Rose Eagle (4 page)

T
he thought of having to spend days — maybe weeks — with Phil Tall Bear by my side was too much for me to bear. Him with his gentle, smiling face. His kind words and all.

I was sure he would be kind to me and be helpful all the time we were together. Like I said earlier, I had never heard him say anything unpleasant to anyone. Not that he was wimpy. He would stand up for himself if someone tried to push him around.

I remember three years ago when Charley Horse Catcher went from teasing him about how good-looking he was to actually saying he was going to rearrange his face. Then one day Charley actually took a punch at him.

This was back before the Cloud, back when men and women worn out from a ten-day shift underground could spend their credits on the booze sold at the company store, where our Overlords overcharged for everything except alcohol. The idea was that alcohol being cheap meant people could buy more of it. In fact, they could do so to the point where their money disappeared faster than water boiling out of a pot you forgot and left on the stove till it melted.

And Charley, who weighed a good three hundred pounds and not all of it fat, was as drunk as you could get and still be able to throw a hard, accurate punch. Charley was thirty years old then, and Phil was only fifteen. Charley had been an athlete with a shot at being a ball player, leaving the Ridge, and being one of those guys you'd see playing in the big stadiums on viddy screens. Until he blew out a knee. And since he was only an Indian, he didn't have the access to the replacement tech that could have made him better than new.

So when that sucker punch was thrown with all of Charley's weight behind it, it could have knocked down a horse — if it weren't for the fact that all the horses had died out six or seven years before that.

Maybe horses were another reason Charley was so filled with the sort of anger that bubbled up when he was drunk. His last name was a legacy from two centuries ago when his family had been great horse catchers. Even though they had access to self-drives and the mag-lines, those Horse Catchers preferred to ride. They grew up riding bareback, and you never saw one of them without a horse somewhere nearby unless they were down in the Deeps. Like all of us, they took comfort from those horses. Horses made us all feel more human, more real, and not just proles who were like game pieces on a board owned by our Overlords.

When all their horses started to die, they didn't bury them. They left them where they lay. The plains air is so dry up there on the hills where they had their ranch that their horses' bodies lay for years looking like they were just asleep. The members of the family would go and sit by those dead horses. Tears would roll down their faces as they prayed and spoke their horses' names.

Anyhow, that hard punch Charley threw at Phil never made contact. Phil just leaned back a little and then wrapped himself around Charley from behind, brought him down to the ground with one arm around Charley's neck, and held him there. He didn't squeeze hard enough to choke him out. Just controlled him until he felt Charley stop struggling. Then he rolled off and patted Charley on the back while the big drunk man lay there and started to cry.

“Why'd they all have to die? Why, why?” Charley was sobbing.

And Phil didn't say anything like “It'll be all right,” which would not have been true. All of us knew back then that it would never be all right again. We were proles whose only future was one of working until we died from overwork or were killed by some accident like the one that took my dad. All the while, those near-immortals who used us lived like kings and queens.

No, the only comfort Phil offered was to keep his hand on Charley's back, his own eyes lifted to the horizon as if he was seeing something none of the rest of us could see. And that look of his was so perfect, that gesture toward poor Charley so much the right thing to do, that as I watched, I fell totally in love with Phil Tall Bear.

Helplessly in love with him. So much so that, for the last three years, I'd been trying to pick out some faults in Phil. See something about him that might make me despise him or at least give up on my crazy infatuation. Sometimes it made me feel sick to my stomach to see him.

Because I knew he could never return my feelings. How could anyone love someone like me with my craggy face and my big overgrown body? But there were other times when being in love with him made me feel warm all over. Like when I dropped a tray in the food line and he accidentally brushed my hand while picking it up and handing it to me.

And after the Cloud came, when we all had to move inside Big Cave at night, it being the only place safe from the gemods, I was even closer to him much of the time.

It was lucky that Big Cave was so big. Our only entrance was through the one manual door because the other massive doors had been sealed shut by the final power outage, but once inside, the five hundred of us who made up the population of the Ridge had plenty of room to spread out and make our own little spaces. Some of the older people still remembered how to make tipis — structures that were well designed to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer. And that was what we all ended up building. Family tipis. Not covered with buffalo hide as in the old days, perhaps, but with the thick cloth that had been used in great rolls as part of the machinery. It took time to bring in the lodgepole pines from the high hills forest, and it was dangerous to do so with the creatures that were out there. But by the time six months had passed, there were over a hundred tall tipis in a great circle inside Big Cave.

The ceiling had been built high to make room for the passage overhead of flight platforms bearing ore. Because of that, the smoke from the fires, kept burning for light and heat at night, rose and made its way out through the titanium mesh vents without choking us. The light filtering in through those vents made it bright enough in the day that we didn't need fires then.

Water was not a problem. An artesian well produced a stream of fresh, sweet water flowing right through the channel in the cave floor. It had been estimated by our Overlords' engineers back before the Cloud that the well would last another decade for ore processing. But now, without it being wasted the way they'd done, it might just flow forever.

In a space that big, I'd been able to avoid Phil at night. At my suggestion, Aunt Mary and I had set up our space way over near the west wall. And I'd made sure that the wood-gathering groups I joined during the days also kept me as far as possible from him. I even tried to eat at a different time than him at the communal kitchen.

* * *

“Phil Tall Bear?” I said again.

“Yup,” Aunt Mary said. “My idea, but the Elders Council agrees.”

My heart sank at that. After the Cloud came, a few days had passed when no one knew what was happening elsewhere. No viddy screens, no flying machines, no word of any kind from anywhere. And then Aunt Mary had a second dream. In that dream she flew like an eagle across the whole continent. She saw that everywhere was like it was here. The time of our Overlords spanning the world with their minds and their machines was done. And she also saw chaos and terror. People fighting and killing each other. People struggling for power. And those gemod creatures that our Overlords had created for their vain amusement, roaming the land everywhere.

When she told people that dream, everyone believed her. And there was no panic, no struggle for power as a result. It was like we all went back two centuries in our minds and our hearts to a time when we all shared to survive. And the Elders Council was set up. A dozen men and women got together and came to a consensus of what to do that would help everyone. They didn't have regular meetings. They just seemed to be able to get together when it was needed, as if their minds were connected. And no one questioned what they decided — which was never offered as orders, but as suggestions. Suggestions that we all knew we needed to heed.

Like the decisions that we would all eat together, form work parties to get firewood, set up shifts of people responsible for latrine duty or gardening or closing and watching the gates at night and opening them in the morning. Like the decision to take all the food and useful goods out of the company store before burning it to the ground with all of the beer and other alcoholic beverages still inside it.

Everyone had accepted those decisions.

Just as I had to accept the decision that I needed to go and find something that would make the lives of our people better. Just as I now also had to agree that my quest was going to be in the company of Phil Tall Bear.

And I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

I
was choosing things to put into my pack. Soon I'd be meeting up with Phil Tall Bear. And what was I going to do or say then? I clasped my two big hands together so hard that if I'd had a lump of coal between them, I probably would have squeezed it down into a diamond.

Lenard cleared his throat. I'd forgotten that he was there.

“Mary,” he said. “Can you give me a minute alone with our Rose here?”

Without a word, my Aunt Mary left the tipi.

Lenard Crazy Dog looked over at me.

“You remember me, Little Girl?”

That was a strange question. I wondered if maybe the pain meds he'd been given were making him forgetful. It was only two days since we'd fought the firewolves together up on the hill. How could I forget that?

But Lenard nodded as if he knew what I was thinking. “Not just now,” he said. “I mean before, before . . .” — he waved a hand — “before all of this.”

I shook my head. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Know why I call you ‘Little Girl'?

That touched something in me. But the memory was not making itself visible, sort of like a deer you just know is there in the woods but haven't seen yet.

Lenard smiled. Not a broad grin this time. A small smile, sort of regretful.

“You were only five or six,” he said. “I was your pa's best friend back then, back before I took off and tried to fight them, being young and foolish.” He chuckled. “Not that I did all that bad a job of it. You ever see a transmission tower knocked down? That was something.”

The memory was almost showing itself now. “Wait,” I said, “Did I . . .” And then it came to me. “You were Uncle Lenard!”

The grin spread across his face like a sunrise coming over the plains. “Ah-yup,” he said. “That was me.” He touched his cheek and his nose. “Before all of this got redecorated and rearranged, courtesy of the powers that be, or rather that was.”

“You called me Little Girl then. And I sat on your horse in front of you as we rode all around.”

I was smiling, too. now. It was such a good memory, being with him, and my dad riding next to us. We were still just proles, just common workers, but we had the freedom of horses. Until they set that disease loose that killed them all.

“Your pa wouldn't come with me. Said he had to think of you, and that your ma would just die without him.”

Lenard bit his lip as he said that, regretting his words. Seeing as how that was just what my mother did after my father died in the Deeps. But I didn't blame him for speaking the truth. I was too glad of having that memory again, the kind of memory that you don't just carry. The kind of memory that carries you.

I reached out and grasped his hand. “I'm really glad to see you again, Uncle Lenard.”

He held my hand lightly, not squeezing it, just resting it in mine the way that our people always do when we shake hands.

“Ah-yup,” he said. “Me too.”

We stayed like that for a while. Then Uncle Lenard let go of my hand.

“Bring me some of that paper over there on the desk and one of them pencils?”

I did as he asked. Then, with great care, he began to draw something. After just a few lines, I figured out what it was.

“You're making a map,” I said.

“Ah-yup. Seeing as how I am the only one around here who has made such a trek lately, I am the one can tell you how to get there. Only a little over one hundred miles as the crow flies. Just a little skip and a jump from here in a slow flier. Half an hour's journey back B.C. But seeing as how birds are the only ones with that sort of power now, you'll be on foot following the roads. So that'll make it more like one hundred fifty miles. A few days if you was to go at a steady trot day and night — which I would not recommend. Seeing as how you need to aim for safe shelters when it gets dark. And both you and Johnny Tall Bear's boy need to keep your eyes out as you go. Never let your guard down.”

He began to make big
X
s on his map. “And these are the places I know for sure you need to go around as best you can.”

I looked at all the
X
s, so many that there was hardly a clear space without being within a few miles of one.

“Because there's monsters there?” I asked.

“You said it, Little Girl.”

U
ncle Lenard — funny how easy it already was to think of him that way again — looked up from the map he'd just finished drawing and looked over my shoulder at someone.

“Hey,” he said. “Come on in. You two are just in time.”

You two? Jeez. That meant it had to be . . .

“Rose,” Aunt Mary said from behind me, “you know Phil Tall Bear.”

I turned around, and he was standing there in the doorway behind Aunt Mary. From several feet away he looked to be my own height, even though I was two inches taller. Our eyes met for a moment. He smiled, and I quickly looked down, hoping the beating of my heart was not loud enough for him to hear it.

“Hi, Rose Eagle,” he said.

Rose Eagle. Of all the people at the Ridge, Phil was the only one who ever called me by my full name. Rose Eagle. I liked the way it sounded coming from his lips. But I didn't tell him that. I was finding it hard to say anything.

“Hi,” I finally said, barely getting that one word out of my tight throat.

Then I didn't know what else to say. The awkward silence in the tipi stretched out.

“Okay,” Phil said. Then he reached out his hand and took mine to shake it.

His hand was all calloused, and it felt as strong as he looked. It was warm, too, and it seemed as if I could feel my own hand getting warmer as I held his. I didn't want to let go of his hand. But I did, just short of holding on to it for too long.

“Okay,” Phil said. “Partners?” he asked in a soft voice.

That voice of his made me want to throw my arms around him and hug him. He was just so nice. But I managed to control myself from saying or doing anything that would make matters worse.

“I guess so,” I replied, my own voice barely audible.

Uncle Lenard cleared his throat. I looked over just in time to see Aunt Mary let go of his hand.

“Okay, kids,” Uncle Lenard said. “You both come over here and take a look-see at this here map of mine.”

The description of our route of travel and the listing of the various sorts of danger along the route took a while and included Lenard Crazy Dog's deciphering of the various cryptic notations he had added to the map since I first looked at it. Most of those notations were sort of shorthand explanations of just what kind of dangerous creatures we might encounter near each of those ominous
X
s.

FW
was the first one I figured out, the initials closest to the Ridge. Off to the south and west into the Badlands.

“Firewolves?” I said.

“Ah-yup,” Uncle Lenard said. “The main body of them. More than two dozen, I'd guess. Those we ran into on the hill must've split off from the main pack. Territory they were in . . .” — he pointed to the letters
MB
, which I also understood — “that would be the madbears. Now gemods usually stake out their own territory unless they get pushed out of their own. So probably a young male firewolf and his buddies tried to take over the alpha spot and they got run off by Old Three Paws. I call him that on account of he lost one of his front feet after someone — not naming any names — put an arrow through that paw and pinned him for a time to a tree, till he gnawed it off.”

“Wow,” Phil said. “Some shot.”

Uncle Lenard aimed a crooked smile at him and then shook his head. “Meant for his throat, son. Sometimes better to be lucky than good.”

I ran my finger along old Route 90 west, which had been pretty much deserted as a highway for years since the ore was shipped north not by land but by the huge lev-carriers.

A large
LO
was marked by the
X
where the road neared Rapid City.

“Little Ones,” Uncle Lenard said. “Just stay way away from them and their burrows. Way, way away. Things don't always have to be big for them to be deadly.”