It’s brutal on readers when beloved protagonists disappear forever. Most writers won’t even touch the subject. We like to think these characters live eternally, even though we know that’s not true. I’ve never been fond of this avoidance of the inevitable. There’s closure in knowing a character’s full arc. And it doesn’t mean their story is over; there are all sorts of adventures untold to go back and revisit.
When John Joseph Adams and I began brainstorming our Apocalypse Triptych, I decided to tell the conclusion of my most iconic character’s story. It would still leave much to telclass="underline" the rescue of the residents of Silo 40; Jules’s trip south to Old Florida; the time she lost the mayoral election by a single vote (hers); and her third and final chance at real love.
As writers, we should trust more in our power to create riveting characters, worlds, and story lines. That means being able to let go of past creations. It means not telling the same stories over and over again (even if themes are repeated throughout our works). Letting go is hard. But it’s the only way to reach out and grab what’s next.
Fantasy
Hell from the East
My path to sickness began the day General Lee surrendered his sword. That coward laid down his arms, and so me and my brother took our rifles and headed west. Wasn’t sure where we was heading, just away. My brother didn’t make it far. He’d survived the Battle of Sharpsburg but was brought down by a persistent cough. Fell off his horse and never got back up. I’d seen more dead than any vicar, but that don’t make me immune to its sad effects. Many a drink and several fistfights later, I found myself in a new army. They gave me a uniform I was more familiar shooting at than buttoning across my chest, and somehow slid from a war between brothers to this frontier life hunting natives. It was all about killing a man you didn’t know. That made it easier, keeping them strangers. Knowing them makes the killing hard.
My father had raised me and my brothers in the pine-studded hills of Virginia, just outside of Staunton. Pa gave me my first rifle, pointed at a squirrel, and told me to shoot. Men more dear to me than my father have been handing me guns and directing my fire ever since. I still find it strange how a man can lose at a war and then enlist in another with his enemy. But there are no real sides in this life except the barrel of a gun and the butt of a gun, and I know where I prefer to stand.
After enlisting, they stationed me at Fort Morgan. This was years before that unfortunate incident at Wounded Knee Creek. It was before the world heard of the Ghost Dance that was driving the natives mad. What we would one day call the Messiah Craze, and would lodge in my ear like a starving tick, had yet to cause trouble on those plains.
Fort Morgan was a lot like the endless Confederate encampments I had endured while serving. The only difference was that the fort didn’t relocate in the morning; it had far fewer men moaning and dying in tents; and it was less prone to abandonment at night. I reckon Colorado was a long way for a man to run home from. Most soldiers out there had already done their running, and Fort Morgan was where they’d ended up. Their final resting spot was a scrabble of tents and rickety shacks ringed by a shoddy wall of pine stumps where the best that could be said was they fed you twice a day. Two muddy tracks came in straight as an arrow from the east, cut right through Fort Morgan, and disappeared out the other end toward the west. In one direction, a flat nothing where only the dust stirred and a creek petered out and was swallowed by the cracked earth; in the other, ancient and impossibly tall mountains stood with white tops like old men. The hell in between was our home.
In the spring and all through the summer—when the gray brows on those granite men to the west receded with the melts and the creek raged—an endless caravan of poor people with rich dreams appeared along the twin-rutted road from territories east. They passed through on their way to California, and our sworn duty at Fort Morgan was to see that their scalps moved right along with them.
Those were the melts and the busy months—spring and summer. Autumn and winter were a harder time at the fort. Men took to cards and more drink than the good Army allowed, and each of us spent our share of nights in the pen sobering up and feeling like asses for mistakes we barely remembered. Those were the hard months—and in the eighteen hundred and sixty-eighth year of our Lord, they got suddenly harder.
I was out with Private Collins taking in a pair of deer when Lieutenant Randall took the sickness. The lieutenant had been away from the fort for near on eight weeks. A trail scout, he spent most of his time up in the hills living in a tent like a native and looking for less damnable passages between those brutish mountains. He was always a bit peculiar, but nothing to presage him wandering back into camp and murdering five good men in cold blood. Yet that’s just what he did; four of his fellow enlisted men were shot dead, plus a half-Indian cook named Sammy. Randall shot each of them in the head before someone managed to wing him and put an end to the slaughter. Why they didn’t kill him on the spot, I’ll never know.
Private Collins and me returned from our hunt too late to help with anything but the digging. Saw the aftermath, though: brains and skull and hair that took me right back to the war. They was already mopping it up, and so we were handed shovels. Now, nobody consulted me for my legal expertise, but Justice would’ve been served by shooting Lieutenant Randall right there on the spot. But the good Army of the United States of America has its own sense of justice. There are trials and spectacles afforded a man before his chest is riddled by a firing squad. There are nights spent in the pen. Which is how I found myself nursing a blister from the shoveling, sitting there on a hard bench outside the holding cell, taking my shift at watching Lieutenant Randall so that he weren’t shot dead by some enterprising fellow before dawn.
On the bench across from me was my hunting partner and shovel mate, Private Collins. I surmised that his presence was to make sure I didn’t scratch that itch of justice, either. I was keeping an eye on him and he on me, and both of us on the lieutenant. Randall, meanwhile, snored and babbled like only the guilty and outright crazy could manage on the eve of their probable execution. What could make a man break camp one morning and ride in to shoot his comrades in their skulls? Morbid curiosity had me itching to know. I tried to discern some of what he was saying in his sleep—but couldn’t make out a word.
“That’s Red talk,” Collins told me.
I turned to the private and realized I’d been leaning forward on my bench, my face scrunched up in concentration. I tried to relax. “You understand what he’s mumbling?” I asked, keeping my voice down.
Collins chewed on the end of an unlit cheroot, and then spat a dab of tobacco between our feet. “Arapaho,” he said, matter-of-factly. Private Collins had that air about him, that supreme confidence that got on some men’s nerves. He had also bagged both deer that morning, firing before I had the chance. Still, I liked him.
“What’s he saying?” I asked. The only Indian I recognized was their war cries, when the hair on the back of my neck was translation enough.
Collins shrugged and sucked on his cigar. “Used to take an Arapaho whore in Mason,” he said. “I know what their language sounds like, can catch a few words, but unless he starts talking about how thick my member is…” He smiled. And not for the first time, I wondered why I liked this man yet despised so many others.