“Well, even after the Doctor and the Elders agreed that I should make the journey, it took a while to get ready, but the day finally came. I set out after morning service on the first of July with Amos, my mule, and headed south on the coast highway. I remember it was a clear day, and I… I’d never done anything before that seemed so right and good. There were times later I doubted that, but now…” He paused, blue eyes warm as he looked at Mary and Rachel. “Anyway, the first few days I passed a lot of little towns and didn’t find a soul in any of them, but I wasn’t discouraged. I knew the Lord was guiding me. Every evening I built a big beacon fire in case there was anybody around to see the smoke or the light.”
Those words were a mnemonic snare, and Mary looked into the flames in the hearth and remembered another fire: the one that had burned in the fathomless darkness on Saddle Mountain.
Luke went on. “Sometimes I camped in empty houses along the highway, but most of the time I bedded down on the beach near my fire. In a couple of places the highway had slid out, and I couldn’t walk on the beach for one reason or another, so I had to go around through the forest. I got myself good and lost once, but I just headed for the highest hill I could see and listened for the ocean.”
Rachel asked, “Did you have maps?”
“The Doctor gave me some road maps. I still have one, but it’s in tatters. Anyway, Amos and I kept going on down the coast, and one day I saw a sign on the road that said I was leaving Oregon. Gave me a funny feeling, like maybe I might never come back again. I stayed on Highway 101 to Crescent City, but it was in the middle of a big burn. You could hardly tell there’d ever been a town. So I headed on south for Eureka. I think—yes, it was along there I ran out of the bum and into the most beautiful forest and the biggest trees I’ve ever seen.”
Rachel smiled at that. “The redwoods, no doubt.”
He nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s right. I saw signs along the road that told about them. Well, I came out of those woods after a few days, passed through what was left of some towns along the way.
I wasn’t too far north of Eureka when I thought I saw smoke in the hills to the east. I built a big fire that night, but a storm came in toward morning. Rain lasted three days. The fourth day I built another beacon fire, but I never saw even a breath of smoke.” He paused, shook his head. “Maybe I didn’t really see any smoke to begin with. Anyway, I went on to Eureka, and at first I couldn’t figure out what happened to it. It was partly burned, but everything around the bay looked like it had been dynamited. Then I saw the mud. I guess there’d been a flood.”
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Of course there had. Nearly every town on the California coast was hit by tsunamis from the big quake.”
“I don’t know that word, soonaw… whatever.”
She spelled it out for him. “It’s a Japanese word. It refers to the waves triggered by earthquakes.”
“Oh. When was this big quake?”
Mary blinked, and she was glad he was looking at Rachel, who was more successful at hiding her surprise as she responded. “The California quake? It was a few months before the End. April, wasn’t it, Mary? It was the worst disaster in American history. The death toll was at least two million.”
Luke was visibly staggered. “I don’t remember anything about that,” he said, nearly whispering.
Rachel studied him with a tolerant smile. “I think you’ve led a very insular life, Luke.”
“Insular? There’s another word I don’t know.”
“Well, it comes from the Latin for island. In this context, it means isolated, cut off.”
“You know so many things. You’re a very wise woman—just like my vision told me.”
Rachel held her smile. “If I’m wise, it’s because I’ve had wise teachers, the best from all the ages.” Then at his puzzled frown: “The books, Luke. They’re my teachers.”
He nodded. “Like the Bible.”
Rachel’s smile slipped. “That’s one book.” Then she added: “Other books are full of different kinds of wisdom. But I want to hear more about your journey.”
He seemed distracted, as if he’d lost his place. Mary prompted, “You were talking about Eureka.”
“Oh, yes. Well, I didn’t find anybody there, so I kept going. South of Eureka, Highway 101 angled inland, and it was about there I counted off my first month. I had a walking stick, and I cut a notch in it every night. Didn’t seem like I’d covered much ground for a month’s travel, but it was slow going. I had to build my beacon fires, and that meant gathering wood, and I wasn’t carrying much food, so I had to hunt or fish along the way. It wasn’t long after I notched off that first month that I ran into another big burn, and as soon as I hit a main junction I decided to go east. I came to the end of the burn that way and found a lake. It was called Clear Lake, and it was beautiful with little houses on the shore. I was sure somebody must still live there, but I didn’t see a sign of smoke. I stayed awhile to fish and hunt and dry the meat. Good thing, too.” He gazed into the fire, but he was seeing something else that even in memory stunned him.
“Once, before Armageddon, the Doctor went to Sacramento. He told me about the huge farms and orchards. I figured when I headed east into the big valley, I was bound to find people. But that place… it had changed since the Doctor saw it. It had turned into a desert. To the north and east, that’s all I could see: dry, brown desert. To the south there’d been fires. I went half a day south and never came out of the burn, so I figured there was no use going any farther that way.”
Rachel asked, “How far were you from Sacramento?”
“As I remember, it was maybe fifty miles down I–5. That’s how the highway was marked on my map.”
“Sacramento had probably been bombed. You were close enough to be in the firestorm zone.”
“Firestorm?”
“From the nuclear bombs.”
“Is that what caused the desert?”
“No, that was probably caused by the nuclear winter—the cold would be far worse inland than it was on the coast—and what you call the Blind Summer. The plants were killed, Luke, and that left the land bare to erosion. Weren’t there any plants at all?”
“Nothing but sagebrush and dried-up grass. There wasn’t any water. Thank the Lord, I’d filled up my canteens at Clear Lake. It was days before Amos and I found a creek with a little muddy water in it.” He stopped, staring again into bleak memory. “In that place, I could believe—I mean, there was no way to doubt what the Doctor said about Armageddon. The world had come to an end there.”
“Yet you said there were plants,” Rachel interjected. “Where there are plants, there’ll be animals. You could say the world had changed there, but not that it had ended.”
Luke didn’t seem to know how to respond to that. Mary took a swallow of her mead, again prompted him. “What happened after you found the creek?”
“Well, I kept on north on the highway. Finally I came to Red Bluff. Just acres of ruins, the sand piling in the windows, but there was a river running though it, and along the banks there were big trees with their bark peeling off, but they were green and seemed healthy otherwise. There were willows and cattails, and even some ducks and rabbits. And fish in the river. I camped there, stocking up on meat, about four days. I saw a big, snowcapped mountain to the north with smoke coming out of one peak.” He laughed bitterly. “At first I thought somebody was living up there, but there was too much smoke to be made by people. Besides, nobody could live on top of a mountain that high.”