword hilt and sword hand behind the targe as the fist-sized missiles banged and rattled painfully off his mail and shield and helmet. If he lost the use of his right arm they'd overrun the Bearkillers in minutes.

"Yuk-hei-saa-saa!" Eric shouted behind him, from where he sat-a bone-bruise on the right leg left him unable to stand. "Ho la, Odhinn!"

Gasping, Havel spared a second to grin at him. "Well, we've all got our traditions," he said. "Keep an eye out for-"

The younger man's bow sounded, a flat snap through the clatter and shouting. A cannibal dropped her knife and fell, trying to drag herself off with the shaft through a thigh. The rest of the band ignored her in their hurry to dive for cover, which at least made it harder for them to throw rocks accurately. A hissing shout brought his head around completely; just in time to see the tip of Pamela's backsword nick through the tip of a nose as three tried to rush her.

That brought a squeal like a pig in a slaughter chute and panicked flight. The other cannibal attacking her dodged away with a shriek of terror as she repositioned in a spurt of dust and gravel, moving with terrifying speed and grace. The third ran into her targe and fell backward as if he'd rammed a brick wall; she killed him with a neat economical downward stab.

"Watch your own side, goddamnit!" she shouted as she moved.

It was good advice. A lump of stone glanced off Havel 's helmet with a dull bongggg sound, and he whipped his gaze back to his section, shaking his head against the jarring impact. Cannibals were bobbing up from cover to throw and then down again, and the little party had "How many arrows left?" he asked.

"Six," Eric said.

Couldn't tell he's hurting from the voice, Havel thought with approval. He really is shaping up good.

"Make 'em count," he said. "There are a lot more of them than I thought."

The rocks picked up again; the two mail-clad Bearkillers huddled back, protecting the more lightly armored Lars-son, moving their shields to catch as many of the heavy stones as they could. After a moment Eric shot; a miss this time, but a close one, and the enemy grew cautious.

"Four left," Eric said.

"I'm surprised they haven't run," Pamela said. "We must have killed or crippled more than a third of them."

"Nowhere to go," Havel replied, keeping his eyes busy. "Wolves don't eat members of their pack who're injured. Men do, men and dogs, and I think literally here. Also that spring down there is probably the only water they know about."

The rocks slowed for a moment. "And they're probably more than half mad by now," Pamela panted, ducking low. She took a quick sip of water and carefully recorked her canteen. "Wanting to die on some level."

"Then they could obligingly try to slug it out toe-to-toe," Havel said, knocking a jagged four-pound lump of basalt out of the air with his shield, and feeling the weight all the way down his back. "We'd have killed them all if they'd kept on doing that."

"I said they were crazy, not stupid," Pamela said.

Well, if nobody turns up soon, we're toast. In fact, we're dinner, Havel thought.

"Here they come," he said a second later.

This time they were doing it smarter; half throwing rocks, the other half scuttling forward. Far too many:

They must have been recruiting among the people they attacked, Havel thought. Those who refused to turn cannibal going into the stewpot.

He saw the faces and the eyes now that they were closer; there was little human left in them. Animals, but cunning ones.

And Pam's right too.

"Dinner's going to be expensive," he snarled. "Haakkaa paalle!"

Eric shot his last four arrows, and put two more of the enemy out of action. Then they were close, three in front of Havel with blades, more behind carrying stones-one woman in the tattered remains of a business outfit clasping a rock the size of her head, ready to sling it into him at close range.

Not good.

He stepped forward, the downward slope giving added force to the cut. The backsword blurred down and caught the axman at the join of neck and shoulder, and the eyes in the dirt-smeared face went wide. Shock vibrated up his arm as bone parted with a greenstick snap.

He wrenched at the steel with desperate haste, beating aside a spearhead with his shield; the blade was fastened immovably by the dead man's convulsion and the sagging weight tore the braided-leather grip out of his hand.

The time lost let a man with a hatchet too close. He dodged and the spearhead from the other side went by his face; the hatchet skimmed off his shoulder, rattling along the rings of his armor. The hatchetman stepped in, trying to grapple, and Havel lashed out with his steel-clad forearm.

The vambrace took his enemy in the face. Bone crumbled. He snapped the puukko into his hand and struck as he stepped in towards the spearman, the vicious edge grating on bone as he slashed it down the haft of the spear, trying to ward off a third attacker with his shield :

"You didn't come!" the woman with the big rock screamed. "You left us!"

Whatever the hell that meant, she was entirely too close, raising the rock in both hands, and he couldn't dodge-not in time. Two of the cannibals were swarming over Eric, one grabbing his hair to pull his head back while the other hacked clumsily with a bread-knife:

Then the one with the rock looked down at the point of the sword that had appeared through her chest, dropped the big stone on her own head and collapsed forward.

Signe stood there instead, revealed like a window when the shade rattled up, leaning forward in a perfect stepping lunge, her eyes going wider and wider as she looked down at the results. Havel took a pace back and clubbed the cannibal about to stab Eric in the throat with the metal-shod edge of his shield; it clunked into the man's neck and dropped him limp on the rocky ground.

The other turned to run, and had just time to scream when he saw the line of blades coming up the ridge. One scream, before Eric's fist closed on his ankle and dragged him back towards the knife.

Havel took the time to draw three heaving breaths, straining to pull air that felt like heated vacuum into his lungs, then stepped forward to plant a foot and wrench his sword free of the body of the cannibal he'd killed.

"Thanks," he said to Signe.

"You're-" She bit back a heave. "You're welcome."

Relief was like a trickle of cool air under his gambeson.

The A-list of the Bearkillers swarmed up onto the ridge as the cannibals fled.

Then they sheathed their swords and unlimbered their bows.

"You're late for the party," he said to Will.

The Texan shot; a shriek of pain followed right on the heels of the bow-string's slap against his vambrace.

"But not for the cleanup chores," Will said.

"Well, I think we can assume he's innocent," Havel said.

The man lying in a cage of barbed wire stank; he was also skeletally thin, and his left foot was missing, crudely bandaged with the remnants of a T-shirt. Enormous brown eyes looked out of a stubbled hawk-nosed face. Havel mentally subtracted twenty years and put him in his thirties.

"I should hope so," the prisoner croaked. "Do I look like I've been eating well?" He waved the stump. "I've been contributing to the pot. Aaron Rothman's the name."

"Mike Havel," Havel said. Then: "Get him out of there."

Two of the Bearkillers went in with a stretcher. Pam knelt beside it and soaked the bandage with her canteen, edging up one end of it. When she saw what lay beneath she swore and reached into her bag for a hypodermic.

"You're a doctor too?" Rothman said. "As well as the Amazon thing?"

"Vet, actually," Pam replied. "Too? You are a doctor? Medical variety?"

"GP," he confirmed and weakly held up a hand. "That's the only reason they didn't kill me, dearie, when I wouldn't: join up."

"Thank goodness," she said. "I've got to pull you through, then. We really need a doc."

The wounded man looked around at the mail-and-leather clad Bearkillers, and at Howie Reines and Running Horse standing in horrified silence as the grim work of cleanup went on.

"Oh, I was so hoping this was all over," he sighed. "If only you'd come in helicopters!"

"It isn't over," Havel said grimly, as Pamela cleaned and rebandaged the gruesome wound. Red streaks went from it up the wasted calf. "In fact, it's probably just starting."

Rothman sighed. "It could be worse. I used to live in New York."

Havel looked around; there were half a dozen living captives, huddled under the Bearkiller blades. And about the same number of liberated prisoners getting help, counting Rothman and the girl who'd been screaming when he arrived-she huddled in a patch of shade, a blanket clutched around her shoulders and her eyes squeezed shut. A couple of young children, too-as far as he was concerned they were all prisoners, no questions asked.

"So, any of these innocent too?" Havel said, going down on one knee and putting an arm behind the doctor's shoulders, lifting him to a better vantage point on the presumptive cannibals.

The weight was featherlight. Rothman fumbled at his breast pocket-he was in the remains of slacks and shirt with pocket protector-and brought out a pair of glasses. He peered through them, and smiled with cracked and bleeding lips. It wasn't a particularly pleasant expression, and Havel didn't blame him one bit.

"Not a one, barring the children," he said. "And I'll testify to that in court."

"That won't be necessary, Dr. Rothman," Havel said, lowering him gently back to the stretcher. "Things have gotten a little more: informal, since the Change."

He looked up. There was a cottonwood growing out of the cliffside, dead and bleached but still strong; a convenient limb stretched out about ten feet up.

"Will!" he called. The Texan looked up; Havel jerked a thumb at the limb. "Get some ropes ready, would you? Three at a time ought to do."

"I can't! I'm sorry, so sorry!"

They were on a low hillside above the camp, which was the only way you could get any privacy. Havel drew his hands backward as Signe fumbled to refasten her clothes. His long fingers knotted on his knees in the cool sage-smelling darkness; herbs and long grass crackled under the blanket, adding a bruised spicy smell to the night.

"OK!" Havel said, turning his back a bit while zippers and snaps fastened. "Look, it's OK!"

No it isn't, he thought, and his voice probably gave his words the lie.

"I'm sorry. I thought I could-look, let's try-"

Havel made his gesture gentle. "No, we just tried to rush it, Signe," he said. "I know it isn't easy to get over the sort of thing you went through. Head on back to camp and tell them I'll be down in a while, why don't you?"

"Mike-"

"Signe, I said head on down. "

He waited until her footsteps had faded in the darkness before he drew his sword and looked at the twisted stump at the foot of the-rock that blocked off the view to the west.

"Is it worth the risk to the blade?" he murmured. "Yes." A pause for thought. "Hell yes."

Then he spent twenty minutes of methodical ferocity hacking the hard sun-dried wood into matchstick splinters.

Interlude II:

The Dying Time

"Y ou sure this is a good idea, Eddie?" Mack said, as they walked into the built-up area of Portland from the west.

"Look, who does the thinking here?" Eddie Liu replied.

"You do, Eddie," Mack said. "But this place gives me the creeps-all those stiffs. We've been eating pretty good out of town since things Changed. A lot of places are growing stuff, too, so we can get that when it's ready. Or maybe we could go east, I hear there are plenty of cows there and not many people. So I was just asking, are you sure about this?"

Eddie Liu shrugged at the question. "No, I'm not sure. But I am sure wandering around the boonies looking for food isn't a good idea anymore. People are getting too organized for the two of us to just take what we need."

Too many of the little towns had gotten their shit together, with committees and local strongmen and those goddamned Witches, of all crazy things. He could see the thoughts slowly grinding through behind Mack's heavy-featured olive face, and then he nodded.

"We have to hook up with somebody," Eddie finished. And Portland is where the organization is, he thought-or at least, that was what the rumors said.

He was betting that in a big city, or what was left of it, there would be less of the no-strangers-wanted thing they'd been running into among the small towns and farms farther south.

They trudged through endless suburbs; mostly smoldering burnt-out wreckage smelling of wet ash, wholly abandoned to an eerie silence broken only by the fat, insolent rats and packs of abandoned dogs that skulked off at the edge of sight. In the unburned patches there were spots where tendrils of green vine had already grown halfway across the street, climbing over the tops of the abandoned cars.

On the roof of one SUV a coyote raised its head and watched as he went by, alert but unafraid. Half a mile later they both yelled as a great tawny-bodied cat flashed by, too fast to see details-except that it was bigger than a cougar, nearly the size of a bear.

The beast was across the street and into an empty window in three huge bounds.

"Mother of God, I don't like the idea of going to sleep with something like that running around loose!" Eddie said. "I know what it's been eating, too. We'd better find a place with a good strong door and a lock before we camp."

Farther east they began to reach flatter stretches where the burnt-out rubble was only patches; this road in the area north of Burnside was flanked with old warehouses and brick buildings. Some of them looked grimy and run-down, others fancied up into loft apartments and stores and coffee shops and offices, with medium-height buildings on either side, but still there was no sign of human life.

There was one encouraging sign. Someone had pushed all the cars and trucks to the sides, so that there was a clear path down the street. That had to have been done since the Change.

No, make that two encouraging signs, Eddie thought.

There weren't many bodies around, or much of the faint lingering sweetish smell he'd become used to, either; anywhere near the main roads or most of the cities they'd passed through you couldn't escape it, and the whole area just south of Portland had been like an open mass grave. It gave him the willies-not because he cared about bodies themselves, but because he knew they bred disease. And because they were an unfortunate reminder of how easy it was to join the majority of nonsurvivors.

He doubted that one in three of the people who'd been around before the Change still were.

Food I can count on getting, as long as anyone does, he thought. But those fevers: man, you can't shiv a germ.

"Maybe we should have kept the bitches," Mack said.

They trudged along the middle of the road-it was the safest place to be, now that guns didn't work anymore and it wasn't so easy to hurt someone out of arm's reach.

" Sandy was real pretty and she'd stopped crying all the time," the big man concluded mournfully.

"We couldn't keep 'em unless you were planning on eating 'em. Which, except as what we people who read books call a metaphor, we weren't-"

He stopped, holding up a hand for silence before he went on: "I hear something. Up that next road on the left."

The big man beside him wheeled; he was wearing a football helmet, and carrying a sledgehammer with an eight-pound head over one shoulder. His jacket had slabs they'd cut from steel-belted tires fastened over most of it, too.

Eddie had added a Home Depot machete slung over his shoulder in an improvised harness, but hadn't tried to add much protection to his pre-Change outfit-he disliked anything that restricted his speed. They both wore backpacks; Mack's held their most precious possession, what was left of a twenty-pound sack of beef jerky. He hoped it was beef, at least-it was what they'd traded the girls for, that and two cartons of Saltines, some peanuts and a precious surviving six-pack of Miller.

He'd considered staying with that gang, but he'd gotten a bad vibe from them all, the way they looked at him, and especially at Mack, like they were noting how much meat he had on his bones.

I'm not really sure they wanted the bitches just to fuck 'em, either, he thought. Ass is cheap these days if you've got food. And they didn't look very hungry. Sorta suspicious.

"Someone's coming," Mack said.

"Yeah. That's why we're here," Eddie said reasonably. "To meet someone. Now shut up and let me think."

There were a lot of people coming, from the sound of it. They stepped back towards the curb, between two trucks.

The young man's eyes went wide, then narrowed apprais-ingly.

The first men to turn the corner were armed-a dozen with crossbows, which gave Eddie a case of pure sea-green envy; he was still kicking himself for not getting one of those right after the Change, when the sporting-goods stores and outfitters hadn't all been stripped. The other twenty or so carried polearms; murderous-looking stabbing spears seven feet long. He'd seen the like elsewhere. What really interested him was their other gear.

They all wore armor; sleeveless tunics covered in overlapping rows of U-shaped scales punched out of sheet metal somehow; they had conical steel helmets with strips at the front to protect their noses, and kite-shaped shields of plywood covered in sheet metal, painted black with a red eye in the center.

Behind them came more people; not armed, but looking businesslike, many carrying tools-sledgehammers, pry bars, saws, and dragging dollies. Behind them came flatbeds and improvised wagons of half a dozen types. The people drawing the vehicles were handcuffed to them, and looked a lot thinner and more ragged than the others. One of the wagons, the last, bore bodies-some fresh, many the wasted skeletons held together by gristle that littered the ground around cities elsewhere. Now he saw why the city itself was less rancid; someone was cleaning house, doing the rounds of buildings where people had dragged themselves to die.

And I sort of suspect that these guys just pushed people out of town to get rid of them, now, he thought. Pushed 'em out before the food was all gone. That's why the dead're so thick south of town. Clever.

And there was a honcho, in a rickshaw-like arrangement, sort of a giant tricycle, pedaled by another of the thin-looking men; men who worked like machines with their eyes cast permanently down. The passenger was black and solidly built and wearing a dashiki and little beaded flowerpot hat; one hand held a fly whisk, the other a clipboard.

The: soldiers, I suppose; unless they're the only racially integrated street gang outside a movie: stopped and leveled their weapons.

Eddie smiled broadly, raising his hands palm-out. "Hey, no problem. You guys the law around here?"

"We are the law and the prophets," the black man said, in a deep rich voice. "We are the nobody-fucks-with-us Portland Protective Association, and you'd better believe it."

"Where do we join?" Eddie asked.

Several of the spearmen looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes and grinned, not a pleasant expression. The man in the pedicab waved his fly whisk eastward.

"That way. Here."

He handed over two disks on strings; squinting at his, Eddie saw "Probationary Applicant" printed on it.

"Being an Associate of the PPA isn't all that easy, but you can try-and they'll find you something to do. Those let you go straight through to headquarters, and man, you do not want to be caught wandering about."

He made a lordly gesture with the fly whisk, and the two wanderers headed east. Signs of order increased; traffic on foot and on bicycles and in weird tandem arrangements hauling cargo, an occasional group of marching armored troops: and at what had been the green lawns of Couch Park, a huge pit.

Thick acrid black smoke poured out of it; a gas tanker stood nearby, feeding lines that spurted burning gasoline over the deep hole. Eddie watched a handcart pulled through a gap in the raw earth berm around the fire pit; it was heaped with skeletal bodies, some no more than bones held together by rotting gristle, some nauseatingly fresh and juicy, swarming with maggots or tunneled by exploring rats. Even now he gagged a little at the smell of the smoke, and of the carts lined up to feed it. He supposed the gasoline kept the fires hot enough that flesh and bone themselves would burn.

"Why're they doing that, Eddie?" Mack asked.

"Not enough room or time to bury them all," Eddie said. This bunch doesn't fuck around, he added silently to himself. "Rotting bodies make people sick, Mack."

The big man nodded, looking nervous. You could fight to take food or anything else you wanted, or to fend off a band after your own goods or the meat on your bones. But you couldn't fight typhus, or cholera, or the nameless fevers that had taken off nearly as many people as the great hunger, or the new sickness people whispered about, the black plague.

They went past the line of dead-carts; the guards keeping the workers to their tasks on that detail wore scarves over their mouths, and stood well back. Another civilian overseer-this time a fussy-looking middle-aged white accountant type-intercepted them. Besides his clipboard, he wore a suit and tie, the first one Eddie had seen since right after the Change.

"Doesn't anyone listen?" he half shrieked, looking at the disks around their necks. "South from here! See that building?"

He pointed to a tall glass-sheathed tower with beveled edges. As Eddie followed the finger, he saw a rhythmic blink of light from the roof; some sort of coded signal, worked with lights.

"That's the Fox Tower. Stop two blocks west of it and then turn south. Straight south to the Park Blocks; that's where the sorting is today. And you'd better be careful; the Protector himself is there this time!"

"The Protector?" Eddie asked. "He the man, here?"

The clerk's lips went tight. "You'll see. And you'd better be respectful."

Eddie looked at the line of spears, and the burning ground. Several other pillars of black smoke rose from the city, and now that he knew what they were he could easily tell them from the ordinary plumes from random fires.

"Oh, yeah, duibuqi, so sorry, no disrespecting, man. None at all.

"

The streets were mostly empty; the long rectangle of park swarmed. Several of the big grassy areas had been fenced off; some held horses, others men learning to ride horses; one fell off and staggered to his feet clutching an arm as Eddie watched.

Much of the rest of the park had been converted to vegetable gardens; a whiff told him where the fertilizer had come from. And another line of spearmen was prodding several score men with disks around their necks towards a small baseball park with bleachers, the kind neighborhood kids would have used back before the Change. Another man with a clipboard waited there; he had a belt with tools around his waist; beside him cooks were boiling something in big pots over wood fires. It smelled like porridge of some sort, and Eddie could hear Mack's stomach rumbling.

The man with the tools shouted for silence.

"All right," he said, when the newcomers had damped down the rumble of their talk. "First thing, anyone lies to us is really going to regret it-but not for long. Understand?"

Eddie preempted Mack's question: "He means if you lie and they find out, they'll off you."

"Oh," Mack said, nodding thoughtfully.

"We need skilled workers," Mr. Handyman went on. "Any blacksmiths first and foremost. Farriers too."

"Well, that lets us out," Eddie murmured; the closest he'd come to blacksmithing was a few hours of shop in high school, and he didn't even recognize the name for the other trade.

"Plumbers, fitters, machinists, bricklayers, carpenters," the man went on. "Doctors, dentists. Gardeners and farmers too. Line up over there at the desks and give the details. And people, do not lie. General laborers over here."

Over here had another bunch of tough guards, and a bin full of metal collars.

No, not my thing, Eddie thought.

There was a scattering of men and women sitting in the bleachers around the baseball field, mostly close up by home base. There were also racks of weapons near the entrance- spears and shields-and an alert-looking squad with crossbows.

Eddie nodded, unsurprised. Yeah. An elimination event.

Also there was a big horse-drawn carriage, the type they'd used to show tourists around town before the Change; it had four glossy black horses hitched to it, and another couple standing saddled nearby, with collared servants holding them. Plus six or seven big armored men, standing by their mounts. Eddie's status-antennae fingered them for muscle.

One more servant sat in the carriage, holding up a lacy parasol-a blond chick, and a real stunner, dressed in something out of a pervert's catalogue and a silver collar. Across from her was a woman in her twenties, a brunette- no collar, and a fancy dress. Leaning back against the side of the carriage with his arms negligently spread along the top of the door was a tall man who seemed to be clad in a rippling metal sheath.

A little closer, and Eddie could see that it was armor- thousands of small burnished stainless-steel washers, held on to a flexible backing with little copper rivets through the holes in their center; it clad the man from neck to knees, slit up the back and front so that he could ride a horse.

Around his narrow waist he wore a leather belt carrying a long double-edged sword and a dagger; over his broad shoulders went a black silk cloak; on his feet high black boots with golden spurs on the heels. A servant nearby held his shield and a helmet, hammered steel with hinged cheek-pieces and a tall raven-feather plume.

The face above the glittering armor was narrow and aquiline; the hazel eyes that surveyed the field were the coldest the young man had ever seen. Eddie estimated his age somewhere between thirty and forty; that sort of bony look didn't show the years much.

I think I'm in love, he grinned to himself. Man, this dude is bad! Look at those chicks, that carriage, that gear, all of this. I want a piece of it. Oh, sweet motherfucking Jesus, do I!

"Hey!" he shouted aloud. "I didn't come here to shovel shit. I came here to join the Association and fight. I want to be with you when you move out of Portland."

Mack rumbled agreement, and about a dozen others among the crowd did as well; none of them had come through since the Change looking plump but they were notably less gaunt than the others.

The man in the coat of rings shifted his gaze to Eddie, coming erect with lazy grace. He walked nearer, the muscle just behind.

"And what makes you think we're leaving Portland?" he said softly, he had an educated man's voice, calm and precise.

Eddie met his eyes, forcing himself not to flinch or show the sudden rush of cold anxiety that ran from crotch up to stomach.

"Because that's where it all is, now," he said. "The farmers and the farms, that's everything. If you've got them, you've got everything."

A guard bristled. "You call the Protector 'sir', cocksucker, or 'Protector'."

A thin brow crooked up, and the man raised a hand for quiet. "Why did you come into town, then?"

"I figured, what with the panic and all, probably not all the food got eaten right after the Change. Just the stuff in stores, maybe canned goods in warehouses, that sort of thing. But the bulk stuff, the wheat and like that in the silos and elevators, maybe on ships, a lot of it wouldn't get taken. Whoever got a grip on that could build up their own army-and it'll take an army to squeeze those farmers out in the valley. Freelancing don't cut it anymore. I heard some rumors about you, and I figured that was what was going on. Protector. Sir."

"Well, well, well," the lord of Portland said. "We've got one with brains. Perhaps I'll have a use for you. Any education?"

Eddie shrugged and grinned. "Two years community college," he said. "And the school of hard knocks."

"More hard knocks we can arrange," the man said. He nodded his head towards the baseball field. "It takes a special sort of man to be an Associate. We have a little contest first, a chance to show your quality. The winners are inducted into our ranks, if they're not too badly crippled."

Eddie nodded. "Figured it would be like that, from your setup," he said calmly. "One question, Protector?" At the nod he went ahead. "How come you figured things out so fast?"

The man smiled, and gestured another bristling guard back. "I was a man who realized what the Change meant," he said.

He clapped his hands sharply. "Let the play-offs begin!"