Havel made his gesture gentle. "No, we just tried to rush it, Signe," he said. "I know it isn't easy to get over the sort of thing you went through. Head on back to camp and tell them I'll be down in a while, why don't you?"
"Mike-"
"Signe, I said head on down. "
He waited until her footsteps had faded in the darkness before he drew his sword and looked at the twisted stump at the foot of the-rock that blocked off the view to the west.
"Is it worth the risk to the blade?" he murmured. "Yes." A pause for thought. "Hell yes."
Then he spent twenty minutes of methodical ferocity hacking the hard sun-dried wood into matchstick splinters.
Interlude II:
The Dying Time
"Y ou sure this is a good idea, Eddie?" Mack said, as they walked into the built-up area of Portland from the west.
"Look, who does the thinking here?" Eddie Liu replied.
"You do, Eddie," Mack said. "But this place gives me the creeps-all those stiffs. We've been eating pretty good out of town since things Changed. A lot of places are growing stuff, too, so we can get that when it's ready. Or maybe we could go east, I hear there are plenty of cows there and not many people. So I was just asking, are you sure about this?"
Eddie Liu shrugged at the question. "No, I'm not sure. But I am sure wandering around the boonies looking for food isn't a good idea anymore. People are getting too organized for the two of us to just take what we need."
Too many of the little towns had gotten their shit together, with committees and local strongmen and those goddamned Witches, of all crazy things. He could see the thoughts slowly grinding through behind Mack's heavy-featured olive face, and then he nodded.
"We have to hook up with somebody," Eddie finished. And Portland is where the organization is, he thought-or at least, that was what the rumors said.
He was betting that in a big city, or what was left of it, there would be less of the no-strangers-wanted thing they'd been running into among the small towns and farms farther south.
They trudged through endless suburbs; mostly smoldering burnt-out wreckage smelling of wet ash, wholly abandoned to an eerie silence broken only by the fat, insolent rats and packs of abandoned dogs that skulked off at the edge of sight. In the unburned patches there were spots where tendrils of green vine had already grown halfway across the street, climbing over the tops of the abandoned cars.
On the roof of one SUV a coyote raised its head and watched as he went by, alert but unafraid. Half a mile later they both yelled as a great tawny-bodied cat flashed by, too fast to see details-except that it was bigger than a cougar, nearly the size of a bear.
The beast was across the street and into an empty window in three huge bounds.
"Mother of God, I don't like the idea of going to sleep with something like that running around loose!" Eddie said. "I know what it's been eating, too. We'd better find a place with a good strong door and a lock before we camp."
Farther east they began to reach flatter stretches where the burnt-out rubble was only patches; this road in the area north of Burnside was flanked with old warehouses and brick buildings. Some of them looked grimy and run-down, others fancied up into loft apartments and stores and coffee shops and offices, with medium-height buildings on either side, but still there was no sign of human life.
There was one encouraging sign. Someone had pushed all the cars and trucks to the sides, so that there was a clear path down the street. That had to have been done since the Change.
No, make that two encouraging signs, Eddie thought.
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 planning on eating 'em. Which, except as what we people who read books call a metaphor, we weren't-"
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 thinner and more ragged than the others. One of the wagons, the last, bore bodies-some fresh, many the wasted skeletons held together by gristle that littered the ground around cities elsewhere. Now he saw why the city itself was less rancid; someone was cleaning house, doing the rounds of buildings where people had dragged themselves to die.
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.