Dies the Fire

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 pla

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 thi

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 gri

"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 tu

"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!"