Ingolf swore admiringly and shook his head; Jose did think ahead. But then, the Tejano had been a wandering paid soldier for a long time, nearly as long as the profes sion had existed post-Change. He'd told a lot of stories, including some where the hired soldiers robbed the ones who hired them. And others where the employers were suddenly struck with the thought-after the fighting was over-that dead men didn't draw pay.
Jose's loyal to his friends, he thought. That's for damned sure.
"Let's get going," he said, lifting his saddle and blan ket off a crate stenciled to proclaim that it was full of TV remote controls, whatever those were, from South Korea, wherever the hell that was. "I want to be a long way from here by dark."
Central Illinois
October 30, CY21/2019 A.D.
The prairie's just so goddamned huge, Ingolf thought. That was the biggest thing about it: the sheer size, and around here it was nearly flat, with a roll you had to concentrate to see over an hour or so of jogging along at walk-trot-canter-trot-walk. In a generation the grasses had conquered anew the empire that the settlers' steel plows had ripped away, and the wildfires had burned out most of the remnants of house and barn and fence.
Tall grass rippled in endless green-bronze surging waves under the mild dry breeze, to a horizon infinitely distant in every direction. The sound of it was an endless sssssSSSSSSsssss, growing and then fading again as each wave went by, over and over, like ocean foam on a sandy beach. Even the noonday sun seemed to hang unchanging for a while overhead.
The scent it baked out of the grass was like lying in a haymow, but wilder and with a spicy tang to it. And there was the first hint of winter to come; it was just cool enough to be comfortable in a mail shirt with a padded gambeson beneath, but the crisp air held a hint that told you a blizzard could hit anytime from now on and leave you hip deep in snow.
The land wasn't much like the forested hills and tilled river valleys of Ingolf's home, but the weather gave him a pang of nostalgia for the long cool days of Indian sum mer along the Kickapoo. Homelike too were the geese and ducks that made ragged Vs in the afternoon sky above, their honking a lonely chorus to accompany the beat of hooves and creak of saddle leather.
He'd spent a lot of time in country like this, in Iowa and Nebraska and southern Minnesota. The only trees were clumps marking old windbreaks around farm-steads, and many of those were dead and burnt. A few maple and burr-oak saplings had taken root in breaks in the asphalt-it protected them from the fires and com petition from the grasses. This wasn't his kind of country, but it was a kind he'd ridden often enough, and that was almost a homecoming.
"Don't get overconfident," he said, sensing the growing cheer of his companions. "We're not home until we cross the Mississippi-or catch up to Jose and the guys."
Singh grunted. "If we ever do, after the way we've had to go back and forth," he said.
Which was fair enough. The last delay had been when they tried to take a shortcut and got stranded in thousands of square miles of renascent wetland the maps didn't show, before finding the trail again-you couldn't just barrel down the old interstates, not these days. This road was a guess at Jose's probable choices. Too many bridges and overpasses were out. He couldn't even rely on his second-in command taking exactly the same route back as they'd used coming out, since the local wild men would be on the lookout for that.
He could have gone farther south, to cross the Illinois where it runs north and south instead of east and west, Ingolf fretted.
This had been a secondary road in the old days, two lane blacktop, and it lay on natural high ground, running northward to cross the Illinois River and connect with old US 80, which would give a good run west to cross the Mississippi at Muscatine. The grass alongside the cracked remnants of pavement was mostly big bluestem, seven or eight feet tall in this season, where it hadn't been flattened by the weather; you had to stand in the stirrups to see over it. The heads branched out into three lobed "turkey feet" over long reddish blue stems thick as a man's little finger.
Now and then they passed the tilted, rust tattered remains of a silo or barn; a drumlike booming came from one where the breeze buckled a stretch of sheet metal like a saw flexing between two hands, echoing with lonely persistence over the empty land.
It's just as dangerous here as the East Coast, even if it isn't as spooky, he reminded himself. More so, perhaps.
The hordes from the Chicago metroplex had met those from Peoria and even East St. Louis here, and the die-off had been bad; many had been so ignorant of country life that they'd perished fighting for scraps in the shadow of grain elevators and silos still mostly full.
The children of the survivors were perhaps a bit less like two legged rats than the ones farther east; for one thing they'd been joined over the years by desperate outlaws and broken men drifting in from Iowa and north Missouri over the Mississippi. A few had taken to trading across the river in hides and furs, and most of them didn't eat human flesh anymore. That didn't mean they wouldn't rob and kill-and they had horses and bows and shetes to do it with, many of them.
A stirring in the long grass brought his bow up, but it was only a mob of feral cattle. There was no point in shooting, since they had the better part of a yearling elk across one of the packhorses. The herd crossed the old roadway eastward in a bawling, surging mass as they be came aware of the humans, their heads up in fear. Sev eral hundred went by; animals had crossed the river too, and bred back swiftly in these rich empty lands.
They'd seen plenty of deer and elk and beaver as well, and sign of catamounts and wolves, bears and tigers, even a few buffalo. These cow-beasts were lean and rangy and long of horn, but their smell was nostalgic. His father had been a great cattle breeder, and had made Readstown famous throughout the Kickapoo Valley for his Angus and Holstein studs bred up from stock… acquired… right after the Change.
Kaur came trotting back across the fields from the northwest, riding bent over so that she was invisible until she was in earshot except as a ripple in the grass. She shouted their cry-"The Villains!"-to alert them and reined in, throwing him a casual salute as she came within speaking distance. The brother and sister were ragged and filthy; everyone in the little group was, after two months of flight and occasional fight winning their way west. She and Singh still managed to look as if they were about to be inspected, somehow.
"I saw their campsite, Captain," she said.
"Good! Whereabouts are they headed?"
"The bridge is still up at Spring Valley," she said, point ing back with her bow hand. "Just go one road over; it's US 89 on the map, straight north on that. But once you're up out of the river flats and the old townsite on the north bank the land is black for a couple of miles-that was as far as I went-prairie fire. Still smoking. Jose left the 'proceeding as normal' sign at the bridge."
" Thought there'd been a fire," Ingolf said-they'd seen the smoke passing from east to west ahead of them earlier that day. "Well, we'll get through the burn fast as we can."
Not having any grain for feed cut how hard and long you could push horses, even switching off with your other mount several times a day; particularly if you wanted them to have any reserve for an emergency, when losing a horse meant losing your life. They stopped to let them graze for an hour or so. He ate some of the elk they'd cooked that morning with notable lack of enthusiasm.