Dies the Fire

"He didn't come back. I couldn't go looking for him because of Terry, and it was four days. And then there was nothing left in the apartment, and nothing worked… the water, the toilets… there was fighting in the streets! And some people I knew a little said they were going to go south to where there was food; I think they wanted me to come because I had the bow, I'm in an archery club, we meet every second Saturday… "

The words trailed off. Juniper stood abruptly and paced, then turned. She left the words unsaid; De

"Oh, we should not be doing this, De

A hand tapped her on the shoulder. Yes, we should, Mom, Eilir signed. Yes, we should. She held out a piece of cold biscuit to the boy, and he grabbed it and jammed it into his mouth.

"All right… Sally," Juniper said. "We can't help everyone… which doesn't mean we can't help anyone. You wait here, and we'll get you into the wagon when the horses are hitched." She looked at De

Seven

Well, shit," Havel said with profound disgust. "I was really hoping this wouldn't happen."

There were cars on Highway 12. The problem was that they were all stationary; he could see half a dozen, before the road curved out of sight along the steep canyon of the Lochsa. Several of them had been left with the doors open; not one was moving.

Eric halted beside him, gawking up and down the roadway. "Wait a minute," he said. "Do you mean that all the cars are stopped the way our plane's engines were?"

"And my GPS unit and the radio at the cabin," Havel said grimly.

He spat into the dirt by the side of the roadway. It seemed to be the only way to really express his feelings. Unless I get down on the ground and sob and cry and scream and beat my fists on the pavement, he thought wryly.

"But… " Eric's slightly battered-looking face went fluid with shock. "How are we going to get help for my mother?"

"You tell me," Havel said, throwing down his pack. "Shit!" He sighed. "All right, let's check the cars."

They did; nothing remained but a few empty plastic wrappers. Hmmm, Havel thought, looking through another trunk, and then casting back and forth along the road for a hundred yards either way.

"No blankets," he said.

Eric looked at him; probably big-city families as rich as his didn't think about that sort of thing.

"A lot of people out here keep spare blankets or a sleeping bag in their trunks on a long trip," Havel said. "Or emergency supplies. None of these cars have anything like that. Five gets you ten everyone's car stopped at the same moment, then they hung around for a while and eventually started walking out when they realized nobody was coming to rescue them."

He swept a hand along the road. "They were crapping by the side of the road for a couple of days too."

Eric tried a shaky smile. "I'm not much of an expert at roadside dumps," he said.

"Spoor is spoor."

Havel felt his mind struggling to refuse the implications of what he saw.

How far does this stretch? he thought. How far can it stretch? All the way from coast to coast, or 'round the world?

The two men looked at each other. It was a relief when they heard the hollow clop of shod hooves, and the harder crunch on the gravel beside the pavement. The sound came from the east, down the road that stretched in from Lolo Pass and Montana.

Damn, it isn't the Forest Service, was his first thought.

There were six horses. Two carried packsaddles; three bore men in outdoors dress, looking even more scruffy than Havel felt or Eric was. The lead rider had a brush of mouse-colored beard that fell halfway down his chest and… Havel blinked… an actual coonskin cap. He looked like a potato with legs, and rode like one, sawing at his horse's mouth as he pulled up; a lead rein from his saddle controlled the packhorses after a fashion.

His face was thick-featured under the matted hair, heavily pocked, with a nose like a smaller spud attached to the mass. His companions were a gangling stork and a third man much younger than the other two, pinker and fatter as well; he carried a compound hunting bow with an arrow on the string and six more in the quiver clipped to the side of the weapon.

None of them looked quite like it was their first time on a horse, but…

It was what followed that made Eric swear under his breath, and Havel's eyes narrow. There was one more rider, a middle-aged black man with his feet lashed to the stirrups and his hands cuffed before him, with the chain of the handcuffs through a ring on the horn of his saddle. Two women walked beside the packhorses, also cuffed; the older looked Hispanic, or possibly Italian; the teenage girl beside her was darker, but had a family resemblance. All three of the captives looked like they'd been roughed up, and recently, with still-wet blood ru

The saddles were Western-style, looking practical and battered enough to be real working gear, and the mounts were excellent; definitely of quarter-horse stock, but in the older style, with good thick legs and strong hooves, and big for the breed.

"Afternoon," the potato-with-legs leader said as the party drew up; he halted within talking distance, but not close.

Havel waved a greeting, unobtrusively letting the rabbit stick fall into the palm of his right hand and handing it off to the left behind his back.

"Follow my lead," he said softly to Eric.

The young man nodded; Havel could tell he was trembling-tense, but he wasn't showing it much.

"Hello there," Havel went on. "Mind telling me what the hell's going on? We crash-landed up in the woods"-he waved his left hand back towards the wilderness rearing southward-"about ten days ago, and just walked out. Is it like this all over?"

The fat rider with the bow threw back his head and yeee-hawed; Havel had heard it done a lot better. The older two laughed.

"It's the apocalypse, brother," the potato-man said, gri

Uh-oh, Havel thought, schooling his face to polite interest. Bad news. And probably true, even given who's peddling it. He recognized the breed; there weren't actually all that many of them in Idaho, but they made up for it in the amount of attention they attracted and the way they gave the state a bad name.

ZOG stood for "Zionist Occupation Government." These three were obviously some variety of neo-Nazi/Christian Identity/Aryan Brotherhood types, one of the groupuscules that had set up redoubts in northern Idaho through the eighties and nineties as part of the survivalist wave-or the scum on the wave, to be more descriptive.

The redoubts usually consisted of a cluster of mobile homes and shacks on heavily mortgaged land, splitting and recombining as the quarrelsome lunatics anathematized each other over fine points of ideology and/or got arrested for credit card scams and death threats to judges and process servers, but the inhabitants could be dangerous enough when they weren't selling each other out to the FBI.

The tall thin one was riding with his jacket open over a bare chest, and the tattoos under it were pure jailhouse; all three of them looked hopped up, as if they'd done a major hit of coke or won the Powerball.