Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (54 page)

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M
ONDAY
, 8 J
UNE
2015,
ABOUT
11
A.M.
R
AFTER
XOX R
ANCH
,
WESTERN
N
EBRASKA

Marjorie makes the funeral very impressive. Of course, she might really be commending Mattie's soul to her god. As she raises the chalice aloft, two dozen crossbows
slap-buzz!
in unison. Asshole Leader falls dead, and so does the hatchet man, nearest Mattie.

Machete Guy is only hit in the calf, and falls forward, closer to Mattie. He heaves himself forward with his hands as James stomps on the pedal of his crossbow, and has a head and a hand under the travois before James' next bolt strikes him square between the shoulder blades.

Soon enough?

When the sortie party reaches the travois, seconds later, they slash it loose from the harness and lift it up. Horsemen ride past them, lances held high, pursuing the three assholes still on their feet; a moment later, the fleeing enemy are all staked to the plains.

Mattie stands up, supported between two of Squad Four, waving madly with his left hand; his right arm hangs funny.

I have not heard so much cheering in many years, maybe ever.

All of a sudden, I can't breathe and my face is all wet, and I barely squeak out to James that I'd like everyone to just carry on their duties. I almost fall going down the ladder.

As I walk, wanting to run, to my quarters, Glory circles me like I'm a herd she's outriding, and everyone trying to approach me is a wolf.

Safe in our rooms at last, I just wash my face in the basin and sit down to breathe. Things will be taken care of, and Mattie will have to see the medics before he can come to me.

Now that we know that Broken can work, he'll be so interested.

I curl up, hugging myself, sobbing and more afraid than I've ever been.

*   *   *

T
HURSDAY
, M
ARCH
19, 1998, 6:45
A.M.
N
IWOT
, C
OLORADO

We all sat up instantly. Outside our room, somewhere else in the building, glass broke with a crash, and a woman's shout of “What are you—” ended in a shriek and moan.

Orry said, “Pull on your boots. Don't wait for a light.”

I did, and I could feel Mattie doing it too. “Now coats on,” Orry ordered. “Make sure you have hats and gloves. Then feel around, stuff anything else into your pack, and shoulder up. There's no time to roll sleeping bags, we'll have to leave them.”

I'd taken nothing out but I felt around in case there was anything of theirs, finding one of Mattie's gloves and handing it to him.

Nearby, in the dark, a man asked, “What's happening?”

“If I'm guessing right, the building is being overrun by a mob,” Orry said. “They're already inside. We're going to hope they were not organized enough to surround the building, and try to run out on the side away from them. If that doesn't work, we'll try something else. Come with us.”

“Maybe we should stay and help—” the voice quavered.

“Suit yourself.” Orry grabbed my hand. “Claire, take Mattie's hand. We're all going to stand up. Can you guys see the light under the door?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Mattie moved beside me. “Now I can.”

“All right, any of you that aren't coming with us, pull your legs and stuff in so we don't trip. Is the pathway clear?”

“Yeah,” “Unh-hunh,” and “Yes,” came at us from the dark.

“Here we go.” Orry dragged us to the door in about three big steps and threw it open.

He lunged into the sudden light, crossing the hall and putting his back to the wall. That dragged me halfway out the door. I half fell across the hallway and backed up against the wall next to Orry.

That pulled Mattie through. He looked kind of strange; it took me a moment to realize he had his socks in his mouth. Probably hadn't wanted to take the time to put them on, but didn't want to lose them either.

Right then I was too scared to laugh or even smile at this skinny boy, glasses slightly askew, in two sweaters and a heavy coat with bare ankles sticking out of snow-sneakers, and these two brown-and-red argyles hanging down from his mouth like he was a dog playing fetch. But I've smiled every time I've thought about it since. I took his socks and rammed them into one of my now empty pockets. “For safe keeping,” I said.

The conference room door opened and a young couple came creeping out, holding hands.

Tossing his head, Orry indicated we should go down the hall, away from the reception area where we'd come in. The couple came with us.

At the end of the corridor, there was a glass door, marked
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY
and
DOOR
IS ALARMED
.

Alarmed? In that door's position I'd be terrified.
It didn't seem like a time to share that joke.

Snow was piled against the glass at least two feet deep. It took all five of us shouldering against it to break the door from its hinges and knock it down across the drift.

Orry and the man heaved it out of the way, and we were out into the snow, running west across the old parking lot, the thick snow sliding under our soles and grabbing at our pant legs. Behind us, the yelling was louder. When I looked back, a handful of people were fighting in the parking lot. The couple was headed north, toward the smoke plumes of the town.

“I feel kind of bad about running out on everyone else,” Mattie said.

I never felt bad about things like that, so I distracted him. “Let's get around to the back side of that building over there, so I can give you your socks, and maybe there's someplace dry to put them on.”

There was a dry, though cold, concrete bench in a northeast lee corner of the cross-shaped office building. Mattie sat down with a sigh of relief and pulled his shoes off, and I handed him his socks. While he put them on, Orry crept back and peeked around the edge. He said it looked like the mob was mostly still inside the IBM building, and the few people running out were heading north to Niwot.

“Okay, I'm ensocked and be-shoed,” Mattie said. “How far do we have to go?”

“Eleven miles from here,” Orry said.

“What if we get lost in this blizzard?” Mattie asked.

“Around here,” I explained, “blizzards blow in from the northwest. So if we keep the wind and snow in our faces, till we hit Colorado 7, we'll be good enough.”

“How do you know all that?”

“She read it in
Journal of Blizzardology,
the special Niwot edition,” Orry said.

“Don't be mean, Orry. I know it from cross-country skiing up here. We had to know how to not get lost. In fact, I kind of wish we had skis.”

“There's a full set of different sizes at the shelter,” Orry said. “Not that it does us any good here. What I'm really wishing for is a good knife. Uhlman took mine for safekeeping and I don't think he'll be giving it back.”

*   *   *

T
HURSDAY
, M
ARCH
19, 1998, 12:00
P.M.
N
EAR
L
EFT
H
AND
V
ALLEY
R
ESERVOIR
, C
OLORADO

Around noon, we saw a house by itself with a big flapping note on the door:

Honey, electricity/phone don't work, going to ride Shadowfax into town for milk & coleman. Will keep trying to get you on phone. Call(when phone comes back)no matter how late.

The barn in back was closed, with a dead frozen Labrador lying where he'd tried to push his way through the locked door.

“Figure they're not coming back?” Orry asked.

“If they do, we'll apologize our asses off,” I said.

With a short split log from the woodpile, I broke the porch window, and climbed into the living room. A little yappy dust mop of a dog came running out. I yelled, waved my arms, chased the little bastard into a bedroom, and shut the door. He went all crazy in there, howling and yipping and jumping at the door.

Orry and Mattie laid a fire in the woodstove. I took a mattress off a bed in the spare room and used firewood and the couch to brace it up against the broken window. Orry's search of the cupboards turned up a bong and an empty lighter; we splashed rubbing alcohol on an electric bill, sprayed the sparks from the lighter onto it, and used that to light the fire.

The bag of meat scraps labeled
ELK
4
STEW
and the big bag of frozen mixed vegetables in the freezer were still cold, so I started them thawing in a big stockpot on the quickly warming woodstove. I brought in shovelfuls of snow from the porch and added them to the pot till eventually we had enough water to cover all the food. The room was getting pleasantly warm by the time the pot began to boil, and we took turns napping and watching.

When I woke from my turn napping, the blizzard was dying down, the boys had taken off their coats, and the food smelled overwhelmingly good. We found bowls and silverware, served out the improvised soup, and ate as much as we could.

The house seemed too dangerous and exposed to stay in, and Orry thought we had enough daylight left to reach the shelter. So we set all the pots we could fill with snow on the woodstove to thaw, and refilled our bottles; treated ourselves to sharing a real live toilet that still had one flush left in its tank; and armed ourselves with kitchen knives and shop knives. When we left, Mattie put the soup pot down on the floor, and opened the back bedroom door. The little yapper fled under the bed, but Mattie said, “He'll come out when we're gone, and at least the house will be warm and there's something for him to eat for a while, and if the weather turns nicer he can get out. Better than what happened to the poor guy outside.”

We left the fire burning when we left, and for at least an hour afterward we could see the smoke streaking black against the deep blue sky, through the cold, still air.

*   *   *

T
HURSDAY
, M
ARCH
19, 1998, 5:15
P.M.
A
BOUT FOUR MILES SOUTH OF
L
YONS
, C
OLORADO

The dead woman was still wearing a good pair of jeans, but she'd been stripped to the waist; she still had one boot on, and the other had been flung down the hill.

“Must not have fit,” Orry said. I laughed because that was funny, and he stared at me like I was weird.

I knelt to look. Blood matted the hair on the back of her head, and her skull felt squashy and cracked where I pushed with my finger. Up ahead, Mattie said, “Aw! Aw shit!”

He'd found a dead little boy, who couldn't have been more than four. His neck was at a funny angle; someone had broken it. He was in socks and underwear.

“That's the one whose clothes fit,” I said. “Somebody wanted that kid's clothes for their own kid, so first they killed his mom, and then they chased him down—”

Mattie blubbered and hung on to my arm for the next couple of miles. Once all the footprints turned off toward Hygiene, I felt a lot safer, but Mattie was silent and moody for another hour.

*   *   *

M
ONDAY
, 8 J
UNE
2015, A
BOUT NOON
R
AFTER
XOX R
ANCH, WESTERN
N
EBRASKA

“Ma'am, did you want lunch?”

“Thank you, Glory, if they send over some bean soup and a barbecue sandwich, that'll be fine.”

“Right away!” She's gone before I can say “thank you” and “no hurry.”

The crowd noise outside tells me that everyone is going by the infirmary to reassure themselves that Mister Matt is just fine, because for the Rafter XOX community that's somewhere between knowing that God is in his heaven and that the sun will come up in the morning. Not that I blame them.

I don't know what I'm going to say.

Mattie's such a reasonable person that the fact that it all worked out will be fine with him, and when I admit that I don't know, really, why I said Broken when I meant Straight, he'll probably just shrug and say he's glad to be here. He has never, never, never second-guessed me.

It's just . . . I feel so afraid, now that it's over. And I'm afraid to tell anyone, even him, especially him, what I'm afraid of.

Ages ago, Mattie looked up reactive attachment disorder and spectrum disorders and all the other weird-kid things in the old books, and figured out how in the new, post-Change world, they might be more advantages than drawbacks. He was the one who picked my brains about how to make people like myself comfortable enough to stay with us and give us their hearts and loyalty, and along the way taught me how valuable I was.

Of course there are some regular people at the Rafter XOX too, refugees who just wandered in and found it congenial, but basically we've got a population that could have filled a special-needs school or even an outpatient mental health clinic before the Change, and it was Mattie who understood how, nowadays, that made us stronger and better.

Mattie makes all our weird, not-good-with-people, but talented and capable, people feel valuable and needed, and they stay, and they're loyal as dogs or angels. Me, I couldn't win anyone's loyalty in a million years. After all, reactive attachment disorder means you don't ever really like people, or hardly any people, or care about them really. They can tell, and they hold that against you. At best, you're a useful jerk.

I run Rafter XOX and fight for it and protect it. I'm its decision-maker and its strong arm, but Mattie, he's the memory, and most of all the heart. If I had given the order to kill him, or if the rescue had failed, everyone here could have been left with mean, cold, practical old Miz Claire, who never knew when a touch on the shoulder or an extra plate of chili might save a soul.