The Old Man and the Wasteland. Nick Cole

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СКАЧАТЬ to scream. Then the man left his car and began running for the mountains on the far side of the road. The guards shot him. His family, his wife screaming, a wide-eyed child in the back of the car watching.

      I have not thought of that for years.

      Why would you?

      The fire popped noisily for a moment and then the deep silence of the wasteland in night settled back upon him.

      But you stopped the car here. Why?

      The windshield still held most of its dirty glass. It had spider-webbed into a blanket of crystals. But on the passenger side the windshield held a hole.

      Something was on the passenger seat and when you hit the rock that stopped you, whatever it was came out and left the hole.

      It was impossible to see what was underneath the car, but The Old Man suspected a big rock, low and jagged, had snagged the axle and stopped the vehicle dead.

      The Old Man returned to his satchel and retrieved the can of pitch. Taking a stick, he covered the end with pitch and lit it in the fire. He returned to the front of the car that lay at the top of a small hill. He turned away from the car and faced outward into the dark.

      There is always a story. To find it I need to know what happened. You are wounded. You are fleeing the cities and have become wounded. You have no plan, few supplies, and as the day progresses, as you flee burning Phoenix or forbidden Tucson, you drive off the road. The roads are a mess, refugees and Army fleeing to Yuma which will be nuked in a day or two because of its base and refugee camps. You drive off the road. You are not thinking clearly; driving too fast you are wounded and sick or hungry and you have begun to believe you will find something out here. Something that will save you. But the vehicle is running out of gas, so you keep driving to the top of ridges and small hills, racing up the sandy shale to avoid getting stuck, then looking to see if there is any refuge in sight. On this hill you race up fast. The ground on the far side was soft. Yes I felt that as I walked up. Suddenly as you gun the accelerator, you slam into the rock and out goes the one thing you managed to grab before the destruction. The car is hopelessly stuck and soon you die. Maybe you kill yourself with a pistol. But one of the countless salvagers who has wandered here has found that since, along with whatever supplies were in the trunk or back seat. Ah, a pistol and blankets and food, thinks my fellow salvager, what luck I have found good things. And he ignores the hole in the windshield. He has ignored the second rule of salvage. Be still and understand the story of what happened in this place. Quick action blinds.

      How fast were you going when you hit the rock? Fast enough that it came upon you and took you by surprise? But not so fast, since you were nearing the top. Maybe you blacked out?

      The Old Man walked outwards from the front of the car. He thought of the size of the hole and the weight of the object as he walked down the other side of the hill scanning the ground.

      Someone may have found it?

      That does not matter. You are thinking as you once thought. Telling the story first. If you find the resting place of the thing and it is gone then you have won because you thought the way you are supposed to think. Some will always lead to more. That is the first rule.

      I could wait until morning?

      Why? You will sleep badly and all night think about where to look in the morning.

      At the bottom of the hill was a dry river bed. Holding his torch down near the ground he checked the bed for ash.

      In the years after the destruction, flash floods of ash had filled the old stream beds as the snowpack of that long winter had finally come to an end.

      If the thing had fallen into the streambed then it is lost. Carried off by rivers of ash in the years since. Also most travelers use stream beds to move. They are shady, there might be water, and the rains may have collected salvage.

      So if it landed in the stream then it is as good as gone.

      Looking back to align himself with the car, he climbed up the rocky slope to the far side of the dry streambed. A few feet away he found a battered aluminum ice chest, half sunk in the mud and hidden by a mesquite tree that had grown up around its base. It was empty. Someone else had found it. Had followed the clues and found the thing in the dried mud with the broken cover.

      The chest was too light to have made the journey from passenger seat through the window down the hill and across the stream bed to land where it did. Whatever had once been inside had been heavy enough to propel it that far.

      In front of the fire, The Old Man sat cross legged and treated himself to one of the tortillas. He congratulated himself on finding the ice chest and thought little that it contained nothing. Instead he was happy that he had found it. Maybe the curse was a lie. It was he who had been lazy, easily accepting the blame of the curse. He was to blame. If so, then things were changing.

      He finished the tortilla, put more mesquite on the fire and took only a small drink of water so he did not have to pee in the night. He rolled himself in his thin blanket and was soon deep asleep. In the night when the fire was low, he awoke thinking ‘I am sleeping really well tonight’, as though he had accomplished a great thing which had eluded him for some time. Pleased, he fell asleep once more.

Chapter Four

      The next day he crossed into the dunes of the wasteland. The scrub and hard rock gave way to smooth sand pink with the rising sun. By noon the landscape faded and the pink of morning turned a blinding white.

      It was still early fall. It wasn’t as hot as it had been earlier in the year. The Old Man sipped the bottle of water, only half full now, and felt the heat more than he had expected to.

      I need to look for water. Soon I will go too far and if I don’t find anything, then even making it back to the village might be impossible.

      Maybe they are looking for me.

      In the night, toward dawn he had dreamt of the child in the backseat of the car of the screaming man the guards had shot. She was the same age of forty years ago but The Old Man was still old, even though he had been younger that long ago day than her father.

      In the dream he was back in the village. The child, who was a girl most surely, had knocked on his door. After letting her in The Old Man gave her cold water and she sat down at his desk, looking out the one window he had salvaged from an over-turned semi.

      ‘Have you been walking all night to get here?’ he remembered asking her. As if a night’s journey accounted for all the years in between that day and the dream.

      But the child remained staring out the window, lost in thought and when she turned back to The Old Man she looked at him smiling. Then she said ‘It never happened, y’know.’ In the way a child who is young can affect a certain seriousness.

      But The Old Man wasn’t sure if she meant her father being shot by the side of the freeway under the shadow of the reactors. Or something else.

      He woke with a start, and already a desert breeze was blowing across the soft blue of first morning. He rose quickly, promised himself some breakfast later and was soon away from the wreck. The dream had bothered him. And he wondered if the dream of the child and the wreck of the car weren’t the cause of it.

      Later, he felt better as he walked through a line of dunes. He was СКАЧАТЬ