Skeletons (41 page)

He sat silently in his chair.

"I've said it. I've said what I did. I don't know what kind of man I was then. But I even stayed in that house that night. Outside, the streets were alive with skeletons and screaming. I stayed in my house, locked myself in my own cellar. I sat in a corner with my revolver on my knees and covered my ears. When I got up, it was daylight. I almost put the gun to my mouth and pulled the trigger.

"Almost . . ." he said. "I stayed barricaded in the cellar for two days. No one bothered me. For two days I wept and tried to blot out the memories of what I had done. By the end of the second day I was sitting in the corner, my knees pulled up, the barrel of my service revolver in my mouth, willing myself to pull the trigger.

"But I didn't." He looked at me. "And that night when I slept, I dreamed of you. You were just standing there, unspeaking, staring at me in my dream. And for some reason that made me feel better."

He looked at me hard. "And the next morning, it wasn't so bad. I discovered I could live with myself after all. I unlocked my cellar door and found a few others who had made it through the last two days. We stayed together, and hid, and fought. Some of us died, but slowly our numbers grew.

"And all the while I had dreams with you in them. I felt you were guiding me in some way. Showing me where to go. Whenever it got so bad that I wanted to die, you would be there in my dreams. The dreams have gotten deeper, more detailed. Margaret's had the same kind of dreams. Only she calls them visions. Many of the others have had them, too. I don't know what they are."

His tears had dried. His face was hard-edged again. He learned forward and looked deep into my eyes.

"In my dreams you already know me. I have to tell you this. A long time ago, before I was married, when I was first in the air force, I met a woman. I stayed with her for one night. She was seventeen, and I was only nineteen. Her name was Beth.

"I'm your father, Claire. My dreams told me that."

He waited for my reaction. But I had none. Something deep within me, in the opening flower, had already known this.

"I never knew about you. If I had known, I would have done everything I could to make you happy."

I smiled.

"Now my dreams have brought me to you. Whatever they are, I know they're right. We have to fight for you. If we have to die for you, we'll do that. My own men took a vow a long time ago to do what we had to because we believe you're the only chance the human race has now. In my dreams I saw you traveling with Beth. She must have been a very special person.”

I nodded, tears coming into my eyes.

He gave a short laugh, looking down at my hand and at himself on his knees. "I feel like a knight, with his queen!"

I smiled.

He stood up, straightened himself. Again he looked tall and hard-edged.

He stopped at the entrance to the tent and spoke again. "There were some very hard decisions I had to make, Claire. I've made them. Also, I don't completely trust Margaret Gray. I don't know how she'll react to this plan of mine. She's been acting . . . strangely. I've been told she's been meeting with some of her old execution-squad people. I don't like that, but there's not much I can do. A lot of people here would still follow her, I'm afraid. I'd arrest her, but that would only start a riot and split the army." He smiled. "Your dad is trying to pull off a high-wire act, Claire. Would you keep your fingers crossed for me?"

I nodded.

His smile widened. "Good."

Opening the tent flap quickly, he left, ramrod straight, walking out into the night.

The humans continued to come down from the hills, from out of their earth-built shelters, to join our army.

When we crossed the Snake River into Oregon, they flowed to us like rivers to a sea. Their stories were the same. They had hidden in their mountains, in their valleys, near lakes and in the woods, and when they knew it was time, they came. Some caught up from behind. Some had come by boat, landing in San Francisco Bay from Australia, continuing by foot eastward, avoiding Lee's army. There was one story of a crashed plane in the California desert, fourteen survivors hiking north, living on a teaspoon of water a day.

The Silent Army of Humanity now numbered fifty thousand.

A place was made for all of them. My father, Sam
Coine
, moved with confidence. Margaret Gray, meanwhile, became more remote, moving from my tent to sleep alone under the night skies, hiding her face beneath her hooded blanket. The reports of her meetings with her old spies and police, though, continued.

There came a rainy cold day when we caught up with one of Lee's straggling companies who had fallen behind, a force of three hundred skeletons camped near Malheur Lake. My father sought to skirt them, turning our army north, but we were spotted by a scouting party.

My father acted quickly. Five thousand soldiers were sent out. By the afternoon the skeletons had been surrounded and obliterated. With relief my father discovered they had had no radio equipment. Apparently, they had been deserters.

We added their equipment to our own.

The next day, at noon, my father announced his plan on the shores of the lake. The sun had come out. Early winter was in the air. Someone had gathered early chestnuts, and their nutty fragrance wafted through the assembly. A breeze made ripples on the surface of the lake.

My father stood on the back of a truck bed, its gate down. He wore his uniform. Into a microphone he said: "We are very close to a great battle—perhaps the greatest humanity has ever joined. But I know you will do well. Because that battle may decide whether humanity lives or perishes from the face of the earth."

He paused.

"I have decided," he went on, "not to use tactical nuclear weapons as had been planned. This would be a mistake. Also, it would leave us a legacy that the human race does not want to bear. Also," he added, smiling, "it isn't necessary.

"General Lee's army is now camped two hundred miles to the west, near Grants Pass. I find this ironic. It is also where we will engage them.

"Our intelligence tells us that the army will stay there for the next three days. At the dawn of the third day we will attack with a force of thirty thousand. We will not attempt to wipe out Lee's army, but will keep him occupied while the rest of our force, including another ten thousand soldiers and all of our civilians, head north at high speed into the state of Washington and then on to Vancouver. Behind them, units of the army will peel off and hold at bay any of Lee's contingent that is able to follow.

"With luck—"

"No. We will burn them!" Margaret Gray's voice said.

She appeared near the bed of the truck and threw her cowl back. She pointed a thin finger at my father. Her face was gaunt, weathered, wrinkled flesh pulled back to show more starkly the madness of her eyes.

My father made a motion for her to be removed. But instead, four burly soldiers climbed up onto the bed of the truck and held my father while he was put into chains.

Margaret Gray climbed up onto the truck while my father was led down. She smiled grimly at him.

"We will burn them!" Margaret shouted, throwing her hands up. "The wrath of the Lord will fall on them from heaven! It is now that this false prophet"—she pointed at my father, who stood tall and silent between two guards—"shall be removed from our sight! We have the means to rain death upon those who would bring us death, and we will use it!"

A group of soldiers in front stood and brought their weapons up. Immediately a line of men appeared from behind the truck and joined Margaret's ranks. "Kill them!" she commanded.

Margaret's men fired on the loyal troops.

"Twice!"

As the soldiers began to turn, Margaret's soldiers fired again, dropping them to dust.

More of Margaret's force appeared. Soon it had surrounded the assembly. From within the circle large groups of soldiers rose to join her.

A small contingent of wavering soldiers was left behind. Reluctantly, they, too, joined her ranks, under force of arms by their comrades. Those who didn't were shot, and shot again.

My father shouted, "This is insanity! If you let her use nuclear weapons, Lee will follow you north and obliterate you!"

Margaret Gray turned to him. "They will burn. And in the morning you will burn." She turned, pointed to me. And so will you."

She held her hands up high above the silent crowd. She shouted, "For I am the one God has chosen! I am the one who will lead all of you to His light! This girl would have led you to death! Your dreams of her are false! Reject them! God has given me a new vision! It is I who will save you!"

"Yes!" someone shouted.

"Amen!"

Soon a cheer had roared through the crowd and taken them over, and amid the wild adulation in their eyes for Margaret Gray, my father and I were dragged off.

That night, as wild, drunken, mad celebration swept through the Silent Army of Humanity, my father and I watched the pyres on which we would be burned being built. They were tall masts built to huge rafts, surrounded by a pyramid of dry wood and straw.

"They're all mad," my father said. "If they realized what they're doing, they would stop now. Margaret Gray is a witch. She'll lead them straight to hell."

They had tied us to a tree, sitting side by side. We had not been fed. Occasionally someone would wander by to hurl insults at us. Some of these were the same people who had treated my father and me with so much respect not a day before. Now a true fever had taken hold of them, a possession from which they might never waken.

"Die!" a small child shouted. He was one of the ones I had played with, a boy with blond hair and deep blue eyes. His face was twisted into an ugly smirk. He picked a stone up, hurled it. It hit my cheek. There was a burning pain.

"Die, witches!" another child, a little girl not five years old, screamed, hurling another stone.

Our guard, a stout middle-aged man with a beard stubble that he continually rubbed, shooed the children away, laughing.

Leaning against a giant tree, the guard said matter-of-factly, "Me, I used to do this for a living. State penitentiary in Nevada. Lethal injection." His face was thick-featured. When he walked, it was almost in a waddle. Suddenly he looked at us, and the madness I expected to see in his eyes wasn't there. "You get to know," he said, rubbing at his thick stubble, "who's guilty and who's not. Most are guilty. It all comes out in the end." He laughed, looking away. "The end."

My father and I looked toward the pyres being built. So did our guard.

"I'll be lighting those tomorrow," he said. "They were my idea, actually. Margaret Gray wanted something . . . exotic." He laughed. "I joined this army back in Illinois. Bet you never noticed me. I've been keeping a low profile. Don't like to get involved. But this job I just had to volunteer for."

Again he laughed. 'Truth is," he said, his laughter trailing off, "I'm probably the only man left alive who can get you out of this."

My father and I looked at him.

His face was all seriousness. "Oh, yes. I'm not the only one. There is a small band, got wind of what Margaret Gray was going to do. She'd been lining up her people quietly for weeks. This bunch left this morning, before the ruckus. They're waiting about five miles north of here. Pretty well provisioned, too." He looked at my father. "You taught them well, Colonel."

"I'm listening," my father said.

"Thing is," the stout man went on, rubbing his stubble, "if this isn't done right, it won't make a damn bit of difference. I could cut you
loose
now. But I'd be dead myself in twenty minutes and Margaret Gray would track you down. She'd send the whole army against you if she had to. Specially that little girl, there. She's very afraid of that little girl.

"Way I see it, Colonel, when Margaret Gray attacks Lee with nukes in two days, he'll destroy her army where it stands using the air power he's got in California. I'm sure you were counting on that, since your idea all along was to use the bulk of our army as a feint, to draw everything toward it while the rest runs north."

"That's correct," my father said.

The stout man smiled. "I ain't so dumb. Army reserves, fourteen years. Nice way to get away from the pen on weekends. But what Margaret Gray will find is that while she vaporized a whole bunch of skeletons near Grants Pass, she signed her own death warrant, because there's plenty more skeletons to man those bombers and wipe her out where she squats. Even if she tries to run, by then it'll be too late."

The stout man looked straight at me. "Margaret Gray has forgotten the point. It's not to kill skeletons. It's to get this little girl up north, where she's got to go."

My father said nothing.

"Like I said"—the stout man laughed—"I ain't so dumb. It's just that most of these people here, they're scared. They don't want to die, and their dreams tell them they're going to. They'd rather listen to a nut like Margaret Gray, who tells them what they want to hear. Me, I started having dreams of my own, back in Illinois. There's something real special 'bout your little girl here."