The two remaining gunmen hunched behind cover, and once they’d located the direction from which Peter was shooting at them, they slowly shifted their position behind the trees in order to protect themselves from his fire. This, it turned out, was a fatal decision for both of them, but their position was such that they couldn’t avoid the danger. Trapped in a killing field between Peter and Ace, when they moved to hide from Peter, the battle rapidly ended. With two well-aimed shots fired only seconds apart—just long enough for him to cycle another round and reacquire his target—Ace felled the last two attackers with headshots from the other side of the valley.
Peter and Elsie stayed in their earthen depression. They waited and watched. Peter didn’t know if these men were just an advance scouting party for a larger group, and he wasn’t going to move until he knew that more attackers weren’t coming. Elsie looked at him, and he gathered strength from her glance. She smiled, and when she looked back out in the direction from which the attack had come, the smile remained on her face. It was not a smile of smugness or arrogance. Death was very real, and not something to be scoffed at or enjoyed. It was a smile of complacency—not in its modern definition—but in a way that means ‘restful satisfaction.’ It meant that all that could be done was being done. For now, things happened to be working out.
After about five minutes of lying perfectly still, Peter pulled a red handkerchief from his pocket and waived it so that Ace would know that all was clear.
Ace’s silence was as complete and pervasive from a distance as it was in person. The red handkerchief waving in the distance answered in kind, and Peter saw it. He thought of how some men hear silence, and they see it as a bull sees a red cape. They mistrust it. Peter kind of liked it.
After all, Ace had already spoken.
Three of the four dead attackers testified to Ace’s declaration, the red blood from their exploded skulls splashed across the snow like exclamation points at the end of his very efficient sentence.
CHAPTER 36
The Farm. Before the Bombs.
“Somewhere in the jungles of the Amazon or over there in Papua New Guinea—somewhere out there—there are uncontacted tribes that, even at thisvery moment…” He paused and looked across the distant horizon and saw the purpling sky. He thought of the dust, the smoke, and the civil war in the distance. “Even now, there are tribes that do not yet know that the world has fallen apart.” Clive Darling stopped mid-thought, and indicated with his hand outward, in the direction of the horizon, as if to say way over there somewhere. It was only a small flick of his fingers, as if he was conserving his energy. Then he continued, his Savannah accent fully evident as he held court.
“The members of such tribes don’t know anything about this tragedy being poured out across this country and the rest of the world. Their daily lives have not suddenly changed. Over the course of the last several days and weeks and years and millennia, they’ve simply gotten up in the morning just as they always have. They’ve fed their children, gathered and hunted their food, sang their songs, taught their customs, and protected their territory.” He stared out at nothing in particular. “Life, for them, just goes on.”
Clive paused and smiled to himself. To anyone else it was only a flash of his eyes, but under his mustache, he smiled. He thought about other moments during his life when he’d told that story—or had told one like it.
Clive spoke and Pat Maloney listened. It was five a.m. The two men were sitting in the drawing room of the farmhouse, talking over the last vestiges of a candle. It was unclear whether they were up early for the new morning or still up late from the night before. It had been unclear for days, in fact, whether these two were coming or going. They simply moved in tandem, and all the while appeared to have been merely passing the time. They talked like old friends would. Clive’s Sam Elliott mustache and Pat’s red beard. Cowboy and leprechaun.
Pat scratched his red beard and contemplated the thought, too. He said what Clive was thinking. “Life governed by the sunrise. Their only clue on a morning like this that something is different…” He motioned toward the window, and continued, “…is that, at the moment, the sunrise seems more vivid. More dust in the air.” Red Beard waved his hand before his face, stirring the dust. He paused.
“Imagine it.”
Clive did imagine it, as Pat let the thought hang in the air like the smoke and the dust.
“Life as a kind of perpetual communion with the earth. Somewhere out there those tribes are waiting for the next sunrise, the next day’s work. Their only job is to survive and to pass what theyare along to the next generation,” Red Beard said.
Clive reached into a bowl at his feet and fished out an orange. He offered one to his friend, but Red Beard waved it off. Clive massaged the orange as he picked up the thread of the conversation.
“Can you see it?” Clive said. “Passing their mortality and their immortality along through their genes to their children? And their customs? And their languages? And their history? And their very practical survival knowledge?”
Red Beard spread his hands as if to indicate that, although he agreed, there was more to be said. He’d noticed that Clive had not mentioned the state. Red Beard finished the thought. “What do such tribes know of war?”
“With nuclear winter coming on?” Clive said, leaning to his right and grabbing a knife from a side table. “Probably more than you’d think, my friend. Probably more than you’d think. They know plenty of war, but war in a primitive state is explicable.” He dragged out this word ‘explicable,’ to emphasize its importance. “Everyone has a very plain and simple reason for fighting. You fight because you want his wife, or he stole your orange, not because someone you don’t know wants you to fight some people you’ve never met over something you could never grasp or hold in your hands. Propaganda and brainwashing doesn’t enter in to it.”
He began to peel the orange in neat little spiraled strips, beginning each portion by plunging the knife’s sharp edge into the wrinkled skin of the fruit, noting how the veins in the rind made the thing look like a fist-sized brain. He carved each strip, and then peeled back the rind. The juice squirted out into the air, and the orange spray smelled nice in the warming air of the drawing room.
Clive and Red Beard saw the candle flicker and noticed, in the flickering, their shadows dance on the wall. They looked up, and in the hallway, the figure of Veronica flashed by, going down towards the kitchen to make her morning coffee. Red Beard lifted his chin in the direction of the hallway. “She turned out to be a good one,” he said. He thought of how Veronica had seemed to fit perfectly into their little household. Had it only been a week ago? Only a week?
Clive reached up, pulled at the corners of his mustache and nodded his head in agreement. “She sure did,” he said. His head nodded even more emphatically. “A strong, smart woman.”
They listened as she bustled around in the kitchen down the hallway humming to herself as the pots banged in the glow of her camping light. Clive and Red Beard were just about to blow out the candle to preserve the little bit of wick left for some other talk, some other morning, when Veronica called down the hallway to see if either of them wanted coffee. The suggestion in her tone indicated that she had asked this question before and that she knew what the answer would be. She was right.