The Last Pilgrims Page 4

  “Now, we get to the nightmare,” Gareth continued, pointing towards his own head to emphasize the point. “The King’s bed is drenched with night sweats when he envisions two very scary possibilities. The first is that the King of the South States, with all of his ample resources, might come to the aid of the Vallenses. The other… actually the more frightening of the two possibilities, is that Jonathan Wall will cast off his reckless and defeatist pacifism and join you in a rebellion against Aztlan.”

  With that, he drew closer to Phillip. There was excitement in his voice and a sparkle in his eyes as he spoke.

  “Jonathan is the key. With one word, he could unite the whole world against Aztlan. He is admired or feared everywhere, even in New Rome. It is most probable that the King of the South States will not move, even on the Vallenses’ behalf, unless Jonathan Wall agrees to fight.”

  He sank back against the headboard, clearly exhausted by the interrogation. “I cannot say that all is lost if you cannot convince Jonathan to join you, but…,” he let the thought linger, as if to suggest that the danger is unspeakable.

  “Jonathan will never fight. This I know,” Phillip said softly. “We waste time speaking of it, because it isn’t going to happen. If you don’t know that, then you don’t know Jonathan. We have to plan to make war with Aztlan without him.”

  Silence fell on the room, as the Ghost and the Assassin pondered on all the possibilities… if only Jonathan would fight. Before long, Phillip shook his head as if he was shaking off the remnants of doubt, or cleansing himself of his wishful thinking.

  “Let’s talk about Aztlan. How many soldiers is the Duke bringing and how long until they get here? Which way will they come, and what arms will they carry? Sit back up you assassin dog, and tell me what you know!” He was deliberately harsh in addressing Gareth, as if scared of becoming too friendly with him.

  “They will most likely come up the remnants of the road that used to be called Interstate 10, at least as far as the trading post in Ozona. They’ll stay south, and won’t try any direct route across the badlands. They know that the militia is in control out there. From Ozona, or possibly Sonora, they will turn northeast and stage in San Angelo.

  “Up until now, San Angelo has really been a border town between the desert badlands and the beginnings of the ‘ungovernable’ lands in Central Texas and eastward. I would say that the Duke plans to carry out a devastating attack, using as many as five-hundred to over a thousand soldiers, hoping to wipe out any militia units he encounters along the way. Then he’ll try to march east, killing and burning as he goes, destroying villages and hamlets until he gets to Bethany, which is considered the capital of the rebellion.”

  Gareth stretched out his wounded arm and, wincing quite a bit, swung his legs over the side of the bed, before finishing his thought. “You know what he’ll do if he gets to Bethany.”

  “Lay back down, fool!” Phillip interjected. “I don’t need you falling out of bed, fainting, or passing out from the excess of beer.”

  Gareth laughed. “I need to stretch a bit, and I’ll need to be more mobile if you are going to hang me any time soon.”

  Phillip gave in and helped him to his feet, probably figuring that he indeed needed to start moving about. At first, he wobbled a bit, but soon steadied himself against the bedpost.

  “I’m still not sure about what you are telling me, Gareth,” Phillip said, shaking his head. “You are talking about the Duke marching five-hundred to a thousand men or more across the desert, in the height of summer, with no supply lines and very little support along the way. They’ll have to carry everything they need along treacherous terrain and unmaintained roads. I-10 hasn’t been a highway in almost two decades. It’s more like the surface of the moon since most of the pavement has been dug up or removed. The Duke is either very stupid, or very sure of himself.”

  “Well, Ghost, I don’t think that he’s stupid. But he is certainly arrogant, which will work to our advantage.”

  “So, you’re sure that he’s coming?” Phillip asked, head cocked to one side, eyes squinted at Gareth.

  “I am.”

  “Then, we’ll just have to make sure that he never gets to Bethany.”

  Chapter 3 - Ruth

  Ruth Wall stood as still as the old ugly mannequin in Mrs. Palmer’s sewing shop down in Bethany, her spear poised only inches above the dark mouth of the coon den. She was backed into a salt cedar bush, leaning on the lowest branches for her balance, moving nary a muscle as she waited for the huge she-coon to stick her head out.

  Minutes passed, and she started to be concerned. The sweat was beading down her face and the drops were gathering on the tip of her nose. She blew upwards, hoping to disperse the gathering droplet before it dripped down into the opening of the hole—scaring off the she-coon.

  She looked up for just a moment, feeling the slight breeze on her face as she turned her head very slowly towards the sun. It was almost four o’clock, nearly time to be heading back home.

  Just as she had almost convinced herself to give up and head back to the ranch, the she-coon made her appearance. Warily, the creature poked her head out of the den. Like lightning, the spear came down with tremendous force and pinned the animal’s head to the ground. Ruth drew her knife effortlessly from her homemade leather sheath. She bled out and gutted the coon in minutes.

  Ruth tossed the coon into her hunting bag, picking up her walking stick, her bow and a quiver full of arrows. She gave a short whistle for Louise, her yellow blackmouth cur dog and, feeling quite satisfied with herself, glanced back at the sun. After re-checking the time, she started her short hike back home.

  Louise came trotting back from the edge of the woods where she had been laying in the shade, trying to stay cool. She was a good pig dog, which was almost a necessity in these parts, but didn’t care for coon hunting one bit. Louise lived and breathed for chasing and hunting pigs.

  At fourteen years old, the redheaded Ruth was quite an accomplished hunter—not nearly as good as David, her older brother, but pretty good nonetheless. Her father told her that she was the best female hunter he had ever seen, and that was praise enough for Ruth.

  Hunting was almost a full-time job, especially when there were guests to feed. In particular, now that the Aztlani assassin Gareth was staying with them and was eating them out of house and home. Not to mention all of the militiamen hanging around as guards and escorts. For a ranch owned by pacifists, home had come to resemble an armed camp.

  Ruth loved to hunt, so she wasn’t complaining. Still, it seemed like a thankless task, as she did notice that Gareth seemed never to be full. Even when he was sick and delirious with a fever from his infection, he still had a huge appetite. Ruth was just glad that she didn’t have to do all of the brewing it would take to keep up with his penchant for Vallensian beer. Gareth still couldn’t figure out how the Vallenses had icy cold beer in the summertime, which was a good source of humor, since no one would tell him about the icehouse.

  The ghostmen usually provided for themselves, and prepared most of their own meals out in the woods away from the house. Her father, being the kind man that he was and a gracious host, would still impose on them to send a few men each day for a full-on supper at his table. Though they really didn’t like any attention and were uncomfortable in the company of many people, they appeared to be tremendously honored to be asked to sit at the table with Jonathan Wall. Despite their discomfort, there were usually at least two of them at supper every night, most likely just to please and honor her father.

  She was glad that there was nearly always fresh game for the table. Father told her that just about everyone had figured it all wrong before the crash. In almost all of the post-apocalyptic literature, he said, it was usually predicted that over-hunting would have wiped out all of the game after a collapse. He explained that, because most writers had a bias towards industrialism and the status-quo (he called it a Normalcy Bias, or the Ceteris Parabus fallacy), they automatical
ly assumed that almost everyone was going to survive any collapse.

  The books, many of which Ruth had read, usually did predict millions of deaths, but generally assumed some kind of eventual return to “normal,” irrationally assuming a return to the system her father believed had caused the real crash when it happened. In reality, the true number of deaths had dwarfed the fictional estimates. Most people didn’t even realize how at risk they were. Father called them ‘unviable’, and said that, throughout their entire lives, they had existed suspended on nothing and sustained by a system that could never last.

  The fact that only a small percentage of the entire population actually survived through the first few years after the crash didn’t surprise her father, and it had changed everything. There was no shortage of game, at least not in Texas. In fact, there was such an abundance of game that many of the predators that had once been abundant in Texas had returned and were fast multiplying. The wild pigs had actually become a nuisance. Like mesquite trees, they were fine and beneficial in reasonable numbers, but of late, they had become a real problem. They had no respect for fences, could devastate a wheat field in a single night, and were constantly destroying property.

  Ruth could not even remember a time when there had not been wolves, mountain lions, and even some bears. According to her father, before the Industrial Revolution all of these predators had once been quite at home in Texas. However, prior to the collapse, only coyotes, some bobcats, and the occasional mountain lion lived in Central Texas, and the bears and wolves had been mostly eradicated.

  Whenever her father talked about the times ‘before the collapse’, she was fascinated. To her it all seemed unreal. Just imagine the foolishness of those people! They didn’t even know how to hunt or grow their own food! Ruth would hush and listen intently when the older folks talked about that time. She really couldn’t get a good hold on what it had been like back then. It all seemed so bizarre. Father had said that there were over 25 million people living just in Texas before the collapse! Ruth shook her head as she tried to imagine it. Some things she would never really grasp. She could understand it, but it wasn’t truly real to her.

  But it was real. She had read many of the books in Father’s library. She especially enjoyed reading the history books that portrayed life as it had been in the last fifty years before the crash. It sounded like another world. It was another world.

  The fun part was when the older people would talk about technology. What magic! She had seen some of the devices, although they were all powerless now. ‘Phones’ no bigger than a stone, which were used to talk to people anywhere at any time without any delay. There were also computers, all linked together to share information across a huge ‘web’ called the ‘Internet’. As a result, you could find out anything in the world just by typing questions on your computer. It all seemed very useful, but Father said that people soon became addicted to the technology, and risked their lives and the lives of their families by being dependent on it. The Vallenses were referred to as ‘legalistic’ or ‘quaint’ for rejecting most of the technology, or at least any dependence on it.

  As Ruth walked along, deep in thought, she noticed the tell-tale silence of Louise locking into a ready and listening stance. Then, like a shot and without any command, Louise rocketed into the oak grove down by the creek. Pig.

  She moved with practiced precision. Before Louise even reached the trees, Ruth had dropped her game bag and her stick, and had drawn an arrow from her quiver, smoothly feeding it onto the bowstring and drawing it back. She knew from where Louise went into the trees, and from the sound of her bark, just where the pig would most likely come out.

  She took a deep calming breath, just as her brother David had taught her, willing her heart rate to steady, as she sighted down the arrow. Just before the feral hog broke through from the trees, with Louise snapping at her heals, Ruth had a strange and untimely thought. I wonder if Tim is watching.

  The thought passed in an instant. Timothy was responsible if he was hit by an arrow, she reasoned. She calculated the lead, and let the arrow fly, watching as it found its mark, striking the hog just above and behind the left shoulder, traveling into the chest area, piercing organs along its path, and exiting low and on the right side of the pig’s underbelly.

  The stunned hog slowed down enough for Louise to catch up with it. The dog grabbed it by the back leg and spun it to the ground, evading the hog’s head as it swung around gamely trying to gut the dog with a swipe of its 3-inch tusks. As Ruth approached, Louise finally pulled back, barking up a storm.

  This was the most dangerous time, when the boar was wounded but not dead, so she advanced slowly in a crouch with her knife drawn and ready. She trusted that Louise would have intercepted the pig if it had tried to charge her, but she was cautious anyway.

  After a few minutes, the pig had lost all of its energy, and—giving up—it lay its head down in the dust. Ruth moved in quickly and carefully, pinning the head down with her foot, as she jabbed her knife into the pig’s neck, cutting the carotid artery. She made a clean slice across the pig’s throat to give the blood a route out of the body, then dragged the rear-section of the pig uphill in order to use gravity to facilitate the bleeding.

  She guessed that the hog weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 100 lbs. Not a huge pig, but it would provide anywhere from 35 to 40 lbs of meat for the Wall’s table tonight. She was glad that the pig hadn’t run off with her arrow, as she and Louise would have had to track it in this heat for a quarter of a mile through the brush. That happened more often than not. This kill-shot had been nearly perfect, and had destroyed at least three major organs as it passed through the pig. According to David, piercing three organs was the ideal if you wanted to drop the pig where it stood.

  As soon as she was sure the pig had bled out completely, she went to work almost mechanically, gutting it, using the hillside to provide gravity to make her work easier. She made certain to keep most of the organ meats, but threw a small handful to Louise as a treat and a reward.

  “Nice kill, Ruth! Not bad at all… for a girl.”

  Ruth turned around to see Tim watching her from the edge of the woods. She figured that he’d be around here somewhere. Tim was one of Phillip’s ghostmen. He was 18 years old, and it had become obvious in the past week that it was his job to watch over her like some kind of bodyguard. She was unsure of how she felt about that.

  Tim did a good job. She usually couldn’t figure out where he was, though it had become a bit of a game between them, as she was always trying to locate him whenever she was hunting. She almost never could. He kept his distance, moved almost soundlessly, and was never upwind.

  “That was an expert kill-shot, Timmy. Not one of you ghostmen, not even Phillip, could have done it better,” Ruth boasted, working with her knife without pause on the pig carcass.

  “I don’t know; I’ve seen Phillip kill a pig without even loosing the arrow. He just thought about it and the pig surrendered.”

  “Whatever, Timothy,” she retorted in a mocking tone. “Hey, be a pal and help me get this meat back to the house.” They trussed the pig carcass onto the walking stick and carried it back to the house between themselves.

  Ruth really didn’t like hunting for pigs in the summertime. Pigs were usually winter food, but their numbers had multiplied so much over the last few years that it had become necessary. As a result, they were hunted in large numbers even in the summer. The Walls didn’t mind the extra meat. When they didn’t have visiting guests (which wasn’t very often), they would grind the meat into sausage, lacto-ferment it, smoke it in the stone smokehouse, and dry it. Dried, smoked sausage was one of the primary foods for the Walls whenever they travelled, because it was perfectly preserved without any added processing. It was also very convenient because it could be carried in a backpack, a pocket, or a satchel, ready to eat at any given moment.

  This pig, though, would be tonight’s supper for the Walls and all of their guests.
The old cook Wally (she called him ‘Walleye’) would roast it on a spit over an open flame. Ruth’s mouth watered just thinking about it.

  As they walked back to the house, Tim and Ruth talked about hunting and the hot summer, as Louise trotted back and forth, darting underneath the pig as if she wanted everyone to know that she had been the one to find it.

  Technically, according to the ordnung of the community, she and Timothy were never allowed to be alone together. Tim was supposed to watch from afar and keep her safe. But no one would say anything to him for helping her carry a heavy pig back home. And she really did enjoy his company. Timothy was nice.

  Back at the house, Wally half-heartedly scolded Ruth for bringing him another pig so late in the day. “This is the third pig in five days, girl! And here we are only hours from supper!”

  Ruth knew that, in truth, Walleye was always pleased when he could cook up a nice pig for supper. She would tease back by telling him, “Ok, Walleye, sorry about that. I’ll feed it to Louise and the rest of the dogs.” Then he’d say, “No, no, no… it’s alright. I’ll cook it up anyway.”

  Everyone was always happy with roast pork on the plate. Ruth liked it slightly charred and glazed with honey, served with onions and basil from the garden, accompanied by pickled beans from the root cellar, and nopal cactus juice sweetened with honey. No one ever complained if supper was a little bit late when they knew that a pig was on the menu.

  Ruth went into the stone springhouse to sit down for a moment, relishing the cool air inside. The springhouse actually wasn’t built on a spring, as most springhouses were. It was built mostly below ground, about 20 feet from the large icehouse. The stone walls of the structure were nearly two feet thick. The ice-melt from the icehouse flowed down an underground pipe through the thick wall and into the springhouse. Stone gutters had been built around the inside walls of the icehouse, and the icy water filled the eight-inch deep troughs. When the dripping water had risen enough that it crested the dam on the trough in the south wall, it flowed down into a deep cistern where it could be pumped up via a hand-pump when it was needed. The icy cold water was the perfect place to store perishables, such as cheese, butter, leftover food etc., and the trough was nearly always full of jars and crocks of goodies, along with sealed jars of beer.