“What you and your people do is entirely up to you,” he had told Paul Krueger bluntly. “But as soon as this winter’s snows are melted enough to allow for it, my people are moving on, northeast, probably.
There’s simply not enough really arable land hereabouts to support all of us—yours and mine, plus our herds—without spreading out so thinly that we’d be easy victims to those thousand or more bikers just across the Sierra. I haven’t wet-nursed my kids and theirs for twenty years to watch many or most of them killed off fighting scum like the pack we were fortunate enough to surprise up there in Tahoe City. When the parent chapter gets up here next spring, you can just bet that they’re going to be none too happy to find out that we killed off every one of the local biker-raiders, thoroughly looted the headquarters and then burned it to the ground, so I will be a damned sight easier of mind with miles and mountains between me and mine and those murderous outlaws.”
Krueger had sighed long and gustily, replying, “Twenty years, huh? Then you must be some older than you look or act, Moray, probably closer to my age. But, hell, you’re right and I know it; our combined hundred and fifty men and boys would stand no chance against a thousand, not even against half of that number, not with as few automatics as we have and no heavy weapons at all except those two homemade PIAT projectors and a few hand grenades.
“You’re right about the farmlands and graze, too, and there’s something else that maybe you don’t know or hadn’t noticed yet: the rains haven’t been as regular and heavy nor the snows as deep in these last few years. Some of the smaller streams are either dried up or are just trickles and the level of the lake has dropped off several feet, and who knows why? I sure as hell don’t. Maybe all the nukes changed the climate like the nervous Nellies used to claim they would if they were ever used.
“So, okay, we all move out of here come spring. But where? We’re almost completely surrounded by some of the worst, godawful deserts on this continent and we’ve got damned little transport and little POL for what we do have. What the hell are we going to do if we run out of gas and there isn’t any at the next town or crossroads?”
Milo had found the answer to this conundrum while, mounted on captured motorcycles, he and a party of men scouted the route northeast to the Snake River Valley, their agreed-upon destination. Just north of Carson City, they came across a roadside attraction, a “PioneerDaysMuseum.” Among other things within the sprawling building were two different types of reproductions of Conestoga wagons, a huge-wheeled overland freight wagon, a Red River cart and several other recreations of animal-drawn vehicles, plus a wealth of printed material detailing their construction, use and maintenance. Complete sets of reproduced harness adorned fiberglass horses, mules and draft oxen.
After Krueger and some of his men, including his blacksmith, had journeyed north and looked over the displays, they had hitched the reproductions onto pickups and jeeps and towed them back home, then taken them all apart and set about turning out their own copies of wheeled transport, harness and other relics, while other men and women devoted themselves to training horses, mules and the few available oxen to horse collar, yoke and draft.
It was at length decided, after a conference with the smith and some of the on-the-job-training wainwrights, that the wagons simply took too much of everything—time, materials and effort—to reproduce properly in the numbers that would be needed, and so with the completion of the wagons already in the works, all of the labor was put to making Red River carts instead.
Other crews were kept busy through the last of the summer, the autumn and the winter bringing truckload after truckload of seasoned lumber from lumberyards far and near, seeking out hardware items, clothing, bedding, canvas sheeting, tents and the thousand and one things needed for the coming trek north.
Unlike most of his companions on these foraging expeditions, Milo had been in or at least through some of the towns and cities they now were plundering in the long ago, and he found the now-deserted and lifeless surroundings extremely eerie, with the streets and roads lined with rusting, abandoned cars and trucks, littered with assorted trash, the only moving things now the occasional serpent or scuttling lizard or tumbleweed. Only rarely did they chance across any sign of humans still living in the towns and cities, and these scattered folk were as chary as hunted deer, never showing themselves, disappearing into the decaying, uncared-for buildings without a trace. Milo suspected that these few survivors had bad memories from the recent past of men riding motorcycles, jeeps and pickups.
Every city, town, village, hamlet and crossroads settlement seemed to have its full share of human skulls and bones and, within the buildings—especially in those closed places that the coyotes, feral dog packs and other scavengers had not been able to penetrate—whole, though desiccated, bodies of men, women and children of every age. Although he and Krueger had come to the tentative conclusion that those humans who lived on in health while their families, friends and neighbors had died around them in their millions must be possessed by some rare, natural and possibly hereditary immunity to the plagues, he nonetheless tried to keep his crews from too-near proximity to the dried-out and hideous corpses, figuring they were better safe than sorry in so deadly serious a matter.
However, the only two deaths sustained by the foragers were from causes other than plague. The first to die was a sixteen-year-old boy who forced open a sliding door on the fifteenth floor of a hotel and was found after some searching by the rest of the party dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft; he had not, obviously, known what an elevator was. The other unfortunate was a man, one of Krueger’s farmers and of enough age to have conceivably known better, who had disregarded Milo’s injunction to leave alone the cases of aged, decomposing dynamite they had found in a shed. He had been vaporized, along with the shed, in the resultant explosion.
With the explosives that had been stored properly and were still in safe, reliable, usable condition, Milo, Krueger and certain of the older men experienced with dynamite or TNT had chosen spots carefully and then had blown down sizable chunks of rock to completely block stretches of both Route 80 and Route 50, the two routes the former slaves recalled as having been used by biker gangs. They might not be stopped, but they certainly would be considerably slowed down, the two leaders figured, which would, they hoped, give the former farmerfolk more of what was becoming a rare and precious commodity—time.
It had become clear that were they to forsake the trucks entirely, they were going to need more horses or mules, so Milo had gathered his group of horse-hunters and ridden out in search of feral herds. Luck had ridden with them. They had found a smallish herd on the second day, and a week’s hard, dangerous work had netted them a herd of some two dozen captive equines, including six that showed the conformation and size of heavy draft-horse breeding.
When they had brought back their catch and turned the beasts over to the breaker-trainers, they had rested for a day, then ridden back out, this time to the southeast. They were gone for two weeks and returned—dog dirty, hungry, thirsty and exhausted—without a single horse … but with five towering, long-legged dromedaries. They had found the outré animals wandering about an arid area and managed to trap them in a small, convenient box canyon. After a few of the men had been bitten by the savage beasts, there was a strong sentiment to kill one for meat and turn the others free to live or die on their own, but Milo had insisted that they be roped and led back to the farming areas, stressing his experiences in certain parts of Africa, where such as these had often demonstrated the ability to draw or bear stupendous loads on little food and less water.