Johnny Reb

Out in back by the wood pile Mick felt the October wind blowing. He smelled the cooking fire from the kitchen and another load of ribs and roast vegetables for the truckers. Far to the West he saw another thunderstorm coming in. The full moon, rising behind him, lit the cloud banks with a silvery imitation of daylight even as the clouds lit themselves flickering from the inside with hidden lightning, too distant yet to be heard. He reflected on how the storms were coming so much later into the autumn than he remembered from his youth. Everything changes.

And yet, when the wind blew oak leaves in a swirl over the wood pile and away toward the parking lot, Mick smelled Autumn: dry leaves, dry cornstalks rattling, pumpkins for Halloween, and Winter on its way. Just as it always had been, and would be.

Jesus, he thought, why did everything have to work out this way? And have I done things right?

Above the distant cloud banks, stars still twinkled.

Going on midnight it was time to lock up and get to bed, but Mick found three truckers still in the dining room, wreathed in smoke. They were men he had known for years, stopping in once every couple months or so. Like most, they made their living moving around the country looking for customers who had freight that needed hauling and who could pay enough to make it worth their while.

The big one, Bobby, pushed out a chair for him. "Hey Mick, I was just saying how I saw a glow one time just like in your story. About this time last year, outside of Seattle. I was stopped about twenty miles out, spending the night there, and it was the damnedest thing! This damn pink glow all over the bottom of the clouds out toward the city, and no moon at all that night. I don't know what it was, but I figured that was just about as close as I felt like getting. I was running solo, and I'll tell you what: I didn't sleep much for a couple nights. There were some pretty damn weird noises around those parts, and in the daytime nothing to be seen. Man, I'll tell you: I got out of there and I got no plans to go back. I'll tell you what I think: that whole place was so hot with radiation it was still glowing. You know they must've used nukes like crazy around there."

"That would be the right place for it," Mick agreed. "That's where the old U.S. submarine pens were, and I don't know which side they came down on in the War. They could have gotten nuked. But still glowing from it? It seems like it must have just been fires."

"Well," Bobby exhaled smoke, "I didn't smell nothing. And I sure can't see how there'd be any damn thing left to burn up around there. Every place I went through around there looked liked the damned Moon."

Washington State west of the mountains, along with a lot of southern British Columbia had all gone up in one vast firestorm that took weeks to burn. But it had been too late in the war for reliable news, and no one knew how it had started or even which side the Navy base there had been on. The fact that it was on American soil increased the odds that it had stayed with the United States. On the other had, the long-time involvement of the Seattle area with the submarine fleet also made it seem possible that the area's allegiance had gone to Foreign Command.

For a little bit everyone was thinking of their own War memories, then Mick broke it up. "You fellas aren't planning to go outside anymore? About time for me to lock up." He thought they might want to check their rigs one more time, but they declined. Here, for once in their travels around the wide country, their trucks were behind a good fence and with dogs to guard them. Tonight they wouldn't worry about anything except smoking the night away, and seeing who could scare everybody with the best tale.

The nightly locking-up process was a ritual that Mick had perfected years before. It would start with a walk around the perimeter with the dogs: Blackie, Brownie, Banjo, and Mr. Chips. The big dogs loved this part; running ahead with their noses to the ground, then doubling back and doing it over and over again. Although Mick's walk was only a mile long around the Wolverine's forty cleared acres, the dogs would cover five times that distance without ever getting a hundred yards away from him. They would smell every trace of every smallest being that had passed the land's borders during the day, while Mick listened to whatever late night sounds he could hear above their pattering feet, and peer into the dark woods beyond the edges of the land. The dogs knew that it was their job to keep watch at night, and nothing bigger than a squirrel would come on to it without their knowledge.

After watering the dogs for the night, Mick would take a quick walk around the Wolverine itself, checking all the doors and the window shutters from the outside, then in through the kitchen, bolting the heavy door behind him, to check that the fires in the stoves and dining room were safely low and screened.

He also usually liked to do a walk-through of the two big hallways through the trucker's rooms just to make sure that nothing really ridiculous was going on, but tonight he didn't feel up to that. Instead he went directly upstairs to the hall that had Melanie's room at one end, and his and Anne's at the other. And naturally, it was up there that he found the trouble.

Mel's door was open an inch, and he knew what that meant. He knocked lightly, then pushed it open to find her sitting on the edge of the bed looking out the room's tall window. He had put that window in for her the year they came to the battered old rest-stop that they built into the Wolverine. He and Anne had been scared all the time then, but she was seventeen years old and excited by the adventure of survival. They had fought through that winter and the next, building the house and rooms, installing the pumps, hunting for food, and getting their first wry customers. They had made a place where a young woman could hope to grow to adulthood, and where her worn-out parents could hope to spend the remainder of their lives. Now the room's only light was a big patch of moonlight that the window admitted, and when Mick's daughter looked at him her eyes held all the desolation he had ever seen. She looked out the window again, and he sat in the room's only chair.

"You did great tonight," Mick attempted, deciding that there would definitely be a better time to discuss her mistakes. She gave a little snort that might have been a laugh, but didn't turn her head.

"I'm sorry about the thing with the gun," he tried again. She lowered her gaze to the floor and breathed deeply once, but still didn't speak. So that hadn't been it either. His third try was to sit silently, and wait.

"That," she said finally, "was the first time I've touched a man in more than a year. Since the dance the Schwarz's had. And I guess there won't be any more of those."

The Schwarzs had made a valiant effort to put together some kind of social life in the remnants of Chelsea, but it hadn't come to much. There weren't enough people left in the whole area who felt secure enough to come to a party. And they had quickly found out why. Not many months after the dance, an attack by bandits from out of Detroit had convinced them to move West like so many others, heading for Grand Rapids on the Lake Michigan coast.

"Daddy," she said, looking at him directly. "I'm twenty-four years old! Will I ever go to another dance? Will I ever see another man who's not a drunken truck driver? Am I going to spend my whole life waiting tables and kicking punching-bags?"

Now it was Mick's turn to look away from her and out the window. He knew what the talk was about now; they'd had it many times before and with increasing frequency in the last year. The fight had only lent it more urgency. It was about school, and there was only one school left in Michigan. In fact, it was the only one in the Midwest as far as anyone could tell. It was the new University at Interlochen. And it was far to the northwest: by road at least two hundred and fifty miles from Ann Arbor and the Wolverine Truck Stop.

Once the school there had been a little academy for the arts, but the disappearance of the state's other schools had forced Interlochen to branch out into all kinds of disciplines that the new world demanded: small-scale agriculture, land reclamation, domestic and wild animal husbandry, veterinary medicine, military microbiology, eugenics, civil defense, general medicine, mechanics, ecology. It had grown quickly, absorbing most of the surviving faculty of the state's more well-known institutions of higher learning. They had been located in more densely populated areas and had suffered more from the biological weapons of the First War. And then the Second War came, and the nuke in Detroit hadn't helped Ann Arbor much. But the state's northwest corner had been relatively untouched by both wars, and Interlochen and nearby Traverse City had grown rapidly. And now they had the added advantage of being far enough away from the nightmare war zone that the old Detroit suburbs had become to be relatively safe. Or at least arguably so. And they had certainly argued about it.