This Old Man

Steven Popkes

The roar of the spring birds woke me up. Every morning for two weeks in April, the birds returning north scream, yell, and mutter to each other in the mulberry tree outside my window. Not that they’re quiet at night; just less vocal.

I stood up, lost my balance, and sat back down again. It’s a spring curse on the stumbling, bleary-eyed, and sleepless. I stood up again and leaned against the window, threw it open. An explosion of wings and a brief moment of peace as a couple of thousand birds vacated my windowsill for another part of the tree. I stared up at them. They stared back at me.

Raib, my elder brother, was oblivious to the birds, the sun, or the window. It had been his night off, and he’d spent it night-fishing—a euphemism for sitting around the campfire drinking corn whisky and singing. He was well-liked, my brother, for his dancing and his singing, neither of which I can do.

I shook him. “Wake up. It’s morning.”

He shook his head and pulled the blanket over his head. “Go away, Lem. I was up late last night with King Leo’s men.” He groaned. “Now, they know how to put it away!”

I kicked his foot under the covers and he pulled the pillow over his head. I let him be. He’d be awake by noon and presentable by six when he went on duty. I was always proud of my brother. He was smarter than me. Mouser, my cat, was sitting on the windowsill and extremely interested in the birds outside. I whistled at him and opened the door and he jumped down and ran outside. He was too old to catch any birds, but the birds didn’t know that. Maybe they’d leave.

I was more awake now and dressed myself quickly. Old Man Hibbert would be expecting me soon. Pants, shirt, jacket. Belly gun and knife. Glock in the small of my back and the brass knuckles in my pocket, and I was ready to go downstairs.

A little about the farm: it was Old Man Hibbert’s. The rest of us just lived on it. My brother brought me here when I was two. He was twelve. I don’t remember it; I’m twenty now and all of my memories are on the farm. My first real memory is Old Man Hibbert taking care of my cat. I might have been four or so.

Our parents had been killed by bandits out near Martinsburg, and we almost starved to death before we got here. We weren’t the only ones; there are a lot of people living here that owe their lives to the old man. Others were born here. It’s a little village of a farm, with a couple of hundred people over ten or twelve square miles of woods, cropland, and greenhouses. Raib calls it a little piece of civilization in an otherwise uncharted wilderness, but that’s the way he likes to talk.

Across the woods to the Southwest is Fulton, the only town of any size for miles. The old man has some men staked out to protect the library there.

There are a few other little villages nearby that we’re friendly with, some individual families living in the bush, and King Leo’s spread to the North. We’re pretty much self-sufficient, and if we can’t build it or grow it, we can trade for it in Fulton. Old Man Hibbert says he picked out this place very, very carefully, back before things went south. He likes to say he didn’t do too bad for somebody his age. It’s not ancient Sumer, like where he grew up, but it’ll do. The old man likes to make jokes like that. They’re irritating, but, after a while, you can ignore them.

Raib sat up and stared at me blankly. “Ask him how old he really is.”

“Beg pardon?” I turned back from the door.

“Something King Leo’s men said last night. I want to know. How long ago was Sumer, anyway?” Then he rolled over, back to sleep.

I shrugged. My brother got, well, notions sometimes.

I realized I was late when I passed the kitchen, so I grabbed some cheese and choked it down on the way to the kennels. That’s where Old Man Hibbert spent the early part of every morning, working with the dogs.

I came to the edge of the main courtyard and stopped. He was wearing nothing but shorts and a shirt, buried five- or six-deep in dogs. There were perhaps twenty dogs total, the idle ones sitting at attention, watching him intently. Every last one of those animals had already placed, identified, and dismissed me before I turned the corner. I stayed put out of the way. I didn’t want to distract them. I’d seen once what one of Old Man Hibbert’s hundred-eighty-pound dogs could do to a man.

He finished playing with that batch and sent them back to the line, then played with the next batch, and so on, until he was done letting them all know they were loved. Then he put them through their paces. Today, he was working on hunting exercises. The old man used odd words in different languages, whistles, and hand signs, to control the dogs. We could all put them through normal commands: sit, stay, and the like. But only Hibbert and the handlers used the specialty commands. Some commands were known only to the old man and nobody knew what they were. For my part, I’d be just as happy to never know, since, as I’d said before, I’d seen what they could do.

I watched him, and watched the courtyard. My job’s a combination of bodyguard and adjutant. I’m called the izquierda. It’s Spanish for “left,” short for “left hand,” I think. There’s almost always been an izquierda with Old Man Hibbert, ever since he started this place several generations back. The first izquierda came from a Spanish family, a woman by the name of Ranquiz, and I suppose the name stuck.

Right now, I just stood with my hand on my gun and waited for him to finish. Being Old Man Hibbert’s bodyguard is kind of like protecting a shark; you wonder why it’s necessary since his teeth are so much bigger than yours. Still, it’s a job, it’s what he wants, and, as old as he is, he knows more than I do.

Finally, he finished and lined up the dogs. They stood unmoving for perhaps a minute as he brought over the handlers and gave them instruction: Put Ansermet in with Suisse, he’s getting tired of being with Murdock. Take Murdock and put him with Elijah and put Van Der Waals by herself: she’s coming into heat next week. Then he gestured and they walked off toward the kennel with the handlers. He watched them intently but gestured for me to join him.

“How do you know what’s going on with them?” I asked.

One of them, a copper-colored bitch, glanced at him as she passed.

Instantly, he called out. “Bruno? Come here, girl.”

She broke ranks and came over, dancing with excitement. I actually liked Bruno a great deal. She grinned up at me and slobbered over my pant leg. I grinned back and scratched her ears. Bruno had the kind of personality that, if she were human, she’d always want to have the last word and her charm would make you like it.

“Good girl,” he said softly, petting her. “I know dogs, Lem. That’s all. What’s on schedule today?”

“You tell me, sir.”

It’s funny, Old Man Hibbert only comes up to my shoulders. He’s as thin as a knife, and even the dogs outweigh him by fifty pounds. But he’s always in charge. He has this authority that people react to without thinking. If he suggested we pick up toothpicks and take out after a wolf, I bet we’d be halfway out of the compound before we had second thoughts.

“Reading class this afternoon, of course,” he said musingly. “Fancy a walk with me, Lem?” Then, he gave me an odd tender look.

The look flustered me. I didn’t know what it meant and I felt embarrassed without knowing why. Then, I realized what he’d said. I smiled thinly and said yes but inside I was swearing. A walk. That meant somewhere, just him and me, with me going cross-eyed every minute watching out for him.

He smiled back at me and I knew, instantly, that he had seen every curse, thought, and irritation as clearly as if I had spoken them aloud. It was ludicrous to be so transparent, and I found myself laughing. He chuckled with me and patted me on the shoulder. I felt as proud as if I’d done something clever.

oOo

As we walked out of the courtyard, he stopped at the sundial. He moved the stones a bit and turned to me: “What’s the date?”

I knew the date: April 5, 2260. You could tell that much by the way the stones were set down. But that’s not what he wanted. He wanted me to read that date in the way he’d arranged the stones into letters and numbers. I tried, like I do every time he does this. I could make out the numbers. I could even see the letters a little bit. But just when they started to go together everything fuzzed out and all I could see were bars and shapes. I had faith that Old Man Hibbert wasn’t lying to me; that there really were words there. But I’d never been able to see them.

It’s like this: in the back time, a hundred and fifty years ago, a bunch of idiots released a plague that made everybody unable to read. For some reason or another, it didn’t die down like a plague should have, and people still can’t read. That’s as much as I know about it. Here in modern times, Old Man Hibbert can still read, even if the rest of us can’t. Of course, he’s different in a lot of ways. As long as he’s been here, he’s been trying to teach people to read. He just keeps at it, trying different ways, even though it never works.

“I can’t read it, sir.”

He shrugged and smiled at me. “Have to keep trying, eh? Maybe the kids will have more luck this afternoon. Let’s get on with it.” He turned to Bruno and whistled a flat sound, she heeled next to him, and we left the compound.

oOo

The walk turned out to be over the north trail to King Leo’s farm. This wasn’t much to my liking, since Leo didn’t exactly have our best interests at heart. He had his own problems, even though he was born here in the compound. But what can you do? The old man goes where he wants to go. He was wearing a small backpack, and that made me wonder how long we were going to be gone.

I had not seen Leo in three years. Not closely, anyway. I mean, both the old man and King Leo hold a harvest festival together in the fall every year. It was good politics, I expect, to tie the two farms together.

But the only time I’d ever really seen him, up close and personal, was when he came over to help with the search for the Kingdom City Man.

We never caught him. We never even saw him. The Kingdom City Man started by stopping girls in the forest and snatching something from them. A blue sash from one girl, a pair of gloves from another. He was so quick and chose so carefully, the girls could never identify him. Pretty soon, nobody was going out in the woods at all unless they were in three’s or four’s, or were all men. Nothing happened for a week or two.

Then, one night, he came out of the woods and took Essie Fleming from right under our noses. Over a week, we trailed him for miles, and he danced us around and we lost him, time and again. Then, somebody would find a piece of cloth or a shoe or a lock of hair, placed carefully so that it would be found, and the whole thing would commence again.

Two weeks after he took her, they found Essie, dead. Maybe raped, too, for all I knew, but Essie’s family wouldn’t talk about it and I never had the heart to ask anybody. She had been cut up after she’d died, and was missing the red hat she’d had when she’d been taken.

Leo had come over, grim and tall, dark as a new moon, and with hands the size of dinner plates. He looked like he’d throttle the murderer himself if he could catch him. It was the only time I’d ever seen Old Man Hibbert angry, either. Leo was mad that anybody would do this to his people or him. But Hibbert blamed himself for everything.

It wasn’t like Essie was a part of his family. He had no family. I’d heard enough stories by that point. How he’d outlived any family he might have had, how he’d foreseen what was going to happen and built a homestead and then protected everybody like they were his own. But these were just stories. To me, that night, he was still the nice old man who had cured my cat. I was sixteen by then but to me that was the thing about him that meant the most.

Watching them work together, leading the search parties, following tracks that disappeared into thin air, was like watching a sword work with a knife. It was then I decided that I wanted to work for Hibbert, personally. Maybe Raib did, too, since it was in that bad time that he joined up with Hibbert’s guard. I didn’t plan to be izquierda; it just turned out that way.

The north trail goes along Richland Creek for a ways, then over the bluff. We talked some on the way. He asked about my brother. I talked about him. We talked about the goings-on of the farm, too, how it had seemed it might be too wet for spring plowing, but that the recent dry weather had been a blessing, and how Johnson had heard what he thought might be wild dogs or wolves. Then, we reached the bluff. It’s a high point, and we could see East down into the old man’s compound and north toward King Leo’s place. The old man stopped and looked around, so I did, too. The sweet breeze came up from the woods and the stream. The early smell of spring rot had gone and been replaced by the new scent of growing leaves and buds. In a week or so, the first wildflowers would spill up and over the banks of the creek.

I liked looking at the compound. You could see the house, the barn and meeting house, and the greenhouses, laid out clean and straight, and, behind them, the goat pens and the fields. I could see Larry hitching up a couple of horses. That meant that he was getting ready to plow. I shook my head and wished he could hold off for another couple of weeks. It just gave the birds outside my window another excuse to stay.

King Leo’s place was laid out differently. He had more people living there, and the fields were bigger. But everything was packed tighter together, less like a home and more like a camp.

“He’s building an army,” said the old man.

“An army?”

“Oh, he’s got a lot of families and children. Just like we do.” He pointed at two long buildings. “Those are barracks. Communal dwellings for single men. Leo must be forty by now.” Hibbert shook his head. “He’s going to be difficult one of these days.”

“He grew up in the compound,” I said. “Will he be trouble? Is he going to attack us?”

“He was born here.” Hibbert nodded. “I remember the night. He was the izquierda before you were. I didn’t have another one for years until you came along.” He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “I helped set him up over there. No one else wanted that spot of land, but he made it happen. A man can do a lot with just force of will. But things are different now.” He pointed past Leo’s place to the Northwest. “Up that way is the Emperor of Mexico. I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard tales.” He pointed northeast. “About forty miles up that way is Hannibal, and I do know him.” Hibbert fell silent. “Well, let’s just say that Leo has reasons to build an army. One of these days, he’s going to want my help.”

“What’ll you do then?”

Hibbert shrugged. “Decide whether or not to help him.” Then, he gave me another look that I didn’t understand; as if he were trying to tell me something.

oOo

A little ways before the border guards, Hibbert made a complex hand motion and said something guttural. It could have been in some kind of language; it could have been just a sound. I had no idea. But Bruno dropped low and took off like a silent gunshot into the brush.

We came through the trees, and two of Leo’s guards were watching us. One of them held a crossbow on us. I don’t know what Raib saw in them. They looked oversized and hungry, like the best news they could get all day would be a fight. I left the exposed holster at my hip alone. Wouldn’t do to let them see me interested in that. Instead, I eased the one on my back and held my arms away from my side. It wasn’t much comfort against a crossbow. The tree behind me would be wearing my kidneys before I ever got the gun out.

Hibbert gave them a big smile. “Gentlemen. I’m Sidney Hibbert. I’ve come to see Leo.”

“Hear that, Kevin?” said the big one holding the crossbow. “Old Man Hibbert’s come to see the King. Should we let him in?”

“Come on, Joey,” said Kevin. “We could get in trouble.”

“Might be a good idea to listen to your friend, son,” Hibbert said, holding his hands up and palm out. “I’d surely hate to see something happen to you.” He didn’t take his eyes off the man’s hands.

“I bet,” said Joey, licking his lips. These were the moments I had nightmares about.

Old Man Hibbert clinched his hands like they were tired, and smiled apologetically. Then, nearly two hundred pounds of dog flesh leaped silently from the brush and caught Joey’s hands as easily as playing dominoes. The crossbow sang and I heard a solid sound behind me. I went down and rolled like Hibbert had taught me and came up with my gun out and trained on the two of them. I was surprised to find myself trembling and enraged. I swear if either of them had said a word, I would have killed them.

Then, I felt Hibbert’s hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right, Lem. I’m unhurt.”

I drew a deep breath. “Yeah,” I whispered.

Bruno had Joey on the ground, both arms in her mouth. She saw me to one side and wagged her tail. Joey tried to pull his arms free but Bruno growled and tightened her jaw. I saw a thin trickle of blood coming down Joey’s wrist.

Hibbert picked up Joey’s crossbow and took Kevin’s. “Bruno, let the nice man up.” Bruno let Joey go and backed up next to Hibbert. “Gentlemen, you can stay here with Bruno for a moment. Lem and I can find our own way.”

He motioned me to holster my weapon—which I did unwillingly—and follow him. “Keep your back to them.”

I followed him. “Sir. At least let me have my gun.”

“No, Lem. This is important. Besides,” he looked at me with a faint smile. “You don’t think Bruno can take care of herself ?”

It dawned on me, then. “You staged that.”

“I took advantage of available material. Joey is one of a handful of people that thinks Leo should turn on us. Now, he’s lost credibility.”

“You’ve got spies in here? Did you wait until Joey was on guard today?”

“Of course not. I’ve never met the boy.”

“Then, how did you know?”

He gave me that knowing look again, sad and thoughtful. “I know people, Lemuel. That’s all.”

At the foot of the gate to Leo’s compound, Hibbert whistled. Seconds later, Bruno joined us, and we entered.

oOo

Leo looked older. His hair had gone gray in the last year, and it brought out the dark of his eyes and the sharpness of his cheekbones. He was standing next to a table, half-leaning on it, half-sitting. He looked up as we entered.

“Ah, Sid,” he said sarcastically. “I should have expected you to show up. Good intuition, no doubt.”

“It seemed time for me to come over and see you,” Hibbert said neutrally.

Leo nodded. “Close the door.”

I closed it. Leo sat in a chair slumped over. “Anybody talk to you coming in?”

“Kevin and Joey. The two guards. Joey and I had a disagreement.”

Leo chuckled and rubbed his face. “I bet you did. I’m sure you made him look good.”

“What’s going on, Leo?”

“A sixteen year old girl was discovered dead in her room just last night. Looks like she was dragged to her bed—there was blood on the window and in a path. The path, of course, disappeared a hundred yards away. The girl had last been seen with a bright red scarf. The scarf was missing when we found the body.” He looked up at Hibbert. “He’s back, Sid. The Kingdom City Man is back.”

I felt cold. I remembered the horror of those few weeks, going to bed not knowing who might be taken that night and finding only a reprieve the next day when we did head counts.

Leo leaned back against the table. He held his hands in the air. “I don’t know what to do. Should we bring everybody inside the walls? It’s spring. If we don’t plow and plant, we don’t eat next winter.” He pointed at Hibbert sharply. “Not all of us have a twenty year food store.”

Hibbert nodded distractedly. “No. Can you keep it quiet for a couple of days? I want to look into some things.”

“Right.” Leo sounded disgusted. “Don’t trust him, boy. The only thing on his mind is to keep on living.”

“I’ll be back, Leo,” said Hibbert, ignoring him. “Come on, Lem.”

oOo

We went back the way we had come. Kevin and Joey were gone, replaced by two hulking and sullen men. I got the feeling they didn’t much care who we were as long as we didn’t bother them, and I was keen on not bothering them.

Back in the woods, the old man just walked silently, clearly angry. He stopped on the top of the bluff, looking around tiredly. Then, he sat down on the ledge.

“Shit,” he said. “Just shit.”

“Sir?” I was surprised. The old man didn’t usually talk that way.

The old man looked up at me and shook his head. “Just an old man talking. Sumer was never like this.” He dropped his gaze and rubbed his neck.

In the silence, I thought about the meeting between Leo and Hibbert. I remembered Leo saying the only thing on the old man’s mind was to keep on living. It made me remember Raib’s question.

“Sir? When was Sumer, anyway?”

“A long time ago.”

“How long?”

He looked up at me again. This time his eyes were cold and wary. “Why do you want to know?”

I looked away and stammered. “I’m sorry. I was just curious. My brother—”

“Ah,” he said quietly. “Raib wanted to know, eh?”

“I’m curious, too. I just never thought of it until he asked me.”

He nodded. “5300 BC,” he said distractedly.

“Beg pardon?”

He stood up. “5300 BC. ‘BC’ means ‘before Christ.’ Remember the date? April 5, 2260. And 2260 is 2260 AD, which means after Christ but only looks absurd to me since I’m the only one anymore that can read the letters. The sum of 5300 and 2260 is 7560, so I’m seven thousand, five hundred and sixty years old.” He stretched his back. “Of course, the dates are approximate; when I finally got around to going out on the digs myself, even I couldn’t tell exactly what period of Sumerian culture I was born in. I remember forests and farms and cool, wet springs. The digs were in the middle of the desert.” He waved his hand. “All gone. Anyway, mustn’t grumble. There, does that answer Raib’s question?”

I was stunned. Whatever took away our ability to read didn’t take away our understanding of numbers. I knew what hundreds and thousands were. But in years—

“I can’t imagine that,” I said finally. “I can’t keep it in my mind. Nothing lives that long, does it?”

The old man laughed. “Just me and a couple of bristlecone pines, last I checked.” He looked at me speculatively. “Come on. I’ll show you a secret.”

We walked down over by Hunter’s Cave. He stopped and looked around.

I was nervous. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the old man’s secrets. “Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe there’s somebody around here.”

Hibbert shook his head. “Look at Bruno. She would have picked up somebody quick as winking.”

The idea of his age was beginning to sink in. “How long have you worked with dogs, then?”

He walked around one particularly large boulder. “Oh, I worked with animals since I was a kid. I started working with Bruno’s bloodline a few years before I started this place. May close it down, soon. They’re about played out.”

“Played out?”

“You can only push a dog bloodline so far.” He started hoisting himself up the boulder. “After that, it starts getting too inbred. I figure I’ll start trading the animals out soon enough. Let them breed back into the general population of dogs. Then, in fifty or sixty years, I’ll hunt them down and see what turns up.”

I always knew the old man was special—after all, he had outlived everybody else. Now, I was wondering just how special he was. “Oh.” I just couldn’t think the way he did. “Bruno, too?”

“No.” He looked at me. “No. I think I’ll keep Bruno.”

Inside, the cave was damp and cold. It opened into a small chamber, and then turned straight back maybe sixty or seventy feet and was lost in darkness. A frigid stream ran down the middle of the passage. The old man led me away from the entrance. The shelf of sand on either side of the stream melted away until we were walking, bent over, through the water, bare rock on all sides of us. The stream deepened and turned under a ledge as the roof rose above us. The chamber ended in an alcove with a sand floor. Hibbert walked out of the water onto the tiny beach and stood looking around in the dimness. He rummaged in his pack and pulled out a flashlight.

I was startled. Flashlights were irreplaceable and were supposed to stay inside the compound.

“Larry’s going to be pissed that you have that,” I said quietly.

Hibbert laughed and played the light across the roof of the chamber without answering. After a minute or two he seemed satisfied. He rummaged in his pack again.

“Take your clothes off and put this on.” He tossed me a bundle of cloth and then started unbuttoning his shirt.

It was a coverall of some sort, made of a thin rubbery material. I had a bad feeling about this. “That water’s cold.”

“Deep, too,” Hibbert said as he started pulling on his coverall. “Good thing I taught you to swim when you were a kid.”

Slowly, I pulled the coverall on. It was very comfortable but it fit tightly.

“The stream dips underneath the ledge in a tight squeeze then opens into a small lake,” continued Hibbert. “Come up as quick as you can and listen. There’s a waterfall at the other end that will hurt you if you get caught up in it.”

I zipped up the front. It was quite warm. “Why are we doing this?”

“Don’t you want to know a secret?” He grinned at me.

“I’m not sure I want to know anything quite this badly.”

“Come on. It’ll be fun.”

With that, he jumped into the water. In a moment, he was gone.

I stared at the water. Was this some sort of test? What did he want from me? I had no idea on either count. After a long minute staring at the surface of the water, I did what I had done for years: I followed him.

oOo

The water couldn’t have been much over freezing. Where the coverall protected my skin, it wasn’t too bad, but my feet turned into dull, aching wood almost instantly and my head felt like cold spikes had been driven in both my ears. I could see his light shining through the opening. The opening didn’t look big enough, but it was, barely. I followed the light up to the surface, and he was treading water, waiting for me.

“Hear that?” he yelled when I broke the surface.

A roar filled the air. “Yes,” I yelled back.

“Spring rain. The lake is deeper than usual and so is the waterfall. Don’t go toward the noise.”

“Don’t worry.”

We swam along the wall, no light but his flashlight. It occurred to me that if he lost that flashlight, we were lost as well. Hibbert might have been able to get out of that place, but I was pretty sure I couldn’t.

Then, he took a deep breath and disappeared under the water. Everything went pitch black. Not normal night black but total darkness. Like the world behind your eyeballs. Like being blinded. Like forgetting your name or your past.

“Uh oh,” I said softly in the echoing darkness. There was only the muted roar at the end of the lake and the steady drip of water from the ceiling. I held my hand against the wall to make sure I didn’t drift around.

Then, below me, a light. I didn’t think. I dove down underwater after it.

oOo

The river had cut out the rock at the edge of the lake and made the wall where I had been clinging to an overhang. The light shone down from a hole in the rock ceiling above me. I broke water and wiped my eyes. The light came from a solitary fixture above a fairly large room. I grabbed the metal loop at the edge of the hole and pulled myself up. I rubbed my hands together and then rubbed my feet. After a minute or two, I could feel a little circulation coming back to them. I called out.

“Back here, Lem.”

This part of the room was filled with tall metal cabinets. Each door was perhaps a foot across, with writing I couldn’t read across the front. I followed his voice. Behind the narrow cabinets were more cabinets. These were just as tall, but with wider doors and more writing.

Behind those was the rock wall, studded with lights and dials.

“Sit down over there,” Hibbert ordered. “I’m checking some things.”

“What is this place?”

“About ten minutes from detonation if you don’t shut up.”

There were a couple of chairs against the wall. I shut up and sat down. He pressed some more buttons and checked the dials. Then, he relaxed.

“That’s a relief,” he said and waved at the lights. “I have to come here often enough to remember how to reset the explosives, but not so often that anybody can figure out what I’m doing.”

“Detonation?”

“A bomb. You wouldn’t want this stuff getting into the wrong hands, would you?”

“What stuff?”

He smiled at me, and, in the stark light, his face looked like a skull’s. “You should have figured that out right away.” He sat next to me, swept a hand around the room. “This is what keeps Hannibal from coming down on us. It’s what keeps Fulton from getting swallowed up or burned out by the Emperor of Mexico. This is what Leo hopes I’ll share with him. It’s my own private armory.”

“Who else has been in here?”

He looked around the room. “You, me, and Leo are the only people alive who know where it is. I’m the only one who knows how to open it and disarm the bomb.”

He opened one locker and pulled out a rifle and tossed it to me. It looked new. The stock was unworn and the barrel was beautifully crafted. I had never seen a new gun in my life. We have a few guns in the compound—I know, I wear a couple of them. But they’re rare and they take a lot of work to keep in repair. I always knew that the old man had saved a nice little stockpile from the back time, but this was far beyond anything I could ever have imagined.

“That’s a Mauser,” he said quietly.

Something flashed in my mind, a horror of ravening flame and screams. Then, it was gone before I could grasp it. “Like the name of my cat?”

“Does that mean anything to you?” he asked mildly.

“Something, maybe.” I looked up from the gun and around. “Did you know modern times were coming?”

He shrugged. “Not exactly. Did I know about the reading plague? No. Not at all. But I could tell that something was coming, and I figured to face it with all the tools I had. This is the fast cache—I can field a couple of hundred men in four hours with what’s in here. All small weapons. There’s the slow cache, but it takes a while to open and weeks to make it useable.”

“Jesus.”

He took back the rifle and cleaned it, replaced it in the cabinet. After he closed it, I heard a hiss come from the cabinet.

“I figured it was time to show this to you. Let you know that it was here. You know. Just in case. Let’s go.”

“Why me?” I asked as I followed him to the edge of the water.

“Oh, Lemuel. Do you know what your main talent is?”

I shook my head. “I would have guessed it was my shooting.”

Hibbert nodded. “Oh, you’re a mean shot. None better. You observe things closely and you take your job seriously. But your main talent is you’re completely and utterly trustworthy.”

He pressed some buttons by the entrance, then put his hand on my shoulder and guided me out into the water.

oOo

Outside, in my clothes damp from the sand, the spring sun seemed warm. We walked up the hill. Bruno met us, and together we sat on down at the top of the ridge. Old Man Hibbert sat down and rummaged in his backpack and brought out a couple of sandwiches.

“Lunch,” he said, and handed me one.

I chewed absently, thinking.

Hibbert gave a bit of meat to Bruno and let her lick his face. She looked as happy as if she had good sense. He petted her down until she was lying next to us, scanning the area. Richland Creek meandered below us, caught a little boost from the Hunter’s Cave stream, and then meandered away from us. The limestone cliffs across from us ran straight up and down, pitted as if eaten away by insects. I listened. I could hear no one. Bruno seemed relaxed.

“You know,” Hibbert said speculatively as he scratched Bruno between the ears. “We have a special arrangement with dogs. They’re the only animals we’ve asked to voluntarily lay down their lives for us.”

“Cattle give us meat,” I answered. “Goats.”

“Not voluntarily. We have to kill them, and they don’t often want to cooperate. Dogs are different.”

I watched Bruno for a minute. Every now and then, she perked up her ears and raised her head—I could tell she was sniffing the air. “Maybe they don’t know any better.”

Hibbert shook his head. “I saw a thirty-pound dog take on a four-hundred-pound grizzly for me once. She bought enough time to save my life. I don’t know if she knew she was going to die, but she knew she was overmatched. Didn’t hesitate. Ran right up his chest and grabbed his throat.” He chuckled. “Didn’t hurt the bear any. Just annoyed him long enough for me to take aim.”

“What happened to the dog?”

“Oh.” He paused, took a bite out of his sandwich. “The bear broke her back. I had to put her out of her misery.”

“When was that?”

“Let’s see.” He thought a minute. “It was a Sharps rifle and she was some kind of beagle. Was it 1880, maybe? Or 1890? I’m not sure. Say, three hundred years or so.”

“Good Lord.” I put down my sandwich. “I just can’t get my head around it.”

“You already knew I was old.”

“But I was thinking maybe just a hundred years old. Or maybe a hundred and fifty.” I shook my head. “Father Patrick didn’t die until he was eighty-something. So I figured you for twice that. Instead, you’re . . .” I tried to add it up.

“Over fifty times that,” he said mildly.

“Yeah. I mean, everything you ever grew up with is gone. Any kids you had are dead. Everybody you ever knew has died before you. Everybody you’re ever going to know is going to die before you. Doesn’t that hurt you? Didn’t it have any effect?” I shook my head again. “I just can’t figure it out.”

“Lemuel.” He patted my hand. “You’re trying too hard. Look at it this way. Just take my age for granted for a minute. Think about it. If you were me, who would you have to be? You’d have to learn how to get over that kind of thing. After all, by now you would have seen, what? Maybe four hundred or so human generations? A man lives at most four or five generations, so you would have seen whole generations die fifty times over. You would have to get over it. You would have to be flexible or the changes to the world would get you. You’d have to like people, or you’d have to live as a hermit. You would have to figure out how to handle the problem. Lots of people resent having someone around that doesn’t up and die every eighty years so you’d have to do a fair amount of travel or figure some other solution. You would have to learn how to take care of yourself, since you couldn’t rely on anybody to be around long enough. Most important, you’d have to know people. That would be your chief skill.”

“But doesn’t it make you sad?” I turned toward him. “I mean, you’d outlive your wife. Your kids—”

“I can’t have any kids,” he said. “Maybe it would be harder if I did.”

I knew that. I’d forgotten for a moment. I’d thought of him as if he was like anyone else.

“But your wife, your friends. Me. Larry. Leo. Everybody. Doesn’t it make you sad?”

He looked away down the stream a minute, then turned back to me. “Of course, it’s sad. I never said it wasn’t. Look,” He pointed at me. “Remember the kitten you brought here with you?”

“Mouser.”

He blinked for a minute. “Right. Mouser. Mouser is getting on. He must be eighteen by now. He might live a couple more years or he might pass on next week. Or Bruno here. She’s young but she still can’t live more than another ten or twelve years.”

I nodded. “So?”

“My point is that it’s part of the package to keeping a cat or a dog. You’re probably going to outlive them. That’s just the way it is. It’s sad. You cry. But that shouldn’t put you off of cats and dogs.” He looked back at the boulder. “That’s all.”

I didn’t like his answer. “So, we’re like pets to you?”

“Oh, Christ.” He rolled his eyes at me. “Of course not.” He stopped a moment and then gave me that look again. “Let’s say Raib had something wrong with him. Something that would eventually kill him so that he would die young. And you don’t have it, so you know you’re going to outlive him. If you knew that was part of the package, would you give up your brother?”

“No.”

“Exactly.” He stowed the rest of his sandwich and the bags back in his backpack. “That’s how it is with me. I’m going to outlive you all. That’s part of the package. Should I die? I don’t think so. Should I never talk to any of you because it’ll hurt too much when you go? Hardly.” He stood up.

“How do you protect yourself ?”

“Beg pardon?”

“From us? Like you said, a lot of people don’t like having somebody around that doesn’t die.”

He didn’t answer for a minute. “In my experience, cultures cycle between metaphorical time and fundamentalist time.”

“Huh?”

He laughed. “Metaphorical time is when people view things as examples. Say you have an oracle here that tells the future. People accept her. You have a wonderful athelete. People accept him.  They try to imitate people they admire and admire people they can't imitate. Fundamentalist time is when people have a fixed idea of what people are supposed to be. You can’t live forever because that’s reserved for God, so you must be the devil. I can come out in the open for a while when it’s metaphorical time. When fundamentalist time shows up, I go to ground.”

“Which is now?”

“You know who I am, don’t you?”

I stood up and checked my various guns and knives. I thought for a minute. “Maybe you could breed humans. Breed them for a long lifespan —like you breed dogs.”

For a moment, Hibbert looked shocked. Then, he started laughing so hard he had to lean against the cliff face. “Oh, Lemuel. That’s what I love about people. You surprise me even after all this time. Quite aside from the fact that humans are much more difficult to control than dogs and don’t take kindly to being told with whom they should have sex, it’s not very nice.”

“Did you ever try it?”

He wiped his hands on his legs. “Yes. A very long time ago. It didn’t work.”

“How come?”

He watched me a moment. “There was once this band of chimps in a zoo in Holland.”

“Chimp?”

“A very intelligent kind of monkey. Anyway, a top male chimp runs chimp bands and controls who breeds with whom. Every night, they put the chimps in cages for the night. There was one lowly male chimp who the top chimp wouldn’t let breed. But he was very attractive to the females, and at night, after the top male was put in his cage, females would run over to the lowly chimp’s cage and mate through the bars.” He chuckled dryly. “Humans are much harder to manage than chimps.” He hoisted his backpack. “Let’s head back.”

After all I had seen, I couldn’t shake the feeling we were the only two people left in the world. Then, it came to me. This was the way he saw things all the time.

oOo

When we returned to the compound, he left me, saying: “Go on and get a wagon from Larry. We’re going to Fulton tonight. I need to check some things in the library. Come on back and get me after the reading class.”

“Want me to take Bruno back to the kennels?”

He looked down at her and scratched her head. “No. I don’t think so.”

As he turned away from me, he stopped. “Oh. Ask Raib to come along. It’ll be fun.” Then, he gave me that look again.

I found Raib near the kitchen. He was talking to Josella, Luis and Fran’s daughter. She was a little-empty headed for my taste, but as I approached them, he seemed interested in her.

“Raib?” I called.

He smiled at her and waved me off.

I grabbed his elbow. “The boss. We have plans.”

Raib sighed and said good-bye. Josella smiled and dimpled at him.

“What’s up?” he said as we went outside through the kitchen back door.

“He’s going into Fulton tonight and wants us to come along.”

Raib stopped. “He does? Did he say why?”

“He’s going to the library. Like always.”

“No. I mean, why us?”

I shrugged. “I always go with him. I suppose he wants to give you a treat.”

“A treat,” Raib said to himself.

“Come on. It’ll be fun. He said so himself.”

Larry said we could take the buckboard and Henna. That was okay but only just. Henna was a patient old roan who’d seen better days. Larry was always worried that a horse might get stolen in Fulton, so he never let us take the good ones there.

“So,” Raib said as he was tying his side of the harness on. “Where did you go today?”

“Over to Leo’s place.”

“What did you do over there?”

I shrugged. “They spoke. I watched his back. You know how it is.”

“What did they say?”

I shook my head. “You know I’m not supposed to talk about that sort of thing. Don’t ask.”

Raib finished tying the harness. “Yeah. I know. Sorry.” He started to check the fittings, since the wagon hadn’t been used since last winter.

I tied my side and leaned against the wagon for a minute. “Raib? I remembered something. Something before we came here.”

Raib stopped for a second, then continued. “Yeah? What?”

“I couldn’t follow it. It flashed through my mind, then it disappeared. An explosion, maybe. Fire.” I shook my head and looked up at him. “Does it ring any bells?”

Raib pulled a wrench from the tools on the wall and started working on the front wheel. “Nothing specific. Maybe you’re remembering the banditos that killed Mom and Dad. That was a bad night. I’d put it behind me if I were you.”

“I suppose.” I tried to recapture it but I couldn’t. It was like trying to catch dustmotes.

“What brought it on?”

“I heard the word Mauser.”

“He brought in a bird this morning. After you left.”

“Who?”

“Mouser.”

“Oh.” For a moment, I thought Raib was joking, but then I saw he had misunderstood me. It didn’t matter. I figured the memory might come to me if I didn’t try to force it.

“Yeah,” continued Raib. “That cat sure does like you. Funny what an animal will do when it likes someone.”

oOo

Later in the afternoon, I went over to the schoolhouse to tell Old Man Hibbert we were ready for him. The schoolhouse had a waiting room with a window in it. I sat down and watched while I waited for him.

Normally, people don’t drop by the schoolhouse unless the old man invites them. He’s pretty particular about how he does things there. He’s been doing this since the back time, but I don’t know that he’s made much progress.

I knew all the kids, of course. They had all been born in the compound. I’d carried water for the old man the night Isaiah Walker was born, and went to get the old man when little Dorothy was almost lost down a well. Maybe it was because I didn’t see him teaching very often, but it struck me how gentle he was with these kids. He’d read to them and try to get them to say the letters. They’d repeat after him but when he held one up and asked them what it was, they’d fidget and laugh. He laughed, too, and tried something else, a different book, a drawing, having Bruno do a trick. Heck, I tried to read with them. I’d like to be able to tell the old man I could read. It wasn’t any use. I couldn’t tell the letters apart. And I knew they were letters; the old man had told me often enough. I could see the numbers without much trouble.

I reckon he must have seen me. Or maybe he felt it was time to stop. About ten minutes after I got there, he gave the kids a treat and sent them outside. He and Bruno came out a minute later.

“It takes patience, I suppose.” He rubbed his eyes and looked tired. “It’s better than it used to be.”

“It is?”

He smiled. “Oh, yes. The generation after the plague couldn’t read numbers. They had trouble counting. Some of them couldn’t see a drawing on paper. Others were actually retarded. Whatever this plague is, it hits a very precise area of the brain. But, as precise as it is, there are still side effects and collateral damage. Now, we have numbers—and money—again.”

I didn’t like the sound of it. “ ‘Are,’ sir? Isn’t the plague gone?”

“I don’t know.” He stepped down and stretched in the afternoon sun. “It could have been a plague that did specific damage to the human genome, and we’re seeing the effects. Or, it could still be lingering around here in some reservoir and reinfecting each generation. I can’t tell if we’re adapting to the damage or generating resistance.”

I stared at him.

He caught my gaze. “Didn’t catch my drift, eh?”

“Way over my head, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it. The real problem is, I have no tools to find out the answers.” We started walking over toward the barn. “I have no lab, nor the means to build one. Even if I did, I don’t have the required skills. I’m just the only one who can read, and everybody who might have been able to help me is a century in the grave. And if I did learn the right skills and built the lab, I wouldn’t know what I was looking for.”

“Why didn’t they help you when they were alive?”

He laughed dryly. “Oh, they would have. It was my mistake. I didn’t understand the nature of the problem. Things happened slowly. First, it looked like a virus-induced dyslexia. Then a kind of encephalitis. Finally, big blocks of the population woke up illiterate. I thought I knew what to do. It couldn’t be worse than Europe in the Dark Ages. The trick was how to be a Saracen. All I had to do was wait it out, I thought. No plague lasts forever, I thought. The important thing is to preserve what I can until people reassert themselves, I thought.” He threw up his hands. “I was wrong, and by the time I realized it, most of those who could have helped me were dead. I saved who I could, but by then they were old and the labs were all destroyed. Soon, they died. I was the only one left who could read. I started the schoolhouse. I work with the kids.” He shrugged. “Every generation gets a very little bit better. It’s just going to take a while longer than I figured.”

Raib was waiting for us at the barn.

“Good to see you, Raib,” said the old man warmly and shook Raib’s hand.

Raib looked startled and froze for a moment. Then, he returned the handshake.

Hibbert nodded and pointed to the back of the wagon. Bruno jumped up on the boards and laid down, panting. The old man put his backpack next to her. We got on the buckboard of the wagon and Raib flicked the reigns.

“Take the north road first,” said Hibbert. “Catch the Fulton road up by the Pierce house.”

Raib turned to him. “That’ll cost us two hours; an hour north and another hour south to make it up again. We won’t get to Fulton until way after dark.”

“I know.” Hibbert leaned back in the buckboard and closed his eyes in the sun. “Take us by the Pierce house first.”

Raib looked at me. I shrugged. The old man goes where he wants to go.

oOo

Betty Pierce and her three sons farm sheep and corn near the northeast corner of the compound.

Miss Betty had raised me after Raib had brought me here. Raib had stayed in the compound with Hibbert. This was long before she had married Frank Pierce, back when she was still helping the old man in the greenhouses. She and Frank had moved out here to North Farm and had three sons. Then, Frank died of lockjaw about eight years ago and left her alone with the boys. Larry sent over people to help her for a while, until the boys grew up. Ethan, the oldest, was close to twenty now, with the two others strung out behind him. I had always liked her. She still insisted I call her Miss Betty like I used to. She’d insisted on that, not wanting to take the place of what little I remembered of my mother. I liked Frank, too, and saw the family whenever I could.

It was Pious, the youngest, that saw us first and ducked back in the house to get Miss Betty. She was waiting for us as we pulled into the yard.

She shook the old man’s hand and Raib’s and hugged me. She turned back to Hibbert and nodded. “Thought you might be heading out this way.”

The old man grinned. “I could smell the rhubarb pie all the way back to the house. Of course, I came.”

She smiled briefly, but it was just to be polite. I could see that she was serious about something. “We lost two sheep and a lamb last night. To wolves.”

Hibbert was instantly just as serious. “Let me see them.”

Mrs. Pierce nodded. “We found only the one. Ethan. Take Mister Hibbert to the barn.”

The body was lying on the straw in one of the stalls. Its throat had been slashed and its neck was broken. The wolf had worried at the body as well. One hind leg was missing and the other looked as if it had been gnawed.

“The animals have all been nervous lately,” Ethan said, standing next to us. “My cousins across the draw lost a calf two weeks ago.”

Hibbert examined the body, moving the head this way and that and drawing apart the flesh of the throat. Raib went outside. So would I if I’d had a choice.

Finally, the old man stood. “I’m going to Fulton tonight. When I get back, I’ll see if I can do something.”

Ethan nodded. We walked back to the wagon. Miss Betty was sitting on a bench next to Pious, looking through his hair.

“Where’s Young Frank?” I asked.

“Out guarding the sheep,” she said, not looking up from the boy’s scalp. “Mister Hibbert. If I could get a bottle of kerosene from you, it’d be a blessing.”

The old man nodded and I expected him to say he’d get some from Larry when he got back to the compound. Instead, he leaned into the wagon and rummaged in his pack and brought out a little bottle.

“Thought you might need some, being spring and all.”

Miss Betty smiled at him, and, for a moment, she looked like a girl. “Thank you kindly.” Without looking, she grabbed Pious by the wrist before he got away.

We got back in the wagon, and Raib flicked the reigns. Henna snorted, and we were back on the road. About a half-mile later, we caught up to the Fulton road and turned south. The old man leaned back in the buckboard and watched the fields.

“So, did Larry say something about the calf ?” asked Raib.

“No. Not at all.”

“Something about the sheep, then.”

“Nope.”

“How did you know to come here?”

Hibbert looked at Raib innocently. “To drop off the kerosene, of course.”

I laughed. Raib grinned. “Yeah. Right. Really, how did you know?”

“Intuition, I suppose,” said Hibbert thoughtfully. “That’s as good a word for it as any.”

I remembered what King Leo had said, but I didn’t mention it.

“And what is intuition?” Raib asked. He reminded me of Bruno playing with Hibbert.

Hibbert smiled indulgently and closed his eyes again. “Intuition is just your brain telling you the answer to a question without mentioning how it solved the problem. Now, don’t bother me. I plan on exercising my intuition the rest of the way into Fulton.”

oOo

It was dark by the time we reached the library.

The Fulton library was a dark and brooding old granite building with slits for windows and a big oaken gate in the front. On either side of the gate grew two ancient oak trees, now filled with spring birds roaring and screeching at one another. I groaned. It was worse than my window at home.

Four guards stood at alert on the gate. I couldn’t see them, but I knew that every window had its own guard. These guards lived in the library and were supported by Old Man Hibbert. If it was a contest between the compound at home and the library, he’d choose the library in a second. As far as he was concerned, the library was important.

These guards were hard-eyed and big. They watched as we brought the wagon up to the gate and only relaxed when they recognized Hibbert in the buckboard. The captain nodded. “Welcome, sir,” he said to the old man and motioned to the other guards to open the gate. The doors swung wide; Raib switched Henna and the wagon rolled inside.

I was always nervous in Fulton, especially now with the Kingdom City Man on the loose. There may be bigger towns in the world, but Fulton was the only such place I knew. It’s one thing to look out for Hibbert in the woods or over to King Leo’s. But Fulton has over five hundred people and all they do is try to separate visitors from their belongings. There’ve been more than a few knifings over the years. Once we entered Fulton, I wasn’t going to rest easy until they closed the gates behind us when we left.

The guards lit the evening lanterns and I could see around me.

Hibbert got down off the wagon and stretched. Bruno jumped down and sat beside him. “Okay, boys,” he said to us. “You two go off and find some dinner. I’ll join you later. I have a little reading to do.” With that, he went off with the captain and left us to our own devices.

oOo

“Well, then, little brother,” Raib said, rubbing his hands together. “Since we’re eating on the old man, what’s your pleasure?”

There weren’t many choices. We could eat at Terry’s Table, an inn down Fifth Street, we could grab bread and cheese at one or another of the bars in Fulton, all of which were barely a hundred yards from where we stood, or we could dine at Susie’s, the brothel. I knew exactly which place had Raib’s attention. Susie’s had the best food, but the place always made me uncomfortable. The walls were thin.

Raib dragged me there anyway. I didn’t protest too much; Susie’s was close, and I was tired. Susie Potter saw us as we came in and found us a table. She and Hibbert have been friends probably since she was a child. The place was loud. Many of the tables had families, and several children were running around and screaming at one another. One child at a corner table was crying inconsolably. Raib had to shout at me to make conversation. For my part, I just didn’t talk.

Susie gave me a kiss on the cheek and patted Raib’s bottom, then went off to find one of her girls to serve us. Two wine cups were dropped on the table and filled by a girl of maybe fifteen who had a pleasant smile and was only missing one tooth.

Raib looked around the room. “Which one do you pick?”

“Susie doesn’t use the serving girls. The women are behind the curtain.”

“A man can dream, can’t he?” He watched hungrily as our girl came back with two bowls of stew and a loaf of bread.

Something about him reminded me of the gun in Hibbert’s cache, the Mauser. The flames and screams flashed through my mind again. This time it stayed with me briefly and I could see a house, a window. I wondered if this memory was of the time when my parents had been killed and Raib had brought me here from Martinsburg. I wanted to ask about it, but a loud brothel didn’t seem the place.

In a little while, though, the place emptied down to about half full. Some went through the curtains to the women, but mostly it was just the families leaving. Farming families, likely, going out for a treat and going home early to sleep for the next day. The remainder were men, drinking and waiting until they were ready to go beyond the curtain. Or just drinking for the hell of it.

Raib had already gone through three or more cups and had demanded a bottle for himself. Susie had sent one over, but had pulled the young girl in favor of an older, more seasoned woman. Her name was Lois, and she looked like she could take either one of us in a fight.

This irritated Raib. “Goddamit,” he grumbled. “What? Was I so intimidating to that slip of a girl? What? Has this become a church when I wasn’t looking?”

I nodded sagely, three cups to the wind myself. “It’ll be fine. Lois will take care of everything.”

“True, true,” Raib agreed and leered at me. He patted me clumsily on my arm. “You’re my brother. I love you, man. I wouldn’t be here but for you.”

He lost interest and turned back to his cup.

I sat up and stared at him, not so drunk after all. “What do you mean, Raib?”

He waved it away. “Doesn’t matter. I’m here, all right.”

“Where would you go if I wasn’t here?”

Raib thought for a minute, then his expression became grave. “Had to make sure you grew up right. That’s why I brought you here. Couldn’t do anything for you back in Martinsburg. Nothing at all. That’s why I brought you here.”

“Raib?” I asked gently. “How did our parents die?”

For a moment, he was still. He stared into his cup. “In fire and flames, little brother. In fire and flames.”

He wouldn’t talk about it after that, but silently drank cup after cup of wine. After a while, he lurched to his feet and stumbled outside. Hibbert and Raib came back in together, arm in arm,

“Look who I found outside,” Raib said, grinning. “If I feed him can I keep him?”

Hibbert gave me that look I had started to recognize but could not interpret. Why here? I thought. Why now?

The two of them sat down. Raib leaned his head on Hibbert’s shoulder. “This guy is great, Lem. You got a place with him. It was worth coming here for that.”

Hibbert laughed and cradled his head, then gently pushed him until Raib was sitting up straight.

“Did you both get dinner?”

I nodded and reached for my purse to pay for the meal but Hibbert took my hand and stopped me.

“I’ll cover it.” He nodded toward the curtain. “Would you both like entertainment?”

Raib looked at me. For the life of me, it seemed like he was asking my approval. It made me laugh out loud. I looked around. Susie would watch Hibbert, and Raib, for all that he had drunk, could turn into a fighting fury if need be. I shook my head. Like watching out for a shark, as I said. The folly of it struck me and I laughed again. “None for me, thanks. But I think Raib would like to join you.”

Hibbert smiled. “Come on, then, son. Let’s enjoy the moment.” He helped Raib stand. Raib collected himself and seemed almost sober.

“See you later, Lem.” Then, Raib hugged me.

I wasn’t surprised. Raib was a sloppy drunk, but it was well meant. I hugged him back and waved the two of them away.

The spring air was still only lightly spiced with flowers. I walked back to the library and stood on the steps with the guards. The air was cool, but I could smell the warm underbelly of summer coming toward us. I said good night to the guards and went inside to my room.

oOo

I awoke suddenly. Hibbert was sitting at the edge of my bed. It was dark, but somehow I knew that it was him.

“Are you awake, Lem?”

Something in his voice drove away all sleep. I sat up and shook my head. I pulled the Glock from under my pillow and the knife from the straw ticking of the bed. “Yes.”

He shook his head and pushed down my hands. “None of that.”

His voice was so sad it scared me. “What happened?” I looked at him, but I couldn’t see his face.

“Raib is dead,” he said.

Suddenly, the whole world couldn’t breathe. Everything was filled with silence and I was looking at Hibbert’s shadowy form from the end of a long tunnel. I pulled the covers off me and stood up, not knowing why. My feet made no sound when they hit the floor. I clapped my hands. Nothing.

I piled the pillows on the bed and fired the Glock through them. The roar of the pistol killed the silence, and I could hear myself breathe again.

I looked at the Glock in my hand. The knife was in my other hand. “Now, that was strange,” I said.

Hibbert lit the lamp, and I could see that he had been crying. “People do strange things around death.” He took the Glock and the knife from me and set them on the table. I was just as happy; I wanted nothing to do with death right then.

“How did it happen?”

“He went upstairs with one of the girls—”

“Which one?”

The old man smiled thinly. “Lois.”

“I thought so.”

“He came back down and we sat at a table drinking wine and talking. He fell asleep on the table. I kept an eye on him while I helped Susie close up. Then, when I went to bring him home, he was dead.”

I felt wounded, shot in the heart and losing blood. I shook my head slowly. “So, what killed him? Did he drink too much?”

“Of course not. I was watching him. It was probably a stroke. Or maybe his heart.”

“His heart?” I stared at him. “He wasn’t that much older than me.”

“No,” said Hibbert sadly. “No. He was a young man. Still, it happens. People have strokes. People have heart attacks.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on. We have things to do.”

oOo

I thought it was still dark out, but it was mid-morning. Raib had died in the early hours, but the old man had taken care of the body as far as he could. Now, the Fulton Sheriff had to get involved, as evil and corrupt a man as I have ever met. That meant talking to the undertaker. Putting Raib in a box. I was ready to put Raib in the buckboard wrapped in a sheet and take care of him back myself back in the compound, but that wasn’t the way they did things in Fulton. No. They had to worry over him and squeeze every last coin out of the deal before they’d let us out of town. If Old Man Hibbert hadn’t been with me every step of the way, I might have shot somebody out of pure impatient fury. That, and the fact he still had the Glock and the knife.

He gave them back to me as we finally loaded the unnecessary pine box onto the back of the wagon. Over us, in the trees, came the roar of the birds. Hibbert motioned Bruno to sit up front with us. It was falling dark when we finally rolled out of town.

Hibbert stopped us a few miles out of town to make a fire and dinner. He cooked very well, but I couldn’t taste the food. I kept looking into the fire and remembering how Raib had looked the last time I’d seen him. He had looked happy, relaxed. Anticipating.

Bruno came around the fire and sat down next to me. Absently, I petted her. Hibbert got his pack from the wagon and came back to sit next to Bruno. Bruno lifted her head and licked my knee as if to say she was sorry, then moved over toward Hibbert and laid her head in his lap. He petted her and scratched behind her ears. She opened her mouth in a dog’s grin and closed her eyes.

I had this itch to do something. Anything. But there was an absolute blank in my mind as to what it was I wanted to do. I just sat there, my hands shaking. My brother’s body is in the wagon, I thought. And all I can do is sit here next to the fire and shake.

“It was a spring night like this when Raib brought you into my house,” said Hibbert suddenly in the silence. He pulled a spike brush out of his pack and began stroking Bruno. “You were maybe two. He was about twelve. Frank Pierce brought him in. Frank had found Raib on the Fulton road, not far from here. Raib was looking for me. Said he’d heard I was a good man to bring a child to.”

Hibbert patted Bruno’s flank. “I guess I was, eh girl? Raib thought so, anyway. He was standing there in my doorway, smelling of smoke and burnt lead. You were asleep against his shoulder. He had his rifle over his shoulder and your cat in a bag—Mauser was a little kitten then. One of his arms was bleeding from a dozen small wounds.”

“Mauser?” He had spoken the word differently. More like the gun.

Hibbert nodded. “Raib carried him because he was yours. You named the kitten after Raib’s gun. That was the first word I ever heard you say. Raib didn’t want to stay, but I persuaded him that you needed your older brother. Maybe that was a mistake.”

I felt unsteady. “He didn’t want to stay?”

Hibbert didn’t say anything for a moment. I could see the fire reflect from the back of the brush as he ran it down Bruno’s flank. Each time he drew the brush down her side, she quivered a little. “Hannibal’s real name is Albert Schricter. He got the name Hannibal from the town where he first started his army. Albert Schricter’s a disgusting little man with nasty habits who would like to be the next Alexander the Great.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Hannibal likes to abduct children about six or seven and turn them into soldiers. Then, he gives them guns, picks a direction and turns them loose. Hannibal runs things north to Warsaw, south to Martinsburg, west to Hunnewell and east to Meredosia. He rules with an iron hand and an army of children. Younger children apparently are just trained to be killers. The raping and torture are left to the older ones. When the children grow up, they become his lieutenants.”

I felt stunned. “Raib was with Hannibal?”

Hibbert nodded. “He’d been abducted. He didn’t remember anything about where he was from until the night he and his band killed your parents. From what he told me, it was your mother that persuaded him to bring you to me.”

“He wanted to go back to that?”

The old man sighed. “Home is where you’re taught to think it is. That was all he knew. But for whatever reason—guilt, love, genetic familiarity—he took a liking to you. You must have smelled right. That’s why he stayed and made things work as long as he could.”

I held my hands together. It had gotten cold. I looked down and saw the tendons straining in my hands and wrists and made myself relax. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I wanted you to know that your brother loved you.”

I nodded.

In the distance, I heard an owl, followed by another. Then, beyond them, a coyote.

“Maybe we’d best go on.” I looked up at the clear night sky. The moon was rising. “I don’t want to tempt Miss Betty’s wolves.”

Hibbert finished brushing Bruno and put the brush back in his pack. His movement half woke Bruno from her firelight doze. Her tail thumped the ground slowly. Her great head was utterly languid in the old man’s lap. He began scratching and rubbing behind her ears.

“Oh,” he crooned to Bruno. “It was no wolf.”

I shivered at the sound.

“No, no, no,” he said gently. Bruno smiled at her master’s voice and wagged her tail. “She tries to be a good girl. She really tries. But she found a way out of the kennels.” He hugged her and Bruno licked his face. “She knows what she’s supposed to do, but she just can’t keep to it. Can she, now?” Bruno barked happily. “Oh, I love her. I do.” He quieted her again by massaging her head, her ears. She leaned back against him, completely happy.

He did something with his hands, a gentle tug, and she sagged, still smiling, to the ground. The long sigh of her last exhale hung in the air.

“She tried,” he said sadly. “She really tried.”

At that moment, I saw Raib and Hibbert talking across the table at Susie’s, Raib happy, sad, crying at some long forgotten shame, asking for absolution. Then, happy in forgiveness and satiation, he leans his head upon the table and Hibbert strokes him, murmuring and comforting him. Then, the old man does something with his hands, a gentle tug, and Raib sees maybe a flash of light and darkness, smiling, never knowing what’s been done to him.

“You killed him. You killed my brother.” The Glock was in my hand, safety off and ready, without me ever thinking of it.

The old man eased Bruno’s head to the ground and looked up at me with that look I had seen all day. Only now I recognized it. It was sadness and regret at something he was going to do.

“Yes, Lem.” He said in a quiet voice. “Yes, I did. Maybe I should have done it years ago, after Essie Fleming died.”

“Raib was the Kingdom City Man?”

Hibbert nodded. “I knew it was one of my people. I’d figured it was Raib soon enough. I should have sent Raib back the night he wanted to go, after he brought you to me. I should have dealt with him when I knew what he was. But I thought I could divert him or heal him. I thought I had. Some wounds don’t heal.” He shook his head and stood up. “I don’t make many mistakes like that, but with Raib, I made one mistake after another all the way down the line. I thought I could avoid the risk. I was wrong, and two girls died.”

I still held the gun on him. One pull, and I could bring an end to him. “You could have let him go.” I realized that I was crying.

He shook his head. “Would you rather Raib had been killed by strangers? Tortured? Hung? Best I do it. Who else do you think he would have wanted to put him down?” He looked down the barrel of the Glock. “If you’re going to try to kill me, now’s the time.”

He stared back at me without flinching. I lowered the Glock and put the safety on. My hands were strangely steady when I replaced it in the holster.

“I trusted you,” I said bitterly.

“You trusted me to do the right thing,” he answered. “I need someone like you to trust me. But I can’t always make you happy.”

I didn’t answer. My brother, I thought. My brother, the Kingdom City Man. My brother, one of Hannibal’s killers. “Why did he kill Leo’s girl? Why now?”

“Bad luck, I think,” Hibbert said. “Raib had developed an attachment to a girl in Leo’s camp. Her name was Cheyenne. She was pretty, vain, and fickle and when, after playing with Raib, she let him go, he tried to convince her to stay with him, but lost his temper and she was dead. It’s my fault. She didn’t deserve to die.”

“To hell with it.” I stamped out the fire and threw the cookware and other things into the back of the wagon, taking care not to hit my brother. When I was done, I got up on the buckboard and looked down at Hibbert. “I’m heading home. Are you coming along?”

“Help me with Bruno.”

Swearing, I got back down off the buckboard, and, between the two of us, we piled the dog on the cookware. Then, in silence, I drove the wagon back to the compound.

oOo

Hibbert got off the wagon near the barn and got a cart for Bruno. He took Bruno with him into the dark. I didn’t know if I still wanted to be here any more.

I went upstairs to our room and stood there. Mouser was on the sill waiting for me. I petted him. Then, I went through Raib’s drawers. In the third drawer down, I found a red scarf, a blue sash, and a red hat next to a bottle of wine. I never found the gloves.

I sat on the floor and drank the bottle of wine, turning the sash and hat over and over, trying to make sense of my brother. Eventually, I passed out.

In the morning, I woke with the sun. I felt wretched. The room was foul from me being sick in my sleep. Raib was still dead. I stumbled to the window, opened it, and absently petted Mouser. The fresh air felt good on my face. Something felt wrong. Something was missing. It took me a long time to figure out what it was.

The birds were gone.

Copyright © 2010 by Steven Popkes.

http://www.stevenpopkes.com/

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2004