Rose Eagle (2 page)

B
uzzards were already circling overhead as we gathered what remained of the blankets and began to make our way back downhill to the Caves.

The monsters meant lots of meat for the big black-winged scavengers. Some of it a little overcooked, but still plenty edible for birds that viewed things four-days dead as gourmet meals.

Some people don't like turkey buzzards, but not me. I appreciate the way they keep on doing what they were meant to do — cleaning up the world. They did the job that the Great Mystery made them to do. Not like the creatures — more than I could name — that had been artificially created by the privileged classes whose downfall had set their pets free.

I'd once asked Aunt Mary why it was that those folks loved to make monsters.

“Because they can,” was all she said. Which made sense.

She was taking the lead as we walked. That made sense too, seeing as how she had her rifle and was one of the best shots anyone had ever seen at the Ridge. Plus I was the one who was burdened down with the heavy pack baskets and the blankets and everything that had been brought along for the sweat that had ended so strangely. Or maybe not so strangely, seeing as how
strange
was a good description for everything I'd ever known in my life.
Normal
was a word nobody ever used to describe the way we lived at the Ridge, even before the Cloud came.

Normal. I'd heard stories about people living a normal life. I wondered what that would be like.

I shifted the weight of the blankets and the baskets over my shoulders.

“You okay, Rose, honey?” Aunt Mary said.

“Sure,” I nodded. And I was. Heavy as my load was, I barely noticed it. I'm just as strong as I am big, and I hardly ever get tired.

It was still early morning. The sun had started to appear while we'd cleaned up the mess around the destroyed sweat lodge as best we could.

We'd pried the pitchfork out of the first creature's chest. Then we'd returned the cooling stones to the place under two small cedars where they were meant to be piled between sweats. We'd restacked the wood, folded up the blankets, put the broken poles of the lodge into the fire pit after managing — with no small effort — to roll the smoldering monster off to the side. Aunt Mary had made a prayer and offered tobacco. After that we'd headed out.

The two dead madbears we'd left where they were. You might wonder why we didn't butcher some meat from them. But you'd only wonder that if you were not from our community. None of us Lakotas would ever dream of eating any creature that was part human. And neither one of us wanted to take any sort of trophy like people in the old days did. A bear-claw necklace made from wrong-spirited creatures like those would have been bad medicine.

Aunt Mary stopped and shaded her eyes with her left hand as she watched more and more turkey buzzards come sailing in to join those kettling in a spiral over the hill.

“Man, that is a lot of buzzards,” she said. “You call them, Rose?”

“Maybe,” I said.

As I said it, a cardinal called from the bushes to our right.

“Wheet-wheet-wheet, chee-uh, chee-uh, chee-uh.”

I was only halfway through whistling an answer to it when it came fluttering out of the leaves and landed on my upraised hand.

“Hau, kola,” I said.

It cocked its head and chirped at me. Some birds — real birds, not ones genetically modified — can talk Lakota, or so people like my aunt Mary who know our language say. Crows, meadowlarks. They could always do that. But not cardinals — they just sing their own little language. But I could tell the cardinal was answering my “Hello, friend,” with a similar message of its own.

Aunt Mary smiled. “It really does beat all how you get on with birds, Rose.”

I nodded.

“And not just birds,” Aunt Mary added, “just about any of the four-leggeds.”

I nodded again. It had always been that way. Animals and birds trust me. When I was little, back before Pop died in the Deeps and Ma grieved herself to death, they used to find me in the backyard sitting with my legs out in front of me and two or three wild rabbits in my lap, who always hightailed it for the brush as soon as my parents opened the door.

I never had any trouble with birds and animals — real ones, that is. I liked them and they liked me, even if I was all tall and gawky. My problem was with the two-leggeds, the kids who teased me because of my height when I was real young. The boys never looked at me the way they did the other girls, especially when I hit my teens and also my current height of six feet seven inches. Instead, they just looked up at me and asked how the weather was up there. Or they said something just as unoriginal and hurtful as that. Though some of them stopped doing that after I picked one or two of them up with one hand and held them out in front of me with their feet kicking.

Then they just avoided me, which was worse. The only one who ever said anything nice to me after I got my growth and didn't act like I was a freak was Phil Tall Bear, who was almost my height. But he was also two whole years older, practically an adult. And he was probably just being nice to me because he was a kind person. I can't remember him ever saying anything unkind to or about anyone.

“So what is that redbird telling you?” Aunt Mary asked.

I shook my head. I'd been in a sort of trance thinking those thoughts, not paying attention to the bird that was doing a little dance on my hand as if trying to get my attention.

Hey, stupid human, look down here.

Sorry,
I thought.

The cardinal nodded up at me. Then it opened its wings and fluttered them, chirruping as it pointed its head toward the trail ahead of us.

“Oh,” I said. “I think it's trying to warn us that someone's watching.”

Phweeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The new whistling sound ended with a thunk
as a striped arrow whizzed past Aunt Mary's face and buried itself in the trunk of a pine.

I
stared stupidly at the arrow, thinking I should get down or duck or something like that. Instead I just stood there. Perhaps I was waiting for Aunt Mary to tell me what to do. But, to my surprise, she didn't say anything. She wasn't even looking at the arrow. Instead, with an exasperated look on her face, she just took a deep breath.

“Le-
nard
!” she said, emphasizing every syllable. “You — get — out — here! Before I shoot your ass.”

A chuckle came from the brush to my left. Whoever it was, if it was the person who shot that arrow, he'd moved more swiftly to reposition himself than almost any normal human could move.

It took me by surprise, but not Aunt Mary. She had already shifted to aim in that very direction.

“Crazy Dog,” she said. “I am not going to warn you again. Get — out — here.”

Crazy Dog, I thought. Then he wasn't just a myth. That would explain it.

“Cool it, Mary,” a calm, deep voice said. “Here I come, hands up.”

And with that, a big, broad-shouldered man stepped out from the brush, the leaves not even rustling as he did so. In addition to the large compound bow he held over his head in his right hand, he had an AK-47 over his shoulder and a very large knife strapped to his right leg. He was dressed in camouflage, a green headband circling his brow and holding back his very long black hair.

His hooked nose bent noticeably to the left, as if it had been broken a time or two. The scars on his face seemed to bear that out. His hands were almost as big as mine, but I was disappointed to see he wasn't actually ten feet tall as the legend had it, just standard height for a big man. Namely, five inches shorter than me.

As he grinned, his dark eyes sparkling with mischief, I could see that he was missing a canine on his left side. He had the beat-up good looks of an action star in the old viddys.

Lenard Crazy Dog was the one man who had fought the system that put our whole adult working population into those killing mines. Even without the helpful injections and implants that had made our rulers' soldiers nearly superhuman, he'd been able to evade capture for months. He sabotaged shipments of the ore, even blew up one of the power towers.

But he'd been caught, sentenced to life in Distant Detention, from which they sent broadcasts every now and then of what they were doing to him — painfully — to our handhelds and stick-on screens — an object lesson to anyone foolish enough to think they could win when they fought power.

“How'd you know it was me, sweetie?” Lenard Crazy Dog asked.

Sweetie?

I'd never heard anyone call Aunt Mary that before, like she was someone's girlfriend! That was clearly a weird thought. After all, she was almost forty years old. I assumed that had to be way past the point where anyone would be interested in that sort of thing. Not that I knew anything at all about “that sort of thing.” Nor, butt ugly as I was, would I ever be likely to.

Aunt Mary pointed with her chin at the arrow.

“Oh,” Lenard said. “Right.”

I got it. A black arrow circled with four red stripes had been his calling card, left behind whenever he pulled off one of his exploits.

“Do I need to ask how you got out?” Aunt Mary said.

Lenard grinned again. He'd lowered the bow from over his head and moved closer to us, perhaps taking the fact that Aunt Mary had not yet shot him as permission to approach.

“Just walked out,” he said. “Doors opened right up when the power quit. Just had to hop over the occasional overseer whose implants had shorted out and turned him into barbecue beef.”

Aunt Mary raised an eyebrow.

“Well,” Lenard continued, “there was a few whose implants didn't finish them off. But not that many. Then I picked up their weapons, which they had no more earthly need of, and I headed for home.”

“What took you so long?” Aunt Mary had actually moved a little closer to Lenard herself. Her gun was held off to her side, pointing at the ground. And her voice was sort of friendly and husky, in a way I'd never heard before.

“Five hundred miles is a ways to walk,” Lenard said. “Especially when there was no shortage of gemods tending to see yours truly as an easy snack. But I was not going to let them keep me from seeing you again, sweetie.”

It was all getting to be too much for me. I cleared my throat.

Both Aunt Mary and Lenard Crazy Dog turned to me, a similar sort of guilty look on both their faces. Like they were teenagers or something.

“Ah, Lenard,” Aunt Mary said, her face a little redder than usual, “this is my niece, Rose.”

I'll say this for Lenard Crazy Dog, he recovered fast. That winning smile back on his face, he reached for my hand and shook it gently.

“Pleased to meet you, Rose.”

I did not smile back at him.

“How did you find us?” I said.

“Weelll,” Lenard said. “Not that long a story. Reached the Ridge yesterday. After I was done with the pleasantries, saying hello to friends and relatives, telling how I'd gotten back home and all, I asked about your Aunt Mary here, who was always . . . a special friend of mine. And they told me quite a tale. How she'd dreamed the power was going to go out even before that Silver Cloud got here. How she had been persuasive enough to warn everyone to get up out of the Deeps before that happened, which I gather took some doing. How the Overlords had been amused enough by it to let everyone just take the day off, seeing as how everyone was all so hot and bothered, and the bosses figured they could punish the ringleaders later.”

He paused and looked over at Aunt Mary. “Right so far?”

“More or less,” Aunt Mary said.

“So when the power went off, cutting off the light and the air and letting the tunnels flood with sludge when the pumps died, it was none of ours died down there,” Lenard said.

It was a pretty good summary, I had to admit. It brought that memorable day back to me. The crackle and sizzle in the air before the lights went out, the booming sounds from the shafts as the lev-lifts plummeted to crash at the bottom, the screams from the offices and homes of the nearby Overlords, the crash and explosion a mile to the west of the Ridge as the formerly mile-high air platform that had held the mansion of the head regional administrator struck the earth and started a forest fire.

I shook my head. Enough reliving the past. “Us,” I said. “How did you find us?”

Lenard chuckled. “They said you was up in the hills, seeing as how my girl, er, my old friend your aunt had another dream. About how you had to be made ready to go out and find something that would help the people. And seeing as how I know these hills as well as I know the lines in my own hand, I figgered it wouldn't be all that hard to find you. Thought I might help some.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn't need to say that, but for some reason I did. I was not sure I wanted Lenard to be here with us, even if he was famous and a sort of hero. I'd liked the idea of Aunt Mary and me doing it on our own — even if it was scary to me. After all, we had just defeated two madbears all on our own. We didn't need a man helping us, did we?

I waited for Aunt Mary to tell him that. But she didn't.

So I did. “I don't think I need your help,” I said.

“Hmmm,” Lenard said, a different sort of smile on his face now, one that was kind of speculative. “Really.”

“Really,” I said, looking over at Aunt Mary, who didn't make eye contact with me.

Instead, she looked at Lenard Crazy Dog, who just stood there, his left hand cupping his chin.

“What about,” Lenard finally said in a slow voice, “them five firewolves waiting down the trail?”

F
irewolves?” I asked.

“Yup,” Lenard Crazy Dog replied, scuffing the toe of his left boot against the dirt of the trail. “Five of 'em.”

Firewolves? Jeez. As if madbears were not bad enough. Though not as big as a grizzly on steroids, the firewolves were still twice the size of a normal wolf, maybe even three times as big. Like the other creatures in the District of the Plains, which is what our part of the continent was called, they had been modified with a mix of animal and human genetic material. For some reason, our regional Overlords got a kick out of making terrible creatures that were part
Homo sapiens
and thus self-aware and capable of speech, as well as voracious and vicious.

The electronic ion barriers and vaporstream locks had kept them safely enclosed — at least safely for anyone or anything outside the enclosures. In the case of the pack of firewolves — which had numbered about two dozen creatures — that enclosure had been no less than twenty square miles. Lots of room for the favorite sport of the Overlords — televised, of course, using drone cameras — of releasing some hapless animal or human inside that enclosure and then taking bets on how long they would last.

It wasn't an easy bet. The firewolves seemed to have had an especially human streak of sadism in them. Torturing their prey, terrorizing, catching, maiming, and then releasing had all been part of their pattern of behavior. So it might take hours, even days.

As soon as their barriers disappeared, that same cat-and-mouse behavior pattern was quickly inflicted on any human they could locate, including surviving members of the upper classes. Firewolves were among the main reasons everyone at the Ridge stayed inside the gates of Main Cave at night.

Firewolves got their name from two things that characterized them. One was their red fur. The other was that they actually could make fire and had no fear of it like normal animals.

“Firewolves.” I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck.

“We'll take all the help we can get,” Aunt Mary said.

“Sure thing,” Lenard Crazy Dog said.

“Firewolves,” I said again.

“Yes, Rose, honey,” Aunt Mary said. Her voice was normal, all business now. That made me feel better, if not less scared. “Now just drop those blankets. Leave 'em here. The less you have to carry, the better. In fact . . . ”

She grabbed the heavier pack from my shoulder and pulled out a leather-wrapped object about three feet long. She unrolled it and lifted the gun that had been wrapped inside.

“This belonged to your Grampa Spotted Horse,” she said, handing it to me. “Though I was the one who cut down the stock and sawed a foot off the barrel.”

I hefted the 12-gauge Remington shotgun in my hand. I'd never used a gun much and I'm only an average shot, but when you're using a 12 gauge, you don't need pinpoint accuracy to hit your target. Just point and pull the trigger. I knew enough about guns to see that it was pump action, which meant I could shoot it several times before reloading. Being shortened as it was made it a good weapon for close-range action.

“Your Grampa Spotted Horse was a big man,” Lenard said.

Aunt Mary handed me a box of shells. They were double-aught buckshot, with enough stopping power to knock down most big game. I slipped shells into the gun, jacking one into the breach so I would have a full six shots. Then I stuck a dozen more shells into the pockets of my down vest. I wasn't happy about the thought of having to shoot at anything, even a firewolf, but I guessed I was ready.

“Plan?” Aunt Mary asked.

“Wind is blowing down the trail,” Lenard said. “So they'll know you're coming. Me, I circle around, come at them from upwind.”

Lenard jerked his chin toward me. “Rose, you keep time.” He knelt, picked up one of the hundreds of pebbles scattered along the trail, and then carefully placed it on the bare earth in the middle of the path. “You do this, same speed as I just did. When you got two hundred stones in the pile, that is when you and your Aunt Mary start down the trail. Just walking normal. Okay?”

Then, before I could nod, he slid back into the brush without a sound and was gone.

“Start counting,” Aunt Mary said.