Horses of the North Page 17

  The buildings and the towns that they passed by and looted of usable artifacts all sat empty, no physical trace of mankind remaining, only his creations. The streets, the buildings, all were now home only to vermin, birds and bats and those beasts for which the lesser creatures were natural prey—mustelids, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, feral cats and a few wild dogs, which last were coming more and more to resemble big coyotes with every succeeding generation, although round, mastiff heads, long, pendulous hound ears, purple-black chow tongues and tight, wiry coats still showed up here and there from time to time.

  Of course, many of these predators and others that did not frequent the deserted towns were to be found on the prairies and in the hills and washes, but their combined predations over the years seemed not to have had much if any effect upon the vast wild herds of cattle, horses, pronghorns, a scattering of bison, sheep, goats, unbelievable numbers of fat deer and even a few elk.

  Milo quickly noted that the wild cattle, sheep and goats all seemed to sport longer and bigger horns than did most of those in their driven herds. Further, two ewes slain for meat out of two different wild herds showed the beginning development of horns. With the two-legged creature called man no longer about to protect these beasts that he had so prized, they had come again to take up the job of defending themselves against the meat-hungry animals with which they shared their habitat. This task called for as many weapons as possible, as well as increases in size, strength and endurance, the lengthening of legs and the sharpening of the senses of sight, hearing and smell. These now-wild herds demonstrated faster reaction time than did their still-domesticated cousins. Cattle and goats were becoming shaggier, and the sheep seemed to be in the process of exchanging fleece for protective hair in more exposed portions.

  From everything he could see, it appeared to Milo that the hosts of nuclear doomsayers had been proved wrong with regard to elevated roentgen counts causing animals to produce monsters. Even in the environs of Denver—the ruins of which might or might not still be radioactive, but which they had studiously avoided nonetheless on general principles—all of the animals they had spied or encountered or killed seemed perfectly normal specimens. Nor were the people producing any significant numbers of abnormal births or stillbirths; quite the contrary, in fact.

  Dr. Bookerman summed it up, his opinions concerning it, at least, in a conversation by the fireside one night. "All that occurred in the wake of the War was ghastly, true, but it may have been for mankind as a whole a disguised blessing, friend Milo. With only a few notable and short-lived exceptions, man has been engaged in a shameful pollution of the racial gene pools for a century or more—allowing the worst varieties of mental and physical defectives to live and breed their blighted infirmities back into the species. On the grounds of a misguided sense of so-called 'human rights,' medical science had been put to the perverted practices of keeping alive infants that Nature would have otherwise allowed the mercy of death soon after birth; disgusting, sickening abnormalities were kept alive at staggering monetary costs in a world that was already beginning to be overcrowded, was starting to outstrip its food-production capabilities.

  "Certifiable lunatics, criminals, sociopaths were allowed to roam at will, to breed as they wished, perpetuating their unsavory kind; mankind employed selective breeding on his livestock, but seemed to consider his own species not worthy of such effort, and any person or group who suggested such a rational practice was slandered, libeled, vilified endlessly.

  "Weil, friend Milo, the death of a high degree of civilization has ended that ruinous phase of mankind's history, at least. We can be certain that only the very strongest, least genetically tainted specimens of humanity survived the plagues and hunger of the period immediately following the War, and the hordes of mental and physical defectives were most likely the first ones to die.

  "Now there no longer are softheaded bureaucrats to force those few doctors or midwives as remain to expend heroic efforts to keep alive infants better off dead. And in our existing world, at the level of human culture to which that catastrophic war has reduced us, there is scant chance of any save the mentally and physically sound surviving to the age of breeding, so we will be spared the generations after generations of genetically crippled and feebleminded and diseased which so disastrously afflicted the previous civilization.

  "With careful safeguards and controls, we now have the God-sent opportunity, my friend, of overseeing the beginning of the birth of a true Herrenvolk—a race that will one day be capable of conquering the world and fitted to rule it, as well."

  "Sieg Heil!" said Milo dryly. "You sound like a 1930s recording of Adolf Hitler, Doctor. Are you sure you weren't yourself a Nazi, before the War?"

  Watching the physician more closely than usual, Milo thought to see a start and a forced nonchalance in the reply.

  "Friend Milo, National Socialism died in the streets of Berlin in 1945, close to a century ago now. So how could I have been, eh? I was not born until 1956. Though it must have been a very exciting time to be alive . . . for a German, that is."

  "Who proceeded to make times even more exciting," added Milo, "for the Czechs, the Poles, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Norwegians and one hell of a lot of other nationalities, Doctor."

  Bookerman sighed and slowly shook his head, saying, "Ah, friend Milo, it was but another in a progression of European wars that had been fought since time immemorial, for land, for religion and, later, for politics. America really had no place in it, no reason to get involved at all. It was strictly a war by Europeans against other Europeans and none of the proper concern of the Amis. Had not the then American president Herr Rosenfeld, been so very much enamored of that Communist butcher, Herr Stalin, and pushed his nation into a position from which war against Germany was inevitable, you know, it is quite possible that the War and the subsequent near-extirpation of most of mankind would never have taken place. The Christian Bible says something about the sins of the fathers, I believe.

  "Besides, few of you Americans ever were allowed to truly understand the aims of the National Socialist German Workers Party—"

  "Six million dead Jews and gypsies, Doctor, are damned hard to misunderstand," Milo interrupted coldly.

  Bookerman's smile resembled a supercilious sneer. "Oh, come now, friend Milo, surely a man as intelligent, as rational as you have proved yourself to be did not' swallow that prize bit of Zionist propaganda entire? If so many were killed during the period of World War Two, then from whence came the hordes of Jews who suddenly appeared in Palestine, in America, in Britain and in Australia?

  "No, if you want monsters, look not to Germany and our Fuhrer, look rather at your former president's great friend and ally. Do you know that Josef Stalin had between thirty and fifty million of his own people murdered in less than fifteen years? And America's more recent ally, Communist China, under Mao Tse-tung, exterminated close to one hundred millions of Chinese and Tibetans between 1949 and 1967, These figures, of course, pale in comparison with that which was done, worldwide it would appear, thirty-odd years ago. And had Rosenfeld and Churchill and the rest of the meddlers allowed us to do that which was so necessary—scour the world clean of the Communists, the Untermenschen—none of this would ever have happened, for there would have been existing no Empire of Soviets to do it, to so destroy all of Western civilization."

  "No, Doctor, there would instead have been the hegemony of Shickelgruber's thousand-year Reich, most likely, with all its many and severe faults. It would have been akin to letting a pack of vicious, hungry wolves into the house to protect it from a prowling bear ; the price was just considered too steep to pay."

  "I am most sorry to have to say it, friend Milo, but you speak the words of a fool, a silly, soft, sentimental fool, not the realist I had taken you to be throughout all we two had experienced together these past years." The physician looked to truly be sorrowful. "I had, indeed, hoped that after all the decades of frustration, I had at last found a man of ki
ndred philosophy and belief who might be my associate in the beginning and who might then assume my mantle of . . . oh, ahh, of Fuhrerschaft, to carry on with the supervision of our folk and to our grand design of a reascension of the West. But you are only another humanistic, egalitarian fool, aren't you? Your baseless slanders against die Dritten Deutschen Reich reveal the truth: at your core of being, you are but yet another of a seemingly endless succession of narrow, visionless men, so hidebound in outmoded dogma as to be unable, unwilling to see that nothing of any importance has ever been accomplished in this world without effort, without sacrifice of the few for the future good of the many, without the sacrifice of the individuals for the good of the state and without the sacrifice of the present for the future.

  "Although it pains me to say it, I overestimated you, Milo Moray. I, who had thought that so many long years of life and experience had honed my judgment of men to near-infallibility, was wrong in your case."

  "If you'd thought that I was going to play Goring to your Hitler, Doctor, you sure as hell were wrong!" said Milo, in a blunt, no-nonsense tone. "A lot of those people you're thinking about breeding like so many dumb cattle are my people, kids I've known all of their lives. You try to impose any of that hideous Nazi crap on them, Doctor, and I'll kill you, that is a promise!

  "Are you sure you're not a good deal older than you say you are? Nazism died a richly deserved death at least ten years before you claim to have been born, so how you came to be so thoroughly inculcated with its savage, barbaric tenets bothers me more than a little . . . and when things bother me that much, then I make it my business to get to the bottom of them sooner or later, preferably sooner. Perhaps I should take you on as an urgent project, Dr. Bookerman, for my peace of mind and for the future safety of those who depend upon me, for from what you have averred here, this night, I see you as a major threat to the common liberty, if not the very survival, of these few remaining Americans."

  After that night, Milo set himself to watch the doings of Dr. Bookerman very closely, but found nothing that seemed at all out of the ordinary. The physician, his co-leader, behaved as if the conversation on that night had never occurred, treating Milo with the same respect or bonhomie as he had since they had been together. Nor was there anything new in his treatment of the second-echelon commanders—Harry Krueger, Jim Olsen and the rest—or his behavior around the lesser folk.

  The caravan of wagons, carts, riders, walkers and herds moved on slowly eastward along or closely paralleling the ancient highway. They halted often to rest the herds or to loot the empty towns, now and again setting up Olsen's forge to do necessary repairs, reshoe horses and draft oxen and mules, or where the materials were available, construct new carts to bear away the quantities of scavenged artifacts they were finding. They were in no hurry to arrive at any destination now, or to be somewhere by a certain time of the year.

  They continued to follow that crumbling highway, wandering on into the overgrown desolation that once had been called the State of Kansas, its broad prairies now given over to grasses, the beasts that fed on those grasses and the other beasts that fed on the grass-eaters. Now and again, they would chance upon traces of other humans, fairly recent traces—within a decade or so, they guessed—some of them, but most much older, probably twenty years old, possibly thirty or more. These findings were a significant disappointment to Milo, but Bookerman, the other leaders and the bulk of the people seemed not to care whether or not they were the only humans left to roam this vast land.

  Milo himself was torn between two goals. One was to try to reach some of what had been the larger centers of population along the Kansas-Missouri border, and the other was a nagging presentiment to head due south before winter caught them in some ill-protected place. In the end, however, they continued their stop-and-go snail's pace eastward, along old Interstate 70, while he salved his conscience with a plan to angle south on Interstate 135 at Salinas. But it was not to be, not that year.

  Chapter XI

  They did not reach Salinas, not that year. They were surprised by an early storm that became a blizzard, while somewhere between Dorrance and Bunker Hill, Kansas, and they halted and set up camp on the spot. And in their ill-chosen, exposed position, they very nearly froze to death before the weather blew itself out and Milo and Bookerman chivvied them, one and all, into striking camp, loading the transport, harnessing the teams, gathering the herds and moving with all possible speed farther east, to the next town, True, those buildings still standing were in poor condition after thirty-odd years of the worst the elements could offer, but at least they offered frail human flesh and bone more protection from those same elements than did thin canvas tent walls.

  When once the people were settled in, Milo began to devote serious thought to something better, more protective than the tents, but equally transportable. It was Dr. Bookerman, however, who came up with the answer.

  "Yurts, friend Milo, felt yurts are the answer to this problem. They were designed for just such weather in just such a land as is this—windy and very cold or windy and very hot."

  "Now where in the hell are we to get felt, Doctor, as much of the stuff as we'd need for the undertaking of this project, anyway? Or have you already figured out exactly how many fedoras and billiard-table tops it would take to make each family a home?" demanded Milo.

  Bookerman shrugged. "Some of it we will be able to find in the various towns and cities—more in the cities, of course—but the bulk of it we will have to fabricate ourselves. But that will not be so difficult, you'll find, not anywhere nearly as difficult as the fabrication of cloth, yet a good many of the women have learned to do that."

  Although Milo still had his doubts, within a few weeks of gathering materials, equipment and volunteers, Bookerman and his crew were actually producing a medium-weight felt from raw wool and animal hair.

  "Where in the devil did you learn to make felt?" inquired Milo.

  Bookerman allowed himself one of his rare, brief smiles and simply said, "Never you mind, friend Milo. Besides, you'd not believe me if I tried to tell you."

  With the felt production in full swing, Milo took the neat, professionally rendered sketches provided him by Bookerman and, aided by some of the cart makers, began to go about turning out the wooden frames and poles of center wheels needed to hold the felt walls and roofs of yurts. When the prototype framing was ready, he turned it over to the doctor.

  On a bitter day, with yet another blizzard clearly on the offing for their chunk of prairie, a party rode out of the tiny ruined town on horseback and on two carts to a very exposed place. There they cleared away the snow down to the frozen earth beneath the white blanket, then painfully hacked out a firepit, lined it with stones and laid the fuel for a fire therein.

  That done, the physician directed a crew of men in setting up the supports and frames, locating the doorframe, then beginning the layering of felt and canvas on roof supports and side lattices. The frame and lattices were anchored by being lashed to stakes laboriously driven deep into the frozen ground; the side felts were carefully surrounded with small boulders and chunks of concrete earlier collected.

  When once the shelter was set up and the coverings all in place, the ground inside, all around the firepit, was covered first with waterproofed canvas, then with several thicknesses of carpet. Fuel supply was stacked near the doorframe, foodstuffs, cooking utensils and bedding were brought in, along with a kerosene lamp and its fuel, some books, a folding chair and table, a five-gallon can of drinking water, some spare items of clothing and Bookerman's treasured rifle—a bolt-action Steyr-Mannlicher, stocked almost to the muzzle in some rare wood, firing 8x57mm handloaded ammo and, in his skilled hands, more than merely accurate out to chilling distances.

  With the wind picking up force by the minute, or so it seemed, the carts and riders headed back into the town at a stiff clip, leaving the doctor within the prototype yurt, by his fire, reading a book. Milo frankly wondered if they ever would see the German ag
ain with life in him, for thick as the layers of felt and canvas were, strong as were the sides and supports of carefully fitted, well-seasoned wood, heavy as were the surrounding boulders and deep as had the stakes been driven, still he wondered if the fragile-looking shelter could be proof against the wind—already, knife-edged—and the cold of the fast-approaching storm.

  The blizzard raged and howled through the streets of the town for two days, hurling snow and ice on hurricanelike gusts to punctuate the steady blast of arctic air. So bad was it out on the open prairie that the herds were brought into town where they might at least enjoy a measure of protection from the winds, although the only available food for them there was the dried weeds that had grown up here and there through the cracked concrete and macadam, the grain and hay being hoarded for the horses and mules and draft oxen.

  Nor, it was soon discovered when the storm finally blew itself out and the people forced a way out into the yards-deep drifts, were the domestic stock the only ungulates which had taken advantage of the shelter of the building walls. There were at least twoscore bison to be seen huddling with the shaggy cattle, deer, native antelope and a scattering of more exotic herbivores, a small herd of wild horses and a smaller one of burros.

  Justly fearing the bestial panic that the discharging of firearms might engender, which might cause death or injury to the intermixed domestic animals, Milo saw to it that those wild beasts harvested were taken with bows, or roped in the deep, movement-hampering snow, then dragged away to have their throats cut.

  All of the leaders worried themselves almost sick about the fate of Dr. Bookerman, way out there on the open prairie, his low-crouching little shelter unseeable from even the highest of the remaining buildings. And it was simply out of the question, just then, to try to reach him either mounted or afoot, so deep were the drifts, so frigid the air, and so threatening of a new storm was the sky. . But no fresh storm occurred that day, although it remained frigidly cold and, in the following night, dropped even lower in temperature. On the next day, however, the sun rose and the thermometers ascended to a surprising high of twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. When the wild creatures began to push through drifts and work their way out of the environs of the town, Milo and Harry Krueger decided that they could safely seek out the yurt site and see if Bookerman had survived his ordeal.