One dead horse was still in the traces before it, and a dead man about four paces beyond, lying curled around a belly-wound that might have taken half a day to kill him. Two of the big black birds kaw-kawed and jumped heavily off the corpse when Havel turned his horse to take a closer look.
"Crossbow bolt," he said, when he'd returned to his companion. "Looks like it was made after the Change, but well done."
They passed another pair of bodies as they rode at a walk up the farm lane to the steading, near tumbled wheelbarrows.
The main house hadn't been burned; it stood intact in its oasis of lawn and flower bed and tree; a tractor-tire swing still swayed in the wind beneath a big oak, and a body next to it by the neck. There was laundry on a line out behind it. The smoldering came from the farmyard proper, from the ashes of a long series of old hay-rolls, the giant grass cylinders of modern fanning, and from where grain had been roughly scattered out of sheet-metal storage sheds, doused in gasoline and set on fire.
The oily canola seed still flickered and gave off a dense acrid smoke. There was a wooden barn as well, gray and weathered; a naked man had been nailed to the door by spikes through wrist and ankle. He was dead, but much more recently than the rest, and he was older as well, with sparse white hair.
Written above his head in blood was: Bow to the Iron Rod! There was a stylized image underneath it, of a penis and testes.
Signe was hair-trigger tense as they rode up to the veranda; she started when the windmill pump clattered into the breeze. Water spilled from the tank underneath it, which looked to be recent-probably the windmill was an heirloom, only brought back into use since the Change.
"Wait here," he said, returning bow to case and arrow to quiver.
He swung down and looped his reins over the railing of the veranda. His horse bent its head to crop at the longer grass near the foundation.
"From the look, whoever did it is long gone. But stay alert."
Havel drew his backsword and lifted his shield off the saddlebow, sliding his left forearm into the loops. There was a scrawled paper pinned to the door with a knife-inside the screen, so it hadn't blown free. Printed on it in big block letters with a felt-tip pen was: FOR REBELLION AGAINST DUKE IRON ROD!
Underneath it was a logo, a winged skull, human but with long fangs.
"And I suppose the Lord Humungous rules the desert, too," he muttered; it didn't seem like simple banditry. "What the hell is going on here?"
Then he nudged the door open with his toe-it was swinging free, banging occasionally against the frame, and went through with blade ready and shield up.
There was no need for it. He blinked at what he saw on the floor of the living room, glad he hadn't sent Signe in- she'd toughened up amazingly, but he just didn't want this inside the head of someone he liked. He made himself do a quick count as he went through the rooms of the big frame farmhouse; there was no way to be precise, without reassembling everyone. Nothing moved but some rats, although he saw coyote tracks; probably one of the scavengers had gotten in through a window.
"That's where the women and children were," he said grimly as he came out.
Signe swallowed and nodded; she didn't bother to ask what had happened to them.
Havel went on: "I make it at least twelve adults, and quite a few kids. Say six families, give or take."
He looked around at the steading. This had been a large, prosperous mixed farm; probably the owners had called it a ranch, Western-fashion. Judging from the stock corrals and massive equipment that stood forelorn and silent in its sheds, it was something on the order of three square-mile sections or more-six hundred and forty acres each. That was typical for this area, which grew winter wheat and barley and canola and other field crops and ran cattle.
Before the Change, that would have meant one family and occasional hired contract work, but…
"Probably the farmer's family took in a lot of townspeople," Signe observed. "Relatives, and refugees."
They'd seen that pattern elsewhere, once the nature of the Change had sunk in.
"Yesterday?" Signe went on. "Day before?"
"Dawn yesterday," Havel agreed, narrowing it down a little more. "They had food cooking on a wood range and the kids were mostly in PJs."
Signe winced. "The bandits ran off most of the stock, looks like. I suppose we should look for anything useful, but-"
"But I'm not going into the buzzard business, until these folks are buried," Havel said for both of them.
Signe's head came up, looking back the way they'd come. A light blinked from the ridgeline there, angled from a hand mirror. They both read the Morse message. Not for the first time, Havel blessed the fact that Eric had been an Eagle Scout; he'd been full of useful tricks like that. He even knew how to do smoke signals.
Twenty-plus riders bound your way approaching from southeast on section road.
Signe took a mirror out of a pouch on her sword belt and replied, then looked a question at Havel.
"We'll meet them out by the gate," he said. "If they look hostile, we can run-tell Will to have everyone ready. I don't think we'll have to fight; whoever did this wasn't planning on coming back anytime soon, in my opinion."
When they halted at the junction of lane and dirt road, she said quietly: "I hate this kind of thing, Mike. I hate seeing it and I hate smelling it and I hate having to think about it later."
He leaned over in the saddle and gave her mailed shoulders a brief squeeze; like hugging a statue, but as so often with human beings it was the symbolism that counted.
"Me too," he said. "But I hate something else worse- the sort of people who do this shit."
"Yes!"
He glared around. There was no reason why people here had to die. It was far away from the cities and their hopeless hordes, and for the first year or so there would be more food than people could handle-plenty of cattle, more grain than they could harvest by hand from last year's planting. They weren't short of horses, either, and with some thought and effort they'd be able to get in hay and sow a good grain crop come fall; nothing like as much as they usually planted by tractor, but more than enough to feed themselves and a fair number of livestock.
It was security that was the problem: without swift transport, or more than improvised hand weapons, without phones and radios to call for help…
Light winked off metal in the distance where the road came over a rise, revealing movement.
Which is why I had all our gear done in brown or matte green, he thought, with pardonable pride.
He unshipped his binoculars and focused; two dozen, all right, all men and riding as if they knew how. The one in the forefront had a U.S. Army Fritz helmet, and a couple of the others did as well, or crash-helmet types. Several wore swords, Civil War sabers probably out of the same sort of museum that had yielded the three-furrow plow; the others had axes or baseball bats, and two had hunting bows.
Mr. Fritz also had a county sheriff's uniform, and a badge… as they drew closer, he saw that several others had badges as well, probably new-minted deputies. The sheriff was in his thirties, the other men mostly older-no surprise there, either. The average American farmer had been fifty-three before the Change.
"They look righteous," Havel said. "Signe, take your helmet off, but keep alert."
She did, and shook back her long wheat-colored braids; that tended to make people less suspicious, for some reason. He turned his horse's head slightly to the left, and kept his bow down on that side with an arrow on the string, not trying to hide it but not drawing attention to it, either.