Free Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) by Michael Lane Page B

down. The stars were bright and hard overhead and a
lone meteor trailed for a second before guttering. Grey liked the quiet, he
reflected, liked being alone. It was safe. Now he was going to have friends
involved. He shuddered and hunched his shoulders. He went back inside and went
to bed.
    The
trail bent south, through a series of tiny towns burnt or at war, through
roving bands feeding off each other as the season ground slowly toward the
spring. No one knew then how long that first winter would be; how quiet the
spring after.
    Grey
followed the track of the survivors. He had killed two the first night after
the murder of his family. The men hadn’t been wary, then, and he had cut one’s
throat as he slept, holding him down, smothering his choking gasps with his own
bedding. The second had awoken as Grey took the dead one’s shotgun. The boy
shot him in the face and retreated to the woods, his heartbeat jackhammering in
his ears. The blast had scattered the picketed horses and woken the camp. In
the confusion escape was easy enough. The killers had loosed their two dogs to
track him. He shot both a few hundred yards from the camp. Then he circled back
around. He managed to grab a single horse, a gray gelding with no tack other
than a rope halter, and led it away while the men yelled and thrashed in the
brush in the distance.
    After
that night it had been a matter of keeping up. The survivors had moved quickly
for two days, slowing when they reached the populated areas along the Pend
Oreille River. They’d traded away booty from Grey’s family, swapping meat for
ammunition. Grey followed behind. Outside Newport, now lightless and
smoldering, he’d shot another in the belly from a vantage two hundred and fifty
yards off. The deer rifle had knocked the man out of his saddle and onto the
blacktop. The others scattered. Grey watched the wounded man writhe on the
ground, trying to crawl into the cover of an abandoned SUV. The others never
bothered to come back, and eventually the shot man bled out.
    He
didn’t loot the body. Locals arrived before he had given up watching; six or
eight kids on bicycles. They took the man’s gun and knife, his boots and his
pack, but they ignored his horse since they couldn’t catch it. Grey caught it
later and let his own go. Having tack and saddle made riding easier.
    Later
that day, Grey’s head began to swim and he had to lean over the saddle horn,
panting while black spots danced in his vision. He realized he couldn’t
remember when he had last eaten, and went through the saddlebags that the horse
carried. He found three cans of tomato juice and venison he’d helped smoke. He
ate and drank, and moved on. What thinking he did was mechanical; where could
he best catch the last three, how could he kill them all. He no longer thought
about why. That hurt too much. How was easier.
    The
survivors rode fast for another two days, and Grey realized they were headed to
Spokane. He lost them there, on the edge of the city, amidst the chaos and
fires. In the six months Grey had been gone, his city had become a wasteland.
Corpses and bones were everywhere. What people remained roved in armed bands or
hid, coming out like roaches each night to steal from others equally miserable.
    Amidst
the chaos were little stories without endings. He found a long line of green
military vehicles, trucks and tanks both, stalled in a line on the north-south
highway through Spokane’s heart. They’d either survived the initial EMP pulses,
or had been repaired, only to be fried by the later waves. There were bodies -
dry, nearly mummified - surrounding the convoy in drifts, riddled with bullet
holes, but he didn’t see any that looked like soldiers.
    In
a section of the old downtown core someone had strung up corpses from the power
lines like malefic piñatas, each body decorated with ribbons and bright yarn
that waved in the reeking breeze. One of the bodies wore a nurse’s uniform. He
remembered the lipless