Dodge said, “A noise woke me.” Now that the dark figures were gone, he seemed more self assured.
“Maybe what I heard was Rabbit. I didn’t see anything. Then the men came.” Eric placed his hands into the small of his back and pushed. He worried that the men had taken Rabbit, but he said, keeping his voice calm, “We won’t find him until it’s lighter. Let’s eat, then we can look.” As they finished their breakfast of dried fruits and beef jerky, the sky lightened and the wind died down. A couple of hundred yards away, on the crest of the hill overlooking their camp, Eric saw the group that had surrounded them, sitting. They too appeared to be eating. Watching them closely for hostile movement, Eric put on his backpack and prepared to track Rabbit. From the dew-cleared path of grass leading from his sleeping bag, it was clear that he had headed north, parallel to the highway, but as soon as Eric and Dodge broke camp, the group on the hill stood and walked down toward them.
“Stay close,” said Eric. He kept himself between Dodge and the strangers. The men drifted toward them like a mist. In the dawn light, they moved… deliberately. He could think of no better word. Each watched where he was stepping, missing twigs or patches of dry leaves, like deer crossing a meadow. They wore leather skirts— their bare legs were sun browned—and what looked like homespun-wool shirts. Moccasins. No socks. Each carried a bow, a spear or a staff. Several were weighted with heavy, leather water bags. He guessed they were in their twenties except for the one leading, who might be forty or fifty. A broad-chested man with a weathered face and light blue eyes above a gray-flecked beard, he planted himself in front of Eric. The others spread out in a semi-circle. He raised an empty hand to Eric and Dodge. “I’m sorry, old one, but you can’t go farther on this road.” The voice rumbled.
“Where’s the boy?” demanded Eric. His own firm voice surprised him. The smallest and weakest of the men out-weighed him by at least thirty pounds.They seemed like cave men, hard and rangy and animal like.
Gray Beard looked puzzled. He gestured at his men. “We have no boys here.” The deepness of his voice impressed Eric. The man spoke from the bottom of a well.
“Our boy,” said Eric. “Where is he?”
Gray Beard glanced around, then signaled one of his party. “Skylar, you had the watch. Where is the other one?”
A man carrying a heavy water bag looked embarrassed and shrugged his shoulders.
“Find him,” ordered Gray Beard. Skylar dropped the bag and circled the camp. He found the trail Eric had noticed earlier and pointed north.
“He’s gone into the Flats,” said Skylar.
Gray Beard threw his staff on the ground and stamped his foot. “After him, all of you!” The men melted into the underbrush, and Gray Beard, Eric and Dodge were left to contemplate the rising sun. The rush of men hurrying off, the strangely dressed man standing next to him, and the mystery of Rabbit’s whereabouts confused Eric. He took a step to follow Rabbit’s trail, but Dodge tugged on his arm. “We’re supposed to stay here, I think,” he whispered.
Gray Beard picked up his staff, inspecting it for cracks. “The Flats,” he said. “One job to do, and I ruin it.” He turned to Eric. “The boy won’t go far, do you think? He’ll come back on his own?” Concern creased his features. Eric thought his posture was odd— forced and uncomfortable—as if he expected Eric to scold him.
Gray Beard twisted both hands slowly on the staff. “Damn.”
Eric said, “What is this about the Flats? Do you mean Rocky Flats?” Rocky Flats were a few miles to the north and east, he remembered. They used to make triggers for nuclear weapons there.
“The Flats,” he said. “We just call them the Flats.” Gray Beard bent and rubbed his hand over the fabric of Eric’s sleeping bag. “You’re jackals,” he said, “but that won’t keep you safe.” Eric remembered Rabbit’s story about the little girl who called him a jackal. “What do you mean, safe?” The man smiled at him, a strained smile but an honest-seeming one that softened his face and crinkled long laugh lines from the corners of his eyes. Eric felt less threatened by him, although still frightened for Rabbit. Whatever was happening, this man was scared.
Gray Beard said, “I don’t believe the stories, but some of the others do, that Jackals are protected from the spirits in the Flats.”
“Spirits?”
The man leaned on his staff and looked past Eric to where the others had headed in their pursuit of Rabbit. “Spirits. Gods perhaps. But my parents told me the Flats were always evil, that even in the Gone Times people feared it. Not because of spirits though. Plutonium contamination.” He pronounced “plutonium contamination” a syllable at a time, as if they were foreign words. Eric wondered if he had any idea what they meant. The man continued, “Animals don’t go into the Flats. People who are stupid enough to go in get sick. Some die.”
What a strange superstition, Eric thought. “So you patrol the border, to keep people out?” Gray Beard shrugged his shoulders. “Foolish people come and go as they please until an animal eats them or they fall off cliffs. Nobody patrols the boundary. If they ignore a clear warning, who can help them?
We have been following you since you sang with the wolves.” He paused, embarrassed-looking, as if he were waiting for Eric to laugh at him. “Some of the men think you are a spirit, a manitou. Wolves carry power. To sing with them is a rare gift.”
Dodge stiffened beside when Gray Beard mentioned following them. “Bugbears, Grandpa. They’re the Bugbears.”
Eric put a hand on Dodge’s shoulder and pulled him close. “I know.” After being trailed the entire trip (and why?), after listening to Phil’s fears, actually meeting them seemed anticlimactic. They’re just men in badly made clothes, and what do they want with us?
Too many mysteries here, he thought, but he didn’t let his confusion show on his face. He remembered the first night he left Littleton—it seemed long ago, now—and howling with the wolves in the middle of the night. Their long, sturdy shadows milled around the base of the rock he slept on, and they made harmonies to the sky.
Gray Beard said, “It’s a small thing, really, I told them, but the young men see the world differently. Lots of ways you could’ve acted around the wolves, and maybe we’d have stopped you from going into the Flats anyway. No one has come so far from the Jackals in years, and you’re old—we don’t see many old ones away from their homes—but of all the things you could’ve done, you sang, so we’ve been watching. We wouldn’t want you to come this far, then have plutonium get you.” He glanced north into the brush. Eric looked too. Surely the man’s fear of Rocky Flats was unjustified, but he realized he knew nothing about how plutonium was stored. All he remembered was the incredible toxicity of the element. A millionth of a grain, less than a dust mote, on your skin would kill. When the plague hit, was the facility safely shut down? Were they even still working with plutonium? He shivered. Dodge handed Eric a coat. “You should wrap up, Grandpa,” he said. Clouds glowed on the horizon. Sunrise was a few minutes away. “How far north would be unsafe?” asked Eric as he pushed his hand into a sleeve.
Gray Beard shrugged. “A mile or two maybe. Who knows what plutonium will do? We don’t trespass.” He turned, concerned again. “It will kill him if he gets too far. I’ve seen men who’ve tried to cross. They…” He paused. “Their deaths are… ugly.” He stopped as if contemplating a bad memory. “He won’t get too far. A town boy. My men will find him soon.”
Eric thought about the way Rabbit could move in the underbrush, his preternatural speed and sense of self preservation. “Not if he doesn’t want them to,” Eric said.