Black Autumn Travelers Read online

  “Brothers and sisters,” the old man spoke, returning to his “prophet” act. “Brothers and sisters, please gather ’round.” He gestured generously at his driveway and motor pool below. “I have words to share.” He waited a few minutes for a crowd to gather for his declaration. Cameron bobbled in his chair, antsy as hell, but more curious than anxious.

  A woman knocked at the door and called out, “Uncle Rulon?”

  Cameron bet that nobody in this community had the stones to kick in the prophet’s door, so he remained still.

  “Uncle Rulon?” the woman pleaded again through the door. After a minute, Cameron heard her walk away down the hall.

  “Brothers and sisters,” the old man revved up again, his audience presumably sufficient. “I have words to share. Not words of the Lord, but words of a man who hath sinned in the eyes of God. A man guilty of sins, weighty enough for blood atonement…”

  Cameron didn’t know what the hell that meant, but it sounded like the old dude was moving ahead with his confession. Cameron laid the rifle across his knee and settled in for the show.

  “Many years hence, I committed sins against my sister. Sins against my daughter. My priesthood has been lost these many years…”

  The crowd gasped, murmuring. The old man went on, rattling off pronouncements, confessions. He dropped the same truth bomb on the crowd of pilgrims that he had dropped on Cameron.

  “Don’t forget about my family, old timer,” Cameron hissed.

  Unwilling to interrupt his flowery confessional, the prophet wrapped up his thought and moved into Cameron’s item of business.

  “And, though I am no longer your prophet, I ask that ye bring forward the family I once placed with my son Isaiah, the wife and two sons of the man taken at our roadblock. Bring them hence… I declare this marital placement void, committed in the shadow of my sin… bring them hence…” The prophet then continued with his soliloquy from before.

  Cameron grew bored with the prophetic rambling and wanted to get on with it, living or dying. “Hurry it up, old man. Have ’em send Julie and the boys up here.”

  The orange flicker of the firelight had abated across the street, the light dwindled. By the rumble of the crowd, half the town had assembled to listen to the prophet confess his sins.

  The prophet continued with his confession, bowing his head and praying over the community. He even took a moment in prayer to pass his priesthood authority to the Jessop guy, which made no sense to Cameron, since the old man had said he wasn’t the prophet in the first place because he had diddled his sister, or some such thing.

  “This is a just test of our faith, right?” a man below interjected when the prophet paused in dramatic humility. “This is our chance to prove our loyalty to you, right, Uncle Rulon?”

  “No, my son. Alas. I am no longer your prophet. The Lord God hath sent an avenging angel and I say farewell to you forever, you who are worthy for Zion, for I will not be there,” the old man held out his hands in celestial surrender.

  Just then someone tapped at the door. The ex-prophet moved on into another round of holy-sounding prophet talk, apparently unable to turn it off. Cameron unlocked the door and cracked it open, seeing the anxious face of Julie in the light of the hallway. He opened the door wide and ushered her into the room along with their two boys. He closed and locked the door behind them, shutting out a middle-aged woman in a prairie dress waiting in the hall.

  Julie looked at Cameron with wide eyes, confused. The ex-prophet droned on outside on the balcony. Julie looked from the prophet to Cameron and back again.

  “Nice get-up.” Cameron raised his eyebrows at her full-length dress, buttoned to the nape of her neck. His boys stepped around her skirts and clamped onto Cameron's legs, hugging him. Cameron knelt and hugged them fiercely, filling his senses with their wonderful, sweaty-boy smell. Both boys appeared well—scared, but good. Looking into their eyes felt like finding a waterhole in the desert. Cameron drank deeply, inhaled, and smiled.

  “Cameron, what’s going on?” Julie asked, bringing him back to the room. “What’s happening here?”

  Cameron let go of his boys and stood up. “Julie. I don’t really know what the deal is here, but I need you to listen to me. This place is going bonkers and you need to take the boys and run. Run west along the road. I’ll be behind you. Do you understand?” Cameron grabbed her shoulders, physically trying to pull her forward to a reality he barely understood himself. She nodded once, then nodded again with conviction.

  She repeated his instructions. “Run west down the road… Okay, but which way is west?”

  “That way is west,” Cameron pointed. “Run. Hopefully, I’ll be behind you.” He opened the door and herded them out of the room. He had to stay focused on current events, not his boys, if they were to have any chance of getting out of this alive. The boys craned their necks around their mom, trying to catch a last glimpse of their father as he shut the door behind them.

  A bit of hope garnished Cameron’s thoughts. The Chaos about him shuddered, and Cameron forced himself to sit back down in the white upholstered chair.

  The ex-prophet continued in his monotone, apparently used to speaking like this for hours. Cameron tried to pick up on the thread of his sermon while the crowd below grew restless, struggling to grasp the eternal import of the prophet’s pronouncement—struggling to understand the machinations of God’s strange Church on Earth. Cameron didn’t blame them for being confused. He had set this whole thing in motion, and he didn’t understand what the fuck was happening, either.

  Cameron remembered that he was supposed to kill the blathering old man on the balcony, now speaking in the dark, lit blue by the light of a xenon flood lamp. But, in truth, all the murder had gone out of him. To Cameron, it felt like when those softball games turned into fights, spending their savage magic, and then receding back into brotherhood and sport once again. It felt like Miller Time.

  Maybe it had been the prophet’s pathetic confession. Maybe it had been breathing in his boys. Maybe it had been the sudden revelation that Julie hadn’t been entirely brainwashed into dumping him. All his insecurities struck their moorings and floated into the night sky and left him wondering why he had, moments before, felt so compelled to murder this old man and destroy this bizarre town.

  Suddenly, the door burst inward, kicked hard. Eight men, all of them with six-shooters in their hands or on their belts muscled into the room. Cameron was caught sitting in his chair, eyes wide, his rifle drooping toward the floor.

  Fortunately, he had never seen any of the men before, which meant none of them had ever seen him, either. Cameron assumed they were the secondary leaders of the town because their ages ran from late fifties to early sixties. A couple of the men glared at Cameron, but one tipped his hat like a Western movie lawman. The men clearly didn’t recognize Cameron as the assassin about town. They moved through the white-carpeted room like they were on a mission from God, stomping past onto the balcony and confronting the prophet. They shouted something about Rulon being the “fallen prophet” and about the need for “blood atonement.”

  With a jolt, Cameron returned to himself. This would be his best chance to leave. Exit stage left. With a burst of energy that shattered his ennui, Cameron bolted from the room and into the hallway, now choked with confused pilgrim women.

  “Excuse me,” he said politely as he made his way through the hallway full of the harem of the prophet. “Pardon me.” Cameron snaked his way down the hall, then took off at a gallop as he hit the stairs.

  He raced around to the front of the house, now packed with pilgrims, and slowed down to work his way through the crowd toward the open gates of the ex-prophet’s driveway. Confusion reigned and no one spared Cameron any notice. The men on the balcony made some booming pronouncement and then their six-guns sounded in unison. Cameron looked back to see Prophet Rulon fall sideways beneath the railing of the balcony, his body peppered with splotches.

  “Was the Prophet Rulon
translated into heaven?” he overheard one pilgrim woman ask another.

  Cameron shook his head in disbelief as he cleared the gates and broke into a run, loping west out of town.

  As he cleared the last of the trailers, it felt like he might make it, family and all. He could see the figures of a tall, blonde woman and two struggling boys ambling west, away from the town, on the road before him.

  The feeling of threading the gap—between bad man and good man—struck him as both strange and heaven-sent. He didn’t understand the whys and wherefores of the last week of mayhem, but Cameron knew this: he had been faithful to his boys. And when their eyes called him to return to the land of the merciful, he had returned.

  Maybe that was all this new world would ask: to fight like a savage when the battle raged, but then return to hearth when the flags lowered and the blood vanished into the ground.

  Cameron knew he was a slow learner. He couldn’t expect this one, absurd victory to paint his life in tones of wisdom and calm. Running west as the last light fled the sky, gaining ground on his family, he filed it all away as proof of a new reality. Maybe it would be a reality more suited to a man like him.

  Epilogue

  Holland Pond, Wallula, Washington

  Sage had killed and butchered hundreds of rabbits; it had been his token responsibility on his dad’s hobby farm. He had worked mightily to avoid any other kind of labor or responsibility, always making himself scarce when he knew his dad might need him. But try as he might, he could never get out of butchering the rabbits.

  In the last two weeks, Sage had become someone he barely knew. At his feet lay a dead rabbit, and Sage glowed with pride. He had finally caught a cottontail in one of his snares, and the meat was still warm. The rabbit had probably run through the snare earlier that morning.

  He found himself looking forward to gutting, skinning, and cooking the rabbit over a fire. These skills—skills he had earned honestly—would fill his belly tonight.

  Back in his old life, no matter how loudly he had barked about his independence and argued with his parents about making his own decisions, Sage had always known himself to be a fraud. He had always known he was a boy in a man’s body. He hadn’t earned the right to stand for himself, though that never stopped him from trying. All his old bluff and bluster, false confidence and bravado sounded in his ears like the clanking of tin. It had all been bullshit and he smiled, knowing now that his dad had listened and tolerated it with patience.

  Becoming a man, he discovered, was far more than growing some chest hair and banging a girl for the first time. As he hefted the dead rabbit in his hands, he felt the magnitude of this moment. With competence and skill, he would feed himself. Maybe this was becoming a man.

  He would never have asked for the fall of society. His heart would probably always be heavy with the deaths of Angelina and Penny, and heaven only knew if his parents and siblings were still alive. But he wondered if he would have found the path of manhood without the collapse.

  He had grown so good at manipulating his friends, his mother, and his father’s wealth that he might never have reached this moment, when he and the earth wrestled for survival and he emerged alive.

  Sage knew he would never be victorious, since Mother Earth would always come around to take another poke at him. But perhaps being alive for one more day was the ultimate endgame, the final stamp of competency of a man, moving across the skin of life.

  Sage reset the snare and headed back toward his hide, the comforting weight of the rabbit hanging from his belt.

  The words of the old man back on the highway turned out to be prophetic. OPSEC—operational security—had truly become a life-and-death factor for Sage. As the masses stranded on the highway became increasingly vicious, being discovered equaled death. If a mob didn’t kill Sage straightaway, they would certainly kill him by taking his supplies. With just ten rounds of ammunition left for the Winchester .30-30, staying hidden from the roaming masses meant staying alive.

  Sage got a small fire going and went to work on the rabbit. He peeled away the skin, the thin fur coming off the flesh with ease. Then he carefully slit the belly with the head hanging down so that he could surgically remove the bladder without getting a single drop of urine on the meat. With the bladder out, he flipped the carcass and dumped the guts onto a chunk of sagebrush wood, thinking he might use them later as bait for his deadfall traps.

  He carved the rabbit into six parts: two rear quarters, two front quarters, the breast and the midsection. Cut up in parts, the rabbit laid flatter in the frying pan. His grandpa had forgotten to send him with cooking oil, but that was something Sage figured he would get used to sooner or later. The lack of oil and butter would be an adjustment, especially since game meat had so little natural fat. He plunked the rabbit pieces down in the pan and set it on the sagebrush coals. He added four small onions for flavor.

  After salting and flipping, he dug into the rabbit and onions. It required discipline to choke down the bland meat—he had nearly reached his max on cooked onions after the first week of eating them―but Sage forced himself to eat every bite. He wasn’t sure if cooked rabbit would be good the next morning, and he wasn’t willing to risk getting sick from eating bad meat. He still didn’t know how cold it should be to preserve meat.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon on overwatch of the pond and the road. He could barely see the Holland farmhouse, just a pinnacle of green in the distance punctuated by their huge cottonwoods. Sadly, those cottonwoods would beckon the hungry and desperate like an oasis in the desert. Sage hated to even look at the farmhouse, knowing that the marauders would come again and again. He decided to stay away. His heart couldn’t take another bout of tragedy.

  The clouds built on the eastern horizon and, if they kept on their way toward him, the afternoon would bring more snow. While Sage loved his hand-built shelter, he knew it wasn’t a tent and that it would leak. He had a tent bundled in with his supplies, but he was afraid that its geometric lines would be too easy for wandering eyes to spot. He thought he would be stranded here for the winter, so he decided to hole up in his stone-and-tarp shelter for as long as the mobs kept coming. Staying hidden took priority over staying comfortable or even dry.

  Something at the bend in the road caught his eye. He dug around for his binoculars and took a careful look. Three figures made their way closer, walking half a mile out. He could tell they were all men, throwing up feathers of dust as they marched toward him.

  Ten minutes later, the men were almost to the pond, and Sage couldn’t believe what he saw. Without a doubt, one of the men, the one leading the trio, was Justin. Somehow, he had managed to survive the wound to his shoulder, and had found medical treatment, with clean bandages and a sling for his arm.

  From this distance, Sage couldn’t hear their conversation, but he could see Justin motioning toward the onion field, describing to his companions the advantages of the pond. A gnawing feeling grew in Sage’s gut. Justin would keep coming. He would keep pressing and keep showing up, until one day Justin would find Sage asleep or unaware.

  How Justin had remained alive for this long flummoxed Sage. Justin had no skill of his own. His only ability was to manipulate others, bending their minds to his will and enticing them to jeopardize their survival for his own. Watching him now, directing the men toward Sage’s onion fields and trap lines, he realized Justin would never go away.

  When the three men turned toward the onion field, Sage slid out of his observation hide and slipped over the rocks, putting the ridge between himself and the men. He had imagined that harvesting rabbits and mice would be enough, that Mother Nature would be satisfied with the blood of small animals. He had assured himself that she would require no more than to follow the life of a hunter, to shed blood only so that he could eat, as his father had taught him.

  Sage had withheld the part of him that could become a killer of men, and had hidden that part deep within, where maybe she wouldn’t notice the hoar
ded piece of his childhood, tucked between his loving heart and his innocent soul. At last, with a plunging grief, he held it out to Mother Nature, complete in his surrender.

  Sage checked the breech of his 30-30 and took off at a slow trot, jogging around to their back trail. He would approach them from where they had come, where they would least expect an attack.

  There had been many occasions where Sage could have killed Justin, but he had sidestepped them all. He had no desire to kill anyone, much less someone he knew. He had possibly killed men and women from the farmhouse window, but he didn’t know that for a fact.

  Killing Justin would be different. He would face the decision squarely. He could see no alternative. If he didn’t kill Justin and the other two men, they would end up killing him.

  Sage cut their back trail and slowed to a walk. He could see the men several hundred yards distant, with their backs turned toward him. Using the sagebrush for cover, he moved forward quietly, cutting the distance. The scoped .30-30 rifle was most accurate under a hundred and fifty yards. To make a sure kill, he would have to close to within a hundred yards.

  He wanted to turn back. Sage knew the ghost of Justin would haunt him and he knew that killing these men would forever change him. He could justify it, but he sensed that the justification would wear thin over time. Like the coming snow would overwhelm the land, truth of murder would overwhelm Sage’s self-deception. Yet Justin was a true threat to Sage’s own survival, and no amount of wishful thinking would change that reality.

  Maybe it was like the rabbit. Perhaps Mother Earth demanded this final sacrifice on the altar of survival. Maybe she required the forfeiture of his fresh, teenage heart—his innocence, his childhood. Perhaps Mother Earth demanded that those relics of the old world be left here on the stony plain of Idaho for Sage to live. Perhaps this dark act of murder was a toll Mother Earth had forever demanded of men, and she had grown tired of forbearing the rite of passage. Maybe, with the collapse of society, she had come to collect for the last hundred years of modern civilization, this time with interest.