As he walked quietly past the gutted buildings, Gordon wondered if he should even try to pull his “postman” hoax in the north. He remembered the little spiders and saucers, flashing in the darkness, and found it hard not to hope.
Perhaps he could give up the scam and find something real to believe in at last. Perhaps someone, at last, was leading a fight against the dark age.
It was too sweet a glimmer to let go of, but too delicate to hold tightly.
The shattered storefronts of the deserted town gave way at last to Eighteenth Avenue and the University of Oregon campus, the broad athletic field now overgrown with aspen and alder saplings, some more than twenty feet high. There, near the old gymnasium, Gordon slowed down, then stopped abruptly and held the pony still.
The animal snorted and pawed the ground as Gordon listened, and then was sure.
Somewhere, perhaps not too far away, somebody was screaming.
The faint crying crescendoed then fell away. It was a woman’s voice, soaked with pain and deadly fear. Gordon pushed back the cover of his holster and drew his revolver. Had it come from the north? The east?
He pushed into a semijungle between the university buildings, hurriedly seeking a place to go to ground. He had had an easy time of it since leaving Oakridge months ago, too easy. Obviously he had acquired bad habits. It was a miracle no one had heard him, traipsing down these deserted streets as if he owned them.
He led the pony through a gaping door in the side of a slate-sided gymnasium, and tethered the animal behind a fold-down stand of bleachers. Gordon dropped a pile of oats near the animal, but left the saddle in place and cinched.
Now what? Do we wait it out? Or do we check it out?
Gordon unwrapped his bow and quiver and set the string. In the rain they were probably more reliable, and certainly quieter than his carbine or revolver.
He stuffed one of the bulging mail sacks into a ventilation shaft, well out of sight. As he was searching for a place to hide the other, he suddenly realized what he was doing.
He grinned ironically at his momentary foolishness and left the second bag lying on the floor as he set off to find the trouble.
The sounds came from a brick building just ahead, one whose long bank of glass windows still gleamed. Apparently looters hadn’t even thought the place worth bothering with. Now Gordon could hear faint, muttered voices, the soft nickering of horses, and the creaking of tack. Seeing no watchers at the roofs or windows, he dashed across the overgrown lawn and up a broad flight of concrete steps, flattening against a doorway around the corner of the building. He breathed open-mouthed for silence.
The door bore an ancient, rusted padlock and an engraved plastic sign.
The voices came from just within… though too muffled to make out anything distinct. An outside stairway led up to several floors overhead. He stepped back and saw that a door lay ajar three flights up.
Gordon knew he was being a fool once again. Now that he had the trouble located, he really should go collect his pony and get the hell out of there, as quickly as possible.
The voices within grew angry. Through the crack in the door he heard a blow being struck. A woman’s cry of pain was followed by coarse male laughter.
Sighing softly at the flaw in his character that kept him there — instead of running away as anyone with any brains would do — Gordon started climbing the concrete stair, careful not to make a sound.
Rot and mold covered an area just within the half-open doorway. But beyond that the fourth floor of the student center looked untouched. Miraculously, none of the glass panes in the great skylight had been smashed, though the copper frame wore a patina of verdigris. Under the atrium’s pale glow a carpeted ramp spiraled downward, connecting each floor.
As Gordon cautiously approached the open center of the building, it felt momentarily as if he had stepped backward in time. Looters had left the student organization offices — with their passionate tornadoes of paper — completely untouched. Bulletin boards were still plastered with age-dimmed announcements of sporting events, variety shows, political rallies.
Only at the far end were there a few notices in bright red, having to do with the emergency — the final crisis that had struck almost without warning, bringing it all to an end. Otherwise, the clutter was homey, radical, enthusiastic …
Young …
Gordon hurried past and skirted down the spiraling ramp toward the voices below.
A second floor balcony extended out over the main lobby. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way.
On the north side of the building, to the right, part of the two-story glass facing had been shattered to make room for a pair of large wagons. Steam rose from six horses tethered over by the west wall, behind a row of dark pinball machines.
Outside, amid the broken glass shards, the sulking rain created spreading pink pools around four sprawled bodies, recently cut down by automatic weapons fire. Only one of the victims had even managed to draw a sidearm during the ambush. His pistol lay in a puddle, inches from a motionless hand.
The voices came from his left, where the balcony made a turn. Gordon crawled cautiously forward and looked out over the other part of the L-shaped room.
Several ceiling-high mirrors remained along the west wall, giving Gordon a wide view of the floor below. A blaze of smashed furniture crackled in a large fireplace between the reflecting panes.
He hugged the moldy carpet and lifted his head just enough to see four heavily-armed men arguing by the fire. A fifth lounged on a couch over to the left, his automatic rifle aimed idly at a pair of prisoners — a boy of about nine years and a young woman.
Red weals on her face matched the pattern of a man’s hand. Her brown hair was matted and she held the boy close, watching her captors warily. Neither prisoner seemed to have any energy left for tears.
The bearded men were all garbed in, one-piece prewar army surplus outfits in green, brown, and gray-speckled camouflage. Each wore one or more gold earrings in his left ear lobe.
Survivalists. Gordon felt a wave of revulsion.
Once upon a time, before the War, the word had had several meanings, ranging from common sense, community-conscious preparedness all the way to antisocial paranoid gun nuts. By one way of looking at things, perhaps Gordon himself could be called a “survivalist.” But it was the latter connotation that had stuck, after the ruin the worst sort had caused.
Everywhere he had gone in his travels, folk shared this reaction. More than the Enemy, whose bombs and germs had wrought such destruction during the One-Week War, the people in nearly every wrecked county and hamlet blamed these macho outlaws for the terrible troubles that led to the final Fall.
And worst of all had been the followers of Nathan Holn, may he rot in Hell.
But there weren’t supposed to be any survivalists anymore in the valley of the Willamette! In Cottage Grove, Gordon had been told that the last big bunch had been driven south of Roseburg years ago, into the wilderness of the Rogue River country!
What were these devils doing here, then? He moved a little closer and listened.
“I dunno, Strike Leader. I don’t think we oughta go any deeper on this recon. We’ve already had enough surprises with this ‘Cyclops’ thing the bird here let slip about, before she clammed up. I say we oughta head back to the boats at Site Bravo and report what we found.”