But the farmer was saying, “No, not bandits. Worse than bandits. Things.” Bard Herbuht would have envied the horror the Dirtman packed into the word.
“Things?” Peet echoed. “What kind of things?” Of itself, his hand went to the mace at his belt. He willed it away, made the sign of peace again.
“That I do not know, but they come out sometimes, to hunt meat from our flocks—or from us. Three men
I know of have been killed since I came to manhood, and more in my father’s time, and in his father’s, and as far back as we recall. Always they die with terror on their faces; always tracks lead back to Uvalde, tracks like men’s, but with claws.”
Peet was a Horseclansman. When something struck him, his instinctive urge was to hit back. “Why didn’t all you Dirtmen gather together, march in, and burn the ruins down, then?” he demanded.
The farmer’s sigh was old as time, the sigh of the oppressed and helpless. “When my father was a boy, we tried that. Thirty men went in. Three came out again, one still with his wits, or some of them at least. Since then, we have left Uvalde alone. If you wish to live, rider, you will do the same.”
“The way I am now, it doesn’t much matter to me one way or the other,” Peet said. “I’m going to Uvalde.”
The farmer made the crisscross motion again. “I have spoken with a dead man,” he said.
“Not yet you haven’t.” Peet swung himself back into the saddle. “I thank you for the warning, though. Sun and Wind with you.”
“God with you, rider,” the farmer replied. “If you are going to Uvalde, you will need Him.”
A little nettled at the Dirtman’s having had the last word, Peet rode on. He saw the green of other cultivated fields and once or twice, squinting and peering, made out men working in them. He did not hail the farmers, and they let him ride past.
He worried over what the Dirtman by the creek had told him as if it were a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth. Things—things with tracks humanlike but for claws. Mutant apes, maybe, whose ancestors, freed from zoos, had passed through the fallout patterns of the bombs that had fallen on Texas.
Mutant men, maybe, too. That would be worse. Now when his hand closed on his mace handle, he let it stay.
The fields dwindled and petered out as afternoon passed into evening. As far as Peet could tell, the land had not changed. No one, however, seemed to want to live too close to Uvalde. After what he’d heard, Peet decided he could not blame the Dirtmen.
The evening stayed hot and muggy. Peet decided against a campfire. He suspected he would have done the same in chilly weather. No telling who—or what— might see it. He gnawed tough jerky and went to sleep. Nothing ate him during the night, so presumably his precautions paid off.
The sun rose red in his face the next morning as he mounted Snowdrop and trotted on toward Uvalde.
They watched the lone rider ford the little sun-shrunken river and ride up toward the ruins. They blinked in surprise; in their experience, meat did not usually come forth to be slaughtered.
They were also suspicious. That raid so long ago had hurt them as badly as it had the farmer folk around Uvalde. And they were suspicious because their nature was to be suspicious. They preyed on each other too. There would have been many more of them, were that not so.
But it \vas only the one rider, coming their way in broad daylight. As well suspect a juicy steak! They waited. The hoped-for meal kept coming.
Now that the ruins surrounded him, Peet wondered in some despair how—or, more to the point, where—to begin. Even before he’d set out, he’d known old cities, even ones reckoned small, were vastly bigger than, say, Clan Staiklee’s encampment. But saying that only made him imagine a larger nomad camp. The reality of block after block of silent, tumbledown houses was something else again.
He wondered how people could have chosen to live their lives perpetually cramped together, then decided that did not matter. Plainly, they had chosen so. His job now was to deal with that reality.
He rode along the overgrown highway toward the center of town. A ruin caught his eye; it was set off from its neighbors by wide grounds and what once must have been impressive fences, though now they leaned drunkenly and had fallen down in a couple of places.
Curious, he rode through one of the gaps. The house, once two stories tall, had fallen in on itself. In front of it, a granite post fought its way clear of the rank weeds that filled the grounds. A bronze plaque was set into the front of the post. It had withstood the elements well. Peet leaned close to see what it said.
“Home of John Nance Garner, Vice-President of the United States, 1933-1941,” he read. One of the chiefs cronies, the nomad gathered. The plaque went on to list Garner’s other accomplishments, none of which meant much to Peet.
Then, suddenly, he laughed out loud. One of Garner’s rivals had characterized him as a “poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man.” To Peet, that made him sound like an excellent crony indeed.
Peet decided not to explore the house. If this Garner had been an old man, he was probably longsighted, in which case any glasses of his that might by some miracle be left in the ruin would do the Horseclans-man no good.
He rode back to the highway, went deeper into Uvalde. Now the wreckage was no longer of houses, but of bigger structures. Sometimes a ruin would stretch uninterrupted from one cross street to the next. Curious to see how far back one of the bigger piles extended, Peet turned off onto a side street.
When he finally reached the back of the ruined colossus, he found a wide, open space, asphalt still visible here and there through brush. Enough tales had come down from the days before the Great Dying to let him recognize what the space had to be.
“A parking lot,” he said aloud. Riding the open plains, he’d never understood why anyone needed a special place just to park anything. Here, though, almost everything was built up. The lot had a reason for being, after all.
And if that was a parking lot, then the huge ruin ought to be that other legendary creation, a shopping mall. And if, in a shopping mall, he found no lenses to suit him . . . “Then I’m screwed, that’s all,” he said.
He tethered Snowdrop to a bush close by an entranceway where a few pieces of jagged glass still stood like the last teeth in an old man’s mouth. He took his mace in his right hand and a knife in his left as he walked into the ancient mall. Those fanglike shards of glass over which he stepped only heightened the impression of walking down the throat of some great beast.
The light inside the mall was not as bad as he had expected. There had been skylights in the roof. All the glass was gone from them (some crunched under his boots), but they let in the sun here and there. Weeds, some waist-high, grew in those patches, and less vigorously elsewhere.
Peet heard small animals scurrying about, smelled the telltale stinks of skunk and bobcat. Likely they denned in the ruins. They would not bother him if he left them alone. He paused, frowned. Something else was in the air too, something he could not quite name. Whatever it was, he did not care for it.
He walked along like a shopper from a bygone age, peering ihto stores to see what they had sold. Many had been looted; mannequins sprawled in old clothing stores like so many dismembered corpses. One shop was nothing but wreckage inside. The sign above it was in letters big enough for Peet to make them out and understand why: UVALDE GUNSMITHING. A few shops farther on was a cutlery store, similarly sacked. Looking behind a counter there, Peet found a skull grinning up at him.
“Was this yours, or are you just a thief who got what he deserved?” he asked, then chuckled. “Tad late to worry about it now.” He left the plundered shop, started for the next one.
A grunting cough disturbed him. Startled, he looked up. Something—someone?—was standing under a broken skylight not far away, as if waiting for him to see it.