A transmission from Belfast apprised Milo that its decades-long turmoil had, if anything, become unbelievably chaotic. While refugees from devastated England and Scotland poured into every port, the Protestant majority were openly battling Catholic and Marxist rebels in cities and countrysides and trying to make ready for an imminent invasion of its southern borders by the army of the Irish Republic. The transmitter went off the air after the third broadcast, and Milo never could raise it again. He did raise a Dublin station, some weeks later, crowing about a “great, God-sent victory” that had “reunited Holy Ireland and driven the Sassenachs into the sea.” But the same announcer had deplored the terrible plague that the army had brought back from the north that was even as he spoke baffling all Irish doctors. Dublin continued to broadcast for several weeks more, but it became increasingly sporadic and its last few transmissions were all in some guttural language that Milo assumed to be an obscure or archaic Gaelic, nor would the station answer him in English. At last, it became silent, no response at all.
The Southern Hemisphere seemed less affected by the diseases and destruction than did the Northern, as Milo recalled. Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Uppington and countless other large and smaller private and commercial broadcasts reached him as long as he had access to his own equipment. Quite a number of South American private, government and commercial stations were also on the air when he, perforce, left it. He was never able to pick up anything from Mexico, Central America or the northern and western Caribbean, but he monitored powerful though sporadic transmissions from some variety of underground research facility located somewhere in central Florida. This broadcaster, too, was still on the air when he had to move on, as were several locations in Antarctica.
According to the South African broadcasts, along with a few isolated signals from other areas, both northern and central Africa, from Atlantic to Indian Oceans, were aseethe with invasions, counterattacks, rebellions and every conceivable type and size of conflict along every conceivable racial, tribal, religious, political or social line. Egypt, seemingly not at all certain whether the nuking of Cairo had come from Israel or Libya, had launched retaliatory attacks on both countries. Libya was in a vise, being attacked as well by Algeria, Tunisia and a shaky coalition of Niger and Chad.
By the time Milo first monitored African broadcasts, the Union of South Africa’s armed forces had already conquered Botswana, Rhodesia and part of Mozambique, reconquered Namibia, and were pushing on into southern Angola and Zambia. Their military successes were abetted by the facts that all these countries were racked by widely scattered rebellions and uprisings, other borders were in serious need of protection from the incursions of other neighbors, and while hundreds of thousands, even millions—civilians and soldiers alike—were dropping like flies from the new plaguelike diseases, the white South Africans alone of all on the continent seemed immune.
Half a dozen Indian cities had been nuked. Nonetheless, the Indian armed forces seemed to be in the process of attacking across borders on nearly every side, even while riots, insurrections and rebellions on a grand scale vied with disease to kill most Indians.
Those survivors of the Vietnamese army that had invaded nuclear-stricken and otherwise beset China had brought back with them the plaguelike diseases, and these seemed to spread through Southeast Asia like wildfire, accompanying boatloads of starving, panic-stricken refugees to the Philippines and the islands of Indonesia. Australia had not received a single nuke, had utilized the harshest of draconian methods to drive off or kill would-be arrivals from plague-infested areas, but despite it all, still had found the incurable disease raging over the island continent from north to south, sparing only the scorned aborigines, oddly enough. Milo got most of this information at second hand from a Wellington, New Zealand, station, those islands having but recently somehow acquired the dreaded and deadly disease.
Military installations on the Hawaiian Islands had been nuked, and so had Tahiti. Otherwise, Oceania seemed from its various radio transmissions to be doing better than the most of the world. He was unable to get any sort of response from Japan, however.
South America seemed to be suffering almost as much as Africa, with a fierce war in progress between Argentina and Chile, another between Bolivia and Chile. Bolivia also was fighting Peru, which was in the process of trying to conquer neighboring Ecuador. Colombia too seemed to have designs upon Ecuador, as well as on Venezuela. Venezuela herself had moved into Guyana, taken over Trinidad, and was in process of marshaling an assault upon Surinam. Brazil had occupied French Guiana and was filling the airwaves with a barrage of nuclear-tipped threats against anyone who tried to violate Brazilian sovereignty or territorial aspirations. Paraguay and Uruguay both were fighting two-front defensive wars against Brazil and Argentina. It was from a South American source that Milo learned that the Panama Canal had been struck by, at the least, two nuclear missiles, one seeming to come from somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, one or more others from the Caribbean side.
It had been later that year when he had chanced across the gaggle of sick, scared, starving children who, under his guidance and tutelage, had become the genesis of the Horseclans folk. By that time, after traveling through countless miles of once-populous countryside that now stank to high heaven of decaying and unburied human corpses, fighting off both there and in the towns and smaller cities where he scrounged for ammunition and supplies the huge packs of hunger-mad, masterless once-pet dogs—these more deadly and dangerous than any pack of wild wolves, since none of them feared mankind and most had recently been dining principally on human flesh—he had come to realize that the immensely complex and interdependent civilization was dead on this continent and quite possibly worldwide for a very long time to come. As for the children he had found, were they to survive and breed more of their race, he would have to teach them to live as savages in a savage, brutal and merciless environment.
Knowing that before too long a time modern firearms and parts and ammunition for them would become unobtainable, he taught them all the bow, at which he was himself expert, taking some of the older boys with him on dangerous expeditions to cities to obtain bows and arrows of fiberglass, metal or wood, even while he experimented with wood, horn, sinew and various natural glues in anticipation of the time when ready-made bows would not be available for the mere taking.
Adept already at living off the wilderness, he imparted to the growing children who now depended upon him some of his vast store of knowledge and skills, then sought through the dead cities and villages and towns for books he and they could read to learn even more. Horses and gear for riding came from deserted ranches and farms, as too did the first few head of cattle, goats and sheep. He had had them bring in swine, too, up until the time he had come across some feral hogs eating the decayed remains of men and women who had died of the plagues; after that, he feared to allow them to eat the flesh of such swine or bears as roamed in the vicinity of former haunts of mankind.
The first generation had grown up, paired off, sired, borne and began to raise a second generation in a settled environment. They farmed and raised livestock, supplementing the produce of lands and herds with hunting game and foraging wild plants, nuts, and the like. They might have stayed thus and there, had not a succession of dry years forced Milo to face the necessity of a move to a place where water still was easily available and the graze was not all dead or dying.