Why am I acting this way? She’ll think I’m a fool. Dad’s fine. I’ll find Dad and everything will be like it was. We’ll live in the house. We’ll play catch. He’ll teach me new bird calls. Dad’s okay.
“No, it’s all right,” she said. “I believe you.” Her arms were around him and they were both sitting on the ground. She rocked him quietly while he shook in her arms.
After a long while, after he had quit sobbing and the muscles in his back relaxed, she still held him. He felt her chin resting on the top of his head.
“Look at that,” she said.
He lifted his head and blinked away tears. “What?”
They were sitting near another broken tree trunk. The trunk itself leaned and roots hung in the air on one side, clods of dirt still clinging to them.
“Sticking in the wood.”
He followed her finger. Protruding from the tree trunk, four inches or so of silver glittered in the sun. He pushed himself off the ground, then pulled on the metal.
“Jammed in there pretty tight.” He worked it back and forth several times before it pulled out. He held it to her. “A spoon. What would do that to a spoon? You couldn’t do that without bending it.” Taking it from him, Leda turned it over in her hand. “A tornado,” she said. “That’s what it was.” He gazed at the scene of destruction, and it seemed familiar, like news footage he’d seen before. “You’re right. Only thing it could be.”
“They skip,” she said. “They touch down, destroy everything, lift, then touch down again.”
“Darned regular. I’ve never heard of one leaving a trail.” “Strange storms. Leave some stuff, ruin others. If anything’s unusual, it’s how much it destroyed. Colorado tornadoes are generally narrower than this.” She gestured to the block-wide path.
“A year ago,” Eric said, “this would be the top story. Denver would be cleaning itself up. It’d be in mourning.”
She dropped the spoon. “Small potatoes, now, a tornado.” He smiled. It was incredibly hard to make that movement with his face. The muscles felt weighed down from frowning. “Does a house falling in a city make a noise if there is no one to hear it?”
“Come on,” she said, “let’s find some food. I’m starving.”
“I’m sure we’ll catch up with Dad soon,” said Eric. “He’ll be glad to meet you.” She didn’t say anything, and Eric glanced at her. “Sure,” she said, “I’ll bet he will be.”
Chapter Thirteen
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Teach said, “Keep your hands underneath you. Don’t look up. Don’t separate your feet. Be a rock, and that’s what they’ll see.”
Eric scrunched his face into the gravel on the hillside above the road. The rest of Teach’s boys had scattered, and when he’d last looked, he could only pick out a couple of them in the same posture he was taking now, folded on themselves, faces down, practically invisible. Their leather skirts and wool shirts blended perfectly into the background.
“Where’s Rabbit and Dodge?” Eric whispered.
“They’re okay. Don’t move and you’ll be fine. Unless they’re expecting to see something, they won’t.” Teach broke a branch off a nearby juniper and jammed it into the ground by Eric’s head. He braced the bottom with a couple of rocks. “There, that’ll give them something to focus on if they do look this way.” Teach climbed a few feet up the slope and lay down, hands underneath him, feet drawn up, the back of his gray-haired head to Eric.
Eric pulled his limbs in even tighter; his back crawled under the heat of the sun. A bit of sand he’d sucked up when he put his face in the dirt gritted uncomfortably between his teeth, and chunks of gravel dug into his cheek, but he didn’t move. They’ll be able to see me, he thought. I might as well stand and shout. Before the point-man had whistled the warning that sent them scrambling for cover above the road, they had been walking up-canyon, crossing a slide that hid the asphalt for hundreds of yards, Eric was hiking gamely, trying not to slow the pace. Teach said, “You’ve got two problems.” Eric panted, put a foot on a stone, placed his hand on his knee and pressed to help himself up. One of Teach’s boys carried Eric’s pack, but even without the extra weight, the soreness in his legs and the incessant buzz of pain in his hips reminded him of his age. “What’s that?” he said. The mountain air smelled of pine and creek water, of sun on hot rocks, but it didn’t fill the lungs.
“First one’s easy, but important. Our last Gone Timer died seven years ago, and most of the young ones haven’t heard about Gone Time from someone who’s seen it. So you’re the featured speaker at the town talk-around tonight.”
“Okay.” Eric almost did a skip step but didn’t. The dirt and sand footing was slippery. “You want to hear old Gone Time stories?” Nobody in Littleton listened to him. The kids would gather at the hunters’ feet and wait for each word about finding elk or killing a bear, but when Eric said anything about Gone Time, they ran off, except for Dodge and Rabbit.
Eric looked for them. He spotted the dark-haired Dodge on the black-top beyond the slide. Rabbit walked in the tall grass on the road’s shoulder, as always looking as if he were ready to bolt. “I can do that.”
“Talking might not be that easy. We’ve got a girl up there—name’s Ripple, a kind of, I don’t know, child prodigy—she’s got some strong ideas about Gone Time. You can bet she’ll ask some tough ones. Might have some things to say of her own. She was my best pupil, but she left me behind years ago.”
“I’ll watch myself. What’s the other problem?”
“Getting you into Boulder. The roads aren’t safe.” Teach offered Eric a firm, hard hand and helped him over a slippery patch of gravel.
“You said the Flats weren’t safe either. More radiation?” He stepped thankfully off the uneven surface of the slide onto the flat road. Here and there, portions of the double-yellow line were still visible on the pavement. Been a while since a car had to worry about oncoming traffic here, he thought. The long stretch of highway curved in between pine-covered hills a half-mile away.
“Nope. Federal’s gunmen.” Teach fell into pace beside him. Eric sighed a little to himself; the bigger man visibly shortened his stride to accommodate him. “Your library may or may not be standing, but there’s a guy who calls himself ‘Federal’ or ‘The Federal’ who thinks something’s valuable in Boulder, and he’s got the roads.”
“Really? Guns? I haven’t seen a working one for years.”
Teach grinned at him, his gray-flecked beard fanning out beneath the smile. “Neither had I. My dad kept a rifle, but he was down to just four boxes of ammo. Took it off the wall on his birthday and would fire one shot. Never did tell me why he did that. But the last year, it took six tries to get a shell that’d work, and it sound pathetic; hardly an explosion at all. Mostly smoke. Dad said the shells had gone gunny-bag, said there wasn’t much ammo anyway, so I’d better learn how to make arrows.” Eric stretched his gait a bit; the extra effort felt good. He thought, at least I’m not hobbling. “What kind of guns?”
“Don’t know, but one of my men has one.” He chuckled. “Federal’s boys aren’t all that bright. One of them shot up a couple of deer and didn’t notice Skylar sitting in a tree. Walked right under him, and Skylar dropped a water skin on his head. He got the gun and a good knife off him, and the guy probably woke up an hour later with a sore neck and a lot of explaining to do. But bright or not, they’ve set up camps on the roads into Boulder. Sometimes we hear shooting.”