Then why didn’t I do that? Was I too afraid?
Probably, he admitted. I’ll very likely die of exposure to-night, but that’s still hours away, far enough to remain only an abstract threat, less frightening and immediate than five ruthless men with guns.
He punched his left palm with his fist.
Oh stuff it, Gordon. You can psychoanalyze yourself this evening, while you’re freezing to death. What it all comes down to, though, is that you are one prize fool, and this is probably the end.
He got up stiffly and began edging cautiously down the slope. Although he wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet, Gordon felt a growing certainty that there could only be one solution, only one even faintly possible way out of this disaster.
As soon as he was free of the thicket, Gordon limped to the trickling stream to wash his face and the worst of his cuts. He wiped sweat-soaked strands of brown hair out of his eyes. His scrapes hurt like hell, but none of them looked bad enough to persuade him to use the thin tube of the precious iodine in his belt pouch.
He refilled his canteen and thought.
Besides his pistol and half-shredded clothes, a pocket knife, and compass, his pouch held a miniature fishing kit that might prove useful, if he ever made it over the mountains to a decent watershed.
And of course ten spare rounds for his .38, small, blessed relics of industrial civilization.
Back at the beginning, during the riots and the great starvation, it had seemed that the one thing in inexhaustible supply was ammunition. If only turn-of-the-century America had stockpiled and distributed food half so well as its citizens had cached mountains of bullets …
Rough stones jabbed his throbbing left foot as Gordon gingerly hurried toward his former campsite. Clearly these half-shredded moccasins would get him nowhere. His torn clothes would be about as effective against freezing mountain autumn nights as his pleas had been against the bandits’ hard hearts.
The small clearing where he had made camp only an hour or so ago was deserted now, but his worst fears were surpassed by the havoc he found there.
His tent had been converted into a pile of nylon shreds, his sleeping bag a small blizzard of scattered goose down. All Gordon found intact was the slim longbow he had been carving from a cut sapling, and a line of experimental venison-gut strings.
Probably thought it was a walking stick. Sixteen years after the last factory had burned, Gordon’s robbers had completely overlooked the potential value of the bow and strings, when the ammo finally ran out.
He used the bow to poke through the wreckage, looking for anything else to salvage.
I can’t believe it. They took my journal! That prig Sep-tien probably looks forward to poring over it during the snow-time, chuckling over my adventures and my naivete while my bones are being picked clean by cougars and buzzards.
Of course the food was all gone: the jerky; the bag of split grains that a small Idaho village had let him have in exchange for a few songs and stories; the tiny hoard of rock candy he had found in the mechanical bowels of a looted vending machine.
It’s just as well about the candy, Gordon thought as he plucked his trampled, ruined toothbrush out of the dust.
Now why the hell did they have to do that?
Late in the Three-Year Winter — while the remnants of his militia platoon still struggled to guard the soy silos of Wayne, Minnesota, for a government nobody had heard from in months — five of his comrades had died of raging oral infections. They were awful, unglorious deaths, and no one had even been sure if one of the war bugs was responsible, or the cold and hunger and near total lack of modem hygiene. All Gordon knew was that the specter of his teeth rotting in his head was his own personal phobia.
Bastards, he thought as he flung the little brush aside.
He kicked the rubbish one last time. There was nothing here to change his mind.
You’re procrastinating. Go. Do it.
Gordon started off a little stiffly. But soon he was moving downtrail as quickly and silently as he could, making time through the bone-dry forest.
The burly outlaw leader had promised to eat him if they met again. Cannibalism had been common in the early days, and these mountain men might have acquired a taste for the “long pork.” Still, he had to persuade them that a man with nothing to lose must be reckoned with.
Within half a mile or so, their tracks were familiar to him: two traces with the soft outlines of deer hide and three with prewar Vibram soles. They were moving at a leisurely pace, and it would be no trouble simply to catch up with his enemies.
That was not his plan, however. Gordon tried to remember this morning’s climb up this same trail.
The path drops in altitude as it winds north, along the east face of the mountain, before switching back south and east into the desert valley below.
But what if I were to cut above the main trail, and traverse the slope higher up? I might be able to come down on them while it’s still light… while they’re still gloating and expecting nothing.
If the shortcut is there…
The trail wove gradually downhill toward the northeast, in the direction of the lengthening shadows, toward the deserts of eastern Oregon and Idaho. Gordon must have passed below the robbers’ sentinels yesterday or this morning, and they had taken their time following him until he was settled into camp. Their lair had to be somewhere off this same trail.
Even limping, Gordon was able to move silently and quickly, the only advantage of camp moccasins over boots. Soon he heard faint sounds below and ahead.
The raiding party. The men were laughing, joking together. It was painful to hear.
It wasn’t so much that they were laughing over him. Callous cruelty was a part of life today, and if Gordon couldn’t reconcile himself to it, he at least recognized he was the Twentieth-Century oddball in today’s savage world.
But the sounds reminded him of other laughter, the rough jokes of men who shared danger together.
Drew Simms — freckle-faced pre-med with a floppy grin and deadly skill at chess or poker — the Holnists got him when they overran Wayne and burned the silos…
Tiny Kielre — saved my life twice, and all he wanted when he was on his deathbed, the War Mumps tearing him apart, was for me to read him stories…
Then there had been Lieutenant Van — their half-Vietnamese platoon leader. Gordon had never known until it was too late that the Lieutenant was cutting his own rations and giving them to his men. He asked, at the end, to be buried in an American flag.
Gordon had been alone for so long. He missed the company of such men almost as much as the friendship of women.
Watching the brush on his left, he came to an opening that seemed to promise a sloping track — a shortcut perhaps — to the north across the mountain face. The rust-dry scrub crackled as he left the path and broke his own trail. Gordon thought he remembered the perfect site for a bushwhack, a switchback that passed under a high, stony horseshoe. A sniper might find a place a little way above that rocky outcrop, within point-blank range of anyone hiking along the hairpin.
If I can just get there first …
He might pin them down by surprise and force them to negotiate. That was the advantage in being the one with nothing to lose. Any sane bandit would prefer to live and rob another clay. He had to believe they would part with boots, a jacket, and some food, against the risk of losing one or two of their band.
Gordon hoped he would not have to kill anybody.
Oh grow up, please! His worst enemy, over the next few hours, could be his archaic scruples. Just this once, be ruthless.
The voices on the trail faded as he cut across the slope of the mountain. Several times he had to detour around jagged gullies or scabrous patches of ugly bramble. Gordon concentrated on finding the quickest way toward his rocky ambuscade.