Horses of the North

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At the doctor’s direction, they moved Junior Jardin to a heavy, solid wooden chair and secured his arms, legs and body thereto with straps and rope.

Taking a handful of the long, lank, dirty hair. Bookerman tilted the prisoner’s head far, far back, then said, “Milo, you are a strong man—take a good grip of his head and keep it in just this position when the time comes … should Mr. Jardin here choose to remain uncooperative and force me to do an agonizing thing to him.”

After a moment of searching his bag, the physician turned to display a single stainless-steel teaspoon. With a broad, sustained smile, he walked over to stand before the trussed-up Jardin.

Despite the smile, his voice was infinitely sad, regretful, a little chiding, as one might speak just before punishing a willful, stubborn, chronically disobedient child. “Junior, we wish to know the present location of your group’s base. Please tell us, now, for if you do not, I am going to have to do something that will hurt you more than any pain you ever before have felt. Nor will that pain go quickly away, Junior. What I do will maim you for life; you never will be able to forget it, either waking or sleeping.

“Well, Junior? We are waiting for you to tell us where your base is located. Where is your group’s camp? Please tell us.”

“Shit, yew ain’ as carin’ me, fucker!” said the plainly terrified man. “I done been beat on afore this. Yew can go fuck yerse’f.” But his voice was not nearly as strong as on previous occasions, and he licked repeatedly at dry lips.

Bookerman sighed. “Oh, Junior, Junior, I am certain that no mere beating would convince you to cooperate with us, and therefore I suppose that I must do what I must do to you.

“Milo, grasp his head and hold it tightly just as I have shown you.”

When the prisoner’s head was immobile in Milo’s strong hands, Bookerman came closer and held the shiny teaspoon before the wide, bulging eyes. “Look well at this instrument, Junior. You see here a simple teaspoon. But with this commonplace utensil, I am going to remove your left eyeball. When once I have begun, I’ll not stop until your bloody eyeball is out and lying in the palm of my hand. Do you understand? So if you wish to tell us what we wish to know, if you wish to live the rest of your life with two eyes, rather than with one eye and an empty, ever painful socket, do so now.”

He sighed again, admonishing, “No, no, Junior, squeezing tight your eyelids will not save your eye from me and my spoon. Only will the telling of the location of your camp, your base, prevent my permanent maiming of you.”

“D … don’ know!” stuttered the captive, in an agony of obvious terror. “P … prob’ly moved on by now, enyhow.”

“Oh, Junior, Junior,” sighed Bookerman. “You lie so ineptly. But perhaps you will wax more loquacious when you have but one single eye remaining and my bloody spoon is poised to remove it as well. Now, Milo, hold him absolutely rocksteady. You, Herr Kruger, assist him, bitte.”

Milo could not be certain that the doctor meant to really carry out this threat until, to the ear-shattering screams of the prisoner, the trained fingers of the surgeon slid the bowl of the spoon expertly, precisely between the eye and the socket.

“Oh, sweet Jesus God, no …” shouted Jim Olsen, then vomited on the floor with a gush and a tortured retching. The other council member simply fled in horrified silence, slamming the door behind him.

The vials which Bookerman had personally prepared were transported to the isolated farm in a large Styrofoam cooler filled with icy spring water and slung between two smooth-gaited mules in a canvas tarp stiffened with boards.

The volunteer archers had practiced for several days with identical glass vials filled with a liquid of equal weight, so they knew just how to aim arrows to which vials of nitroglycerin had been taped behind the blunt target points.

Milo had been loath even to go near the cases of ancient, deteriorating and thus highly unstable and deadly-dangerous dynamite, but not so Dr. Clarence Bookerman. The doctor himself had boiled the sticks, skimmed off the nitroglycerine, then poured it into glass medicine vials, actions which called for a degree of courage and cool nerve that not even Milo felt he could have summoned up. He reflected yet again that the doctor was simply full of surprises.

The early-morning drizzle of nitroglycerin-laden arrows blew in most of the roof, blew out sections of walls and three doors of the sprawling farmhouse and did even worse damage to the barn, setting it fiercely ablaze. Claxton, who turned out to be a burly, hairy man in his mid-fifties, and his crew, half clad and still groggy with sleep, a few of them clutching their rusty Ml6s, stumbled and staggered out the enlarged openings where doors had been to face a terrifying and unwavering line of leveled muzzles—rifles, shotguns and full automatics-interspersed with the winking points of hunting arrows in drawn bows.

Milo sincerely wished that they all had come out shooting. There was no question of the fact that these predators had to die; they were just too dangerous—armed or unarmed, ahorse or afoot—in their numbers and degree of savagery—to let loose to terrorize any other of the scattered survivors. But Milo also knew that cold-blooded murder was beyond him.

It was then proved to not be beyond the man who stood beside him, Dr. Bookerman. With an inarticulate shout imbued with a tone of alarmed warning, the physician opened fire on the mob of marauders, loosing short, controlled bursts of automatic fire. And, as he must have known would happen in the tense, keyed-up situation, every other weapon joined his within a bare eyeblink.

A few of the band of bushwhackers managed to flee back into the wrecked, smoldering house, only to be hunted, rooted out and killed by the now blood-mad raiders, Wheelock’s contingent, at least, set on long-overdue revenge for past incursions.

Claxton did not look at all imposing as he lay dying on the blood-soaked ground before the wrecked house. The three bullet holes in his torso stood out markedly against his graying skin, and his thick beard and furry chest now were thick with blood, providing a feast for the flies that swarmed the charnel yard.

There was no fear in the bloodshot eyes that looked up at Milo where he squatted beside the fatally wounded leader, only pain alloyed with wonder.

“How come for you to shoot us all, feller? We won’t no particle of danger to a bunch size of yours, the way we was out here. The mosta us dint even have our rifles, you know—them mortar shells or grenades or whatever it was you used just had plumb took the fight outen my boys.”

“The same reason,” Milo replied gravely, “that you pour boiling water into a barrel of rats—your kind, you spoilers, are a bane to the existence of folks who are breaking their asses trying to keep themselves and their families alive. Or, I could quote you Scripture to the effect that ‘those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword’; you and your pack existed by violence, and that’s how you, most of you, were killed.”

Claxton choked briefly, then weakly pushed himself up onto his elbows and coughed violently, sending a frothy, dark-pink spray from his mouth. Moaning, he eased himself back into a recumbent posture, breathing raggedly, wheezing loudly, his eyes shut and a series of strong shudders racking his body and limbs. Thinking him on the point of death, Milo had started to arise when the eyes opened again and Claxton spoke once more.

“How the fuck did you bunch of murderin’ bastids find us, anyhow? It was never no fires was lit here by day, and even the boys as come back wounded or dyin’ covered their tracks damn good, the way they was taught to, and I had me three overlapping layers of guards around this place, day and night.”

Milo nodded again. “Yes, I know, Claxton. With an organizational mind like yours and your leadership abilities, it’s too bad that you didn’t choose to work for people, instead of against them. We had a devil of a time taking out your sentries without alerting you here last night.

“As to just how we found you. We … ahhh, ‘persuaded’ one of the raiders who came after our horse herd to tell us exactly how to find this place.”

“Who?” Claxton demanded. “Who finked on us?”

“He calls himself Junior Jardin,” Milo replied.

Claxton shook his gory head and snorted weakly. “No way, feller, no damn fuckin’ way! Lissen, I knows that lil boy, he’s done been my lover nearly a whole year now, and I knows he’s tough as they come. You could of beat him plumb to death and he wouldn’ of finked on me and the boys.”

“Yes, Claxton, we tried beating him and he just laughed and sneered and spat at us, for all that he was wounded when we got him. But my … my associate was able to prevail upon him to tell us everything.”

“How?” asked Claxton, still disbelievingly.

“He pried out the young man’s left eyeball with a teaspoon, Claxton,” was Milo’s answer. “When he showed him his own eye in the bowl of that spoon, dripping blood and other fluids, and promised to do the same to the other eye as well, Junior Jardin decided to tell us everything we asked of him.”

Rage and loathing momentarily lit Claxton’s glazing eyes. “God damn you, you heartless fuckers! You slanged me and my boys as spoilers and all, but, feller, you bastids is worse than us. I never would of done nothin’ that bad, that common, to no man I ever took alive. You all goin’ to hell, you knows that, don’t you?”

“Quite possibly, Claxton, quite possibly … but well after you. As for …”

But Claxton could no longer hear him, he saw; the outlaw leader had at last died.

There was precious little worth taking from the farm, save ammunition that might or might not ignite, rifle magazines and parts, and some knives, axes and other tools and utensils. The few head of horses were in such bad, ill-cared-for condition that they were simply turned loose to join the wild herds. The small herd of cattle looked to mostly be diseased, so they were put down, lest their malady spread to the wild cattle and other hoofed game of the region.

Milo thought that he had seen pigpens that had been cleaner than the interior of the blasted house, and he was surprised that disease or infections had not cut down the men who had lived in such filth long before the bullets had done so. Even the sty inhabited by the Tahoe City biker contingent years ago had been scrupulously clean compared to this unholy mess, but that may have been partially because that long-dead pack had had dozens of women and male slaves to maintain their home base, water that still ran from faucets and even electricity.

Claxton and his group, however, had never taken prisoners, male or female, coldly cutting down everyone not killed in an attack, so they had had no slaves to do the household chores that they clearly had never themselves chosen to do, preferring to live in their own stink and slops until they were ready to move on to fresh quarters and recommence the same disgusting cycle.

When the house—what the explosions had left of it—and the dead bodies had been thoroughly searched and anything of any use taken, the men dragged their victims into the structure and then set it afire in several places before mounting and starting the long ride back to Limon.

Subsequent to several heated meetings of the enlarged council, a very important decision had been hammered out. Most of Wheelock’s people would move on, out onto the prairies, with the bulk of the newcomers, there being just too many memories of a sad or painful nature now connected with Limon and its environs for them, and their place would be taken by those few Snake River and Cheyenne families still dead set on a settled, farming life rather than the nomad herding-hunting-gathering existence chosen by the bulk of them for their futures.

While Milo hated to leave behind men and women whom he had known for thirty and more years, men and women whom he first had met as scared, helpless urban boys and girls suddenly marooned in a pitiless wilderness, he also realized that he could no longer guide them. They were all become self-reliant adults, parents of their own children and grandparents, as well, in a number of cases; if they had decided that the settled life was best for them, they were right to choose it, and it would have been unfair to Milo to use his emotional leverage to try to shake that decision. He could only wish them all well and move on eastward with the majority.

This they did. The farmers willingly traded their carts for the lands and buildings that they were taking over, settled on their shares of the herds and immediately commenced feverishly hurried attempts to put in a late crop to help sustain them until next year’s harvest time, their goodbyes to their lifelong friends being necessarily brief.

The long, snakelike column of wagons and carts, of riders and walkers, of herds and herdsmen and herd dogs crawled out, eastward-bond, along the ancient, deteriorating Interstate 70. They made but few miles per day, and detachments halted at each single house or farm or ranch or settlement to search for recent signs of human life and to ferret out anything that might be of use or of value to the people as a whole for their survival.

On the wider, more level, less overgrown stretches of the highway, they were able to travel two and even three teams abreast and therefore increase their speed of march, but then, often as not, they would be forced to wait or to go into camp early in order that the laggards and the fractious herds could catch up. But, sometimes, hours or even days were lost when the entire train found itself confronted by washed-out bridges and broad sections of roadway, necessitating dangerous fording or wide-swinging bypasses or filling and smoothing out sections of former road with earth and rocks and brush and tree trunks.

The buildings and the towns that they passed by and looted of usable artifacts all sat empty, no physical trace of mankind remaining, only his creations. The streets, the buildings, all were now home only to vermin, birds and bats and those beasts for which the lesser creatures were natural prey—mustelids, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, feral cats and a few wild dogs, which last were coming more and more to resemble big coyotes with every succeeding generation, although round, mastiff heads, long, pendulous hound ears, purple-black chow tongues and tight, wiry coats still showed up here and there from time to time.

Of course, many of these predators and others that did not frequent the deserted towns were to be found on the prairies and in the hills and washes, but their combined predations over the years seemed not to have had much if any effect upon the vast wild herds of cattle, horses, pronghorns, a scattering of bison, sheep, goats, unbelievable numbers of fat deer and even a few elk.

Milo quickly noted that the wild cattle, sheep and goats all seemed to sport longer and bigger horns than did most of those in their driven herds. Further, two ewes slain for meat out of two different wild herds showed the beginning development of horns. With the two-legged creature called man no longer about to protect these beasts that he had so prized, they had come again to take up the job of defending themselves against the meat-hungry animals with which they shared their habitat. This task called for as many weapons as possible, as well as increases in size, strength and endurance, the lengthening of legs and the sharpening of the senses of sight, hearing and smell. These now-wild herds demonstrated faster reaction time than did their still-domesticated cousins. Cattle and goats were becoming shaggier, and the sheep seemed to be in the process of exchanging fleece for protective hair in more exposed portions.

From everything he could see, it appeared to Milo that the hosts of nuclear doomsayers had been proved wrong with regard to elevated roentgen counts causing animals to produce monsters. Even in the environs of Denver—the ruins of which might or might not still be radioactive, but which they had studiously avoided nonetheless on general principles—all of the animals they had spied or encountered or killed seemed perfectly normal specimens. Nor were the people producing any significant numbers of abnormal births or stillbirths; quite the contrary, in fact.

Dr. Bookerman summed it up, his opinions concerning it, at least, in a conversation by the fireside one night. “All that occurred in the wake of the War was ghastly, true, but it may have been for mankind as a whole a disguised blessing, friend Milo. With only a few notable and short-lived exceptions, man has been engaged in a shameful pollution of the racial gene pools for a century or more—allowing the worst varieties of mental and physical defectives to live and breed their blighted infirmities back into the species. On the grounds of a misguided sense of so-called ‘human rights,’ medical science had been put to the perverted practices of keeping alive infants that Nature would have otherwise allowed the mercy of death soon after birth; disgusting, sickening abnormalities were kept alive at staggering monetary costs in a world that was already beginning to be overcrowded, was starting to outstrip its food-production capabilities.

“Certifiable lunatics, criminals, sociopaths were allowed to roam at will, to breed as they wished, perpetuating their unsavory kind; mankind employed selective breeding on his livestock, but seemed to consider his own species not worthy of such effort, and any person or group who suggested such a rational practice was slandered, libeled, vilified endlessly.

“Weil, friend Milo, the death of a high degree of civilization has ended that ruinous phase of mankind’s history, at least. We can be certain that only the very strongest, least genetically tainted specimens of humanity survived the plagues and hunger of the period immediately following the War, and the hordes of mental and physical defectives were most likely the first ones to die.

“Now there no longer are softheaded bureaucrats to force those few doctors or midwives as remain to expend heroic efforts to keepalive infants better off dead. And in our existing world, at the level of human culture to which that catastrophic war has reduced us, there is scant chance of any save the mentally and physically sound surviving to the age of breeding, so we will be spared the generations after generations of genetically crippled and feebleminded and diseased which so disastrously afflicted the previous civilization.

“With careful safeguards and controls, we now have the God-sent opportunity, my friend, of overseeing the beginning of the birth of a true Herrenvolk—a race that will one day be capable of conquering the world and fitted to rule it, as well.”

“Sieg Heil!” said Milo dryly. “You sound like a 1930s recording of Adolf Hitler, Doctor. Are you sure you weren’t yourself a Nazi, before the War?”

Watching the physician more closely than usual, Milo thought to see a start and a forced nonchalance in the reply.

“Friend Milo, National Socialism died in the streets of Berlin in 1945, close to a century ago now. So how could I have been, eh? I was not born until 1956. Though it must have been a very exciting time to be alive … for a German, that is.”

“Who proceeded to make times even more exciting,” added Milo, “for the Czechs, the Poles, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Norwegians and one hell of a lot of other nationalities, Doctor.”

Bookerman sighed and slowly shook his head, saying, “Ah, friend Milo, it was but another in a progression of European wars that had been fought since time immemorial, for land, for religion and, later, for politics. America really had no place in it, no reason to get involved at all. It was strictly a war by Europeans against other Europeans and none of the proper concern of the Amis. Had not the then American president Herr Rosenfeld, been so very much enamored of that Communist butcher, Herr Stalin, and pushed his nation into a position from which war against Germany was inevitable, you know, it is quite possible that the War and the subsequent near-extirpation of most of mankind would never have taken place. The Christian Bible says something about the sins of the fathers, I believe.

“Besides, few of you Americans ever were allowed to truly understand the aims of the National Socialist German Workers Party—”

“Six million dead Jews and gypsies, Doctor, are damned hard to misunderstand,” Milo interrupted coldly.

Bookerman’s smile resembled a supercilious sneer. “Oh, come now, friend Milo, surely a man as intelligent, as rational as you have proved yourself to be did not’ swallow that prize bit of Zionist propaganda entire? If so many were killed during the period of World War Two, then from whence came the hordes of Jews who suddenly appeared in Palestine, in America, in Britain and in Australia?

“No, if you want monsters, look not to Germany and our Fuhrer, look rather at your former president’s great friend and ally. Do you know that Josef Stalin had between thirty and fifty million of his own people murdered in less than fifteen years? And America’s more recent ally, Communist China, under Mao Tse-tung, exterminated close to one hundred millions of Chinese and Tibetans between 1949 and 1967, These figures, of course, pale in comparison with that which was done, worldwide it would appear, thirty-odd years ago. And had Rosenfeld and Churchill and the rest of the meddlers allowed us to do that which was so necessary—scour the world clean of the Communists, the Untermenschen—none of this would ever have happened, for there would have been existing no Empire of Soviets to do it, to so destroy all of Western civilization.”

“No, Doctor, there would instead have been the hegemony of Shickelgruber’s thousand-year Reich, most likely, with all its many and severe faults. It would have been akin to letting a pack of vicious, hungry wolves into the house to protect it from a prowling bear; the price was just considered too steep to pay.”

“I am most sorry to have to say it, friend Milo, but you speak the words of a fool, a silly, soft, sentimental fool, not the realist I had taken you to be throughout all we two had experienced together these past years.” The physician looked to truly be sorrowful. “I had, indeed, hoped that after all the decades of frustration, I had at last found a man of kindred philosophy and belief who might be my associate in the beginning and who might then assume my mantle of … oh, ahh, of Fuhrerschaft, to carry on with the supervision of our folk and to our grand design of a reascension of the West. But you are only another humanistic, egalitarian fool, aren’t you? Your baseless slanders against die Dritten Deutschen Reich reveal the truth: at your core of being, you are but yet another of a seemingly endless succession of narrow, visionless men, so hidebound in outmoded dogma as to be unable, unwilling to see that nothing of any importance has ever been accomplished in this world without effort, without sacrifice of the few for the future good of the many, without the sacrifice of the individuals for the good of the state and without the sacrifice of the present for the future.

“Although it pains me to say it, I overestimated you, Milo Moray. I, who had thought that so many long years of life and experience had honed my judgment of men to near-infallibility, was wrong in your case.”

“If you’d thought that I was going to play Goring to your Hitler, Doctor, you sure as hell were wrong!” said Milo, in a blunt, no-nonsense tone. “A lot of those people you’re thinking about breeding like so many dumb cattle are my people, kids I’ve known all of their lives. You try to impose any of that hideous Nazi crap on them, Doctor, and I’ll kill you, that is a promise!

“Are you sure you’re not a good deal older than you say you are? Nazism died a richly deserved death at least ten years before you claim to have been born, so how you came to be so thoroughly inculcated with its savage, barbaric tenets bothers me more than a little … and when things bother me that much, then I make it my business to get to the bottom of them sooner or later, preferably sooner. Perhaps I should take you on as an urgent project, Dr. Bookerman, for my peace of mind and for the future safety of those who depend upon me, for from what you have averred here, this night, I see you as a major threat to the common liberty, if not the very survival, of these few remaining Americans.”

After that night, Milo set himself to watch the doings of Dr. Bookerman very closely, but found nothing that seemed at all out of the ordinary. The physician, his co-leader, behaved as if the conversation on that night had never occurred, treating Milo with the same respect or bonhomie as he had since they had been together. Nor was there anything new in his treatment of the second-echelon commanders—Harry Krueger, Jim Olsen and the rest—or his behavior around the lesser folk.

The caravan of wagons, carts, riders, walkers and herds moved on slowly eastward along or closely paralleling the ancient highway. They halted often to rest the herds or to loot the empty towns, now and again setting up Olsen’s forge to do necessary repairs, reshoe horses and draft oxen and mules, or where the materials were available, construct new carts to bear away the quantities of scavenged artifacts they were finding. They were in no hurry to arrive at any destination now, or to be somewhere by a certain time of the year.

They continued to follow that crumbling highway, wandering on into the overgrown desolation that once had been called the State of Kansas, its broad prairies now given over to grasses, the beasts that fed on those grasses and the other beasts that fed on the grass-eaters. Now and again, they would chance upon traces of other humans, fairly recent traces—within a decade or so, they guessed—some of them, but most much older, probably twenty years old, possibly thirty or more. These findings were a significant disappointment to Milo, but Bookerman, the other leaders and the bulk of the people seemed not to care whether or not they were the only humans left to roam this vast land.

Milo himself was torn between two goals. One was to try to reach some of what had been the larger centers of population along the Kansas-Missouri border, and the other was a nagging presentiment to head due south before winter caught them in some ill-protected place. In the end, however, they continued their stop-and-go snail’s pace eastward, along old Interstate 70, while he salved his conscience with a plan to angle south on Interstate 135 at Salinas. But it was not to be, not that year.