Ashes of the Earth - A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America

242 Pages·2011·1.07 MB·English

by  Pattison Eliot

ASHES OF THE EARTH
A MYSTERY OF POST-APOCALYPTIC AMERICA
By Eliot Pattison
Copyright © 2011 by Eliot Pattison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The author would like to acknowledge that the lyrics on page 240 are from Bobby Darin's song Beyond the Sea, first recorded by
US Atco in 1960.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-58243-644-9
Cover design by Domini Dragoone Interior design by Megan Jones Design
Printed in the United States of America
COUNTERPOINT 1919 Fifth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10987654321
CHAPTER One
the faces of the many child suicides Hadrian Boone had cut M from nooses
or retrieved below cliffs never left him, filled his restless sleep, and encroached
in so many waking nightmares that now, as the blond girl with the hanging rope
skipped along the ridge above, he hesitated, uncertain whether she was another
of the phantoms that haunted him. Then she paused and reached out for the hand
of a smaller red-haired girl behind her. Hadrian threw down the shovel he was
using to dig out the colony's old latrine pit, gathered up the chain clamped to his
feet, and ran.
He scrambled up the steep slope of the ravine, ignoring the surprised, sleepy
curse of his guard and the shrill, angry whistle that followed. Grabbing at roots
and saplings to pull himself forward, he cleared the top and sprinted along the
trail, his spine shuddering at the expectation of a baton on his back, his gut
wrenching at the sound of a feeble shriek from the opposite side of the ridge. As
he reached the open shelf of rock, he sprang, grabbed for the swinging rope that
hung from a limb over the edge, heaving it up with a groan of despair. He froze
as he hauled the child at the end of it back onto the ledge. What he found himself
holding was an old coat fastened over a frame of sticks, and he was looking into
the blank eyes of a pumpkin head with dried wheat for hair.
The shriek sounded again, and Hadrian suddenly realized it was one of
laughter. The two girls behind him tittered with delight as he cradled the effigy
in his arms. More children joined in the laughter, at least half a dozen in the
shadows of the trees.
"No more, Sarah," he scolded the older girl as he rose, dumping the figure
onto the ground. "Not this game. I taught you better." He saw now the
photograph pinned to the effigy's chest, an advertisement torn from a long-
forgotten magazine showing a woman driving a red convertible filled with joyful
children eating bags of hamburgers. Such photos were considered by many
children to be proof of the paradise on the other side and were the reason so
many sought to reach the heaven they depicted. Carthage colony had long ago
banned the private possession of salvaged books and magazines from the past
century, which guaranteed their hoarding by the young. There were no more
cars, no more drive-through fast food, and the only religion in most families was
that invented by children as they tried to decipher the forbidden annals of a lost
world.
"Why the stones?" he asked, bending to roll the pumpkin figure's head
toward him. The eyes carved into the flesh, the most prominent feature of the
effigy, had pupils of blue pebbles.
Sarah glanced back at a thin boy in the shadows, taller than the others. "Dax
said his eyes would disappear. He's seen it, in the others who cross over. He says
that's what you take with you to the other side, your eyes, because that's where
your soul lives."
"To be or not to be, amen!" interjected the younger girl.
"To be or not to be, amen!" The children under the trees quickly echoed the
words.
Hadrian shuddered at the strange, frantic homily, then braced himself on a
tree trunk. His despair was like a physical weakness. He'd opposed the
withholding of the truth from the younger generation, arguing, begging, and
shouting until he'd been removed as the head of the colony's school. Left without
the truth about their world, the young would always find their own version of it.
Hadrian had begun to think of the children of Carthage as one more population
of prisoners. He glanced at Dax, filled with foreboding over the boy's familiarity
with suicides, then shook his head at the girls and began to dismantle the figure.
Sarah and her younger sister put on the wounded expressions so familiar to
him at the school. "We found something special for you, professor," Sarah
offered, handing him a little cylinder of rolled maple leaves tied with vine. "I
was going to bring them to the jail window tonight after—"
The baton slammed into Hadrian's shoulder like a hammer, the first blow
knocking him to his knees, the second causing him to collapse onto his hands.
"No!" the older girl cried. She lowered her head and charged the guard who'd
materialized behind Hadrian, ramming him in the belly.
"Get back, you damned vermin!" Sergeant Kenton snarled, slapping the girl
as he was pushed against a tree. "I told you last night your gangs are finished! I'll
find your—" his fury melted into confusion, then fear, as he recognized Sarah. "I
didn't mean ..." he muttered to her. "We can't have prisoners escaping, Miss. You
know the governor sentenced Mr. Boone to more hard labor for destroying
government property again."
Sarah straightened, rubbing her cheek where he'd struck her. "And what,
Sergeant," she asked in a stern, grown-up voice, "shall we tell our father when
the prisoner he sentenced cannot work because of the beating you gave him?"
Kenton cast a baleful glance at Hadrian. They both knew he would be willing
to haul dried dung himself just for a chance to use his baton on Boone. The burly
sergeant swallowed hard, bobbing his head to the girl with ill grace. Governor
Lucas Buchanan was the most powerful man in the colony of Carthage, on the
entire planet for all anyone knew, but in his own household his daughters
reigned supreme. "Lawbreakers owe a debt to all," Kenton murmured. It was the
safest of responses, a slogan carved over the entry to the colony's courthouse.
Hadrian clutched his throbbing shoulder a moment, then rose, brushing dried
leaves and dirt off his clothes.
"Did you know, Dora," Sarah declared to her sister in an exaggerated
whisper, "that back in the days of the world Sergeant Kenton sold shoes?"
The younger girl laughed derisively and raised her necklace, shaking its
amulet at Kenton, who reflexively jerked backward. It was a rattle from one of
the local diamondback snakes, a favorite adornment of the adolescent gangs.
The policeman clenched his fists, then glared again at Hadrian, as though he
must be the one broadcasting the sergeant's secret past. Kenton offered a servile
nod to Sarah, then feigned a retreat for two steps before springing into the brush
where he seized the lanky boy by his hair. Dax squirmed for a moment before
Kenton brutally slapped him. "I'll have you begging with the half dead in another
week!" he spat at the boy.
Blood streaming from his nose, Dax pushed back his shaggy blond hair and
grinned as Kenton marched back down the trail. "Jackals run with ghosts!" Dax
shouted at his back. "Keep hold of your eyes, Sergeant!"
Hadrian stared at the boy, as disturbed by his bizarre words as by the
policeman's behavior, then turned to the girls with a disappointed gaze. "No
more pretending about the other side," he said, the words strangely choking in
his throat. The last time he'd found a child suicide, he'd not been able to stop
weeping for an hour. He gestured toward the golden fields of grain and the
sprawling town of log, stone, and scrap-metal houses beyond. "This is the
paradise that belongs to you." He gathered up his chain and followed his jailer.
Five minutes later he was back in the pit of dried waste, shoveling the
fertilizer into a tattered basket, then carrying the load to the wagon that would
transport it to the fields. Glancing about to assure Kenton was nowhere in sight,
he extracted the secret bundle from Sarah and with a surge of pleasure
unwrapped it to find half a dozen pages torn from books. Quickly he stepped to
the flat rock in the shadows where ten similar pages gleaned from the dried
sludge lay after being washed in the bucket he was supposed to use for drinking
water. He leaned against a boulder and studied the contraband Sarah and Dora
had passed to him. Three pages from a history text, three of precious maps,
colorful maps brimming with towns and provinces and countries that existed
only in a few memories now. With a pang he gazed at other pages trapped in the
dried sludge around him, ruined beyond salvage, sent for use in the latrine before
the new bleaching mill began recycling old books into fresh paper. The last
words of dead poets were there, histories of entire civilizations whose names
would never be spoken aloud again, mixed with small useless objects like
electric clocks, music players, and hair dryers, stripped of metal and discarded.
The end of the world had no ending. Most of it had been annihilated in a few
nightmarish days twenty-five years earlier. But the rest of it slipped away like
this, one shard at a time.
He stared at one of the maps, of the eastern United States. He could still
name people he had known in a dozen of the cities, though their faces had
blurred in his memory. He put a finger on each city's name and mouthed it, as if
to keep it alive. "Baltimore," he whispered. "Portland, Washington,
Poughkeepsie, Philadelphia—"
The two movements from the brush came almost as one. First, a furious
Sergeant Kenton emerged with a fresh hickory switch, pointing at Hadrian's
illegal hoard, quickly followed by Sarah running with her sister on a course to
block Kenton from reaching Hadrian. But the policeman's rage had burnt away
the intimidation he'd felt earlier from the girls. He sidestepped them, reached
Boone in two leaps, and slashed the switch across his face so violently it drew
blood. Hadrian bent and took the beating, flinching with each blow, knowing
resistance would make it worse, watching the girls through spasms of pain. Too
late he realized they were prying up a weapon, a stout stick embedded in the
dried sludge.
Dora, the eight-year-old, pulled so hard on the stick that she tumbled
backward when it came free, causing Kenton to pause, as if considering whether
to help the governor's daughter. Then the screams began, as the horror that had
been pinned under the stick slowly rose from the surface. Dora shrieked and
crawled, crablike, away. Sarah cried out in terror and darted behind Hadrian. An
arm, a blackened, shriveled arm, reached from the sludge, extending its grisly
fingers as if for help.
Lucas Buchanan, the governor of Carthage, always wore slate-grey suits
gleaned from the warehouse stores during the frenzied scavenging of the
colony's early years. Hadrian watched uneasily as the tall, lean man rose from
his desk to put on his jacket before speaking, always a bad sign.
"There is only one reason we haven't permanently exiled you," Buchanan
declared as he paced along the window of his second floor office. He seemed to
be working hard to control his emotions. "If we voted today, the Council would
toss you aside like the worthless salvage you are. Banish you to the camps or the
forest to waste away with the other discards out there." He paused to straighten
one of the many carefully selected photos on his wall. Abraham Lincoln sitting
with his generals flanked Theodore Roosevelt posing with a dead buffalo. An
image of a busy harbor with square-rigged clippers and steamboats hung over
one of Thomas Edison beside his early phonograph. Buchanan was relentless in
his efforts to wipe out the past few decades.
Hadrian clamped his jaw tightly, refusing to be baited by the governor's
mention of the ghetto thirty miles away, the squalid camps where the survivors
of radiation and other diseases from the apocalypse had been condemned to live.
Slags, the exiles were commonly called, though many other epithets were used.
I'll have you begging with the half dead in another week, Kenton had threatened
Dax. Was he hinting at a coming purge of the gang leaders? The camps would be
a living hell for the young teenager.
"But Jonah insists you are the only one he will work with, the only one who
really understands what he's doing. I reminded him that many of us can read
blueprints and follow designs. But the old man just gives me that damned monk's
smile of his and says it's you or no one. As if he were our wizard and you the
only apprentice able to read his runes." The governor's voice was heavy with
resentment. "So when you complete your sentence you will be released into his
custody," he added quickly.
Just the mention of the old man who had become like a father to Hadrian was
a salve to his aching spirit. But after a moment he raised his brows. Ever since
Hadrian had been pushed out of the Council and his schoolmaster's job,
Buchanan had harassed him, ejecting him from his quarters at the school,
arresting him on petty charges. "Why would you do that for me?"
"I told you. To help Jonah build our public works. He submitted a long list of
proposed projects to the Council. He promises a brick factory soon, says he can
even build a rail line to the mines in five years' time."
"I know you better." Hadrian shifted so he could keep an eye on the half-
open door behind him. There should have been deputies frantically consulting,
policemen conferring about the dead man. With a chill he saw several dirt-
encrusted pistols hanging on belts from a peg on the back of the door, awaiting
restoration.
The governor lifted a marble chess piece, an elephant with a castle on its
back, one of the many random artifacts he collected. When he finally replied he
addressed the rook in his hand. "I've discovered he keeps a secret journal. We've
been unable to find it."
"Perhaps he's just putting your regime in historic perspective. I tend to think
in terms of feudalism."
Buchanan's smile was as thin as a blade. "No one cares what you think
anymore. But if the esteemed Jonah Beck were recording such careless thoughts
and they wound up in our new newspaper..."
"You're asking me to spy on him?"
The governor toyed with the switch on an old gooseneck lamp. Government
House was one of the colony's few electrified buildings, powered by bicycle
generators designed by Jonah and manned by convicts in the darker, colder
months. "We want only to protect him from himself. He trusts you. All I want
are reports from time to time."
"I refuse." A drop of blood fell from Hadrian's cheek onto his tattered shoe.
Buchanan adjusted his jacket, which hung like a sack on his bony frame.
Everyone had resembled scarecrows in the early years, but he was one of those
who had never been able to regain their weight. "How many people in the known
world, Hadrian? Nine thousand, maybe ten?"
"You always ignore the camps and the forest people. They probably make it
closer to twelve."
The governor grinned, as if amused by the jibe. "And once you were with me
at the very top, not just a founder, a leader."
"I don't recall worrying about what people called us. We were too busy
keeping people alive."
"You played the survivor's game better than any of us. Now look at you.
Can't even clean out dried shit without making trouble." Buchanan gestured
toward a small stack of papers held together with a pin. "If I had enough paper to
keep a thorough file on you, this would be a foot thick. You're a failure even at
being a failure. There'd be little protest if I ejected you right now. Agree, or I'll
have you declared an outlaw. No coming back. No more crying on the old man's
shoulder. And no more interfering with my children," he added with extra
vehemence.
Hadrian had been examining a photo of an old canal boat pulled by a team of
mules. "Is that what this is about? Your daughters were toying with a hanging
noose."
"A game."
"You and I have buried a lot of children through the years, Lucas. This is
how the pattern begins, getting comfortable with the mechanics of it. I remember
once when children joined Scouts and soccer teams. In your colony they join
suicide cults. Surely you haven't forgotten how a little girl's neck looks when it's
stretched? The bulging, surprised eyes, the laughter forever choked out of her?
They don't move on to a more beautiful world, they just move into our
nightmares. Each of their gravestones is a monument to our failure."
Buchanan gripped the rook so hard his knuckles whitened. "Since the day
you were thrown off the Council and sacked as the head of our school you were
no longer accountable for my children. Accept my generosity," he said coldly,
"or I draw up papers today to exile you.
Push me and I'll banish Jonah too. I can't trust him if I have no leverage over
him. Are you prepared to nurse him through the winter in some wattle hut in the
camps? Frostbite will come first, then chilblains. After a couple of months he'll
look like he had radiation sickness."
Hadrian stared at the little pool of blood on his shoe. He longed to be in the
camps at that moment, sitting in a smoke-choked hut as some hairless, half-
toothed bard sang the rock songs of their youth. But he couldn't bear to be
forever parted from Jonah, and the old man wouldn't survive even a month of
winter in the camps. He looked up into Buchanan's icy, expectant grin and
slowly nodded.
Settling into his chair with a satisfied expression, the governor lifted a large
silver ring from the desk. Hadrian realized he'd seen it an hour earlier. It had
been on the finger of the shriveled hand in the sludge pit.
"We could have had this conversation next week when my sentence is up,"
Hadrian observed, his gut tightening. Buchanan had been making certain he had
him under his thumb before demanding something more urgent.
"I want that body removed."
Hadrian closed his eyes a moment. Then he looked hard at Buchanan. "I'll
need more than a shovel and basket. Tell Kenton to bring tools in the morning, a
coffin if he can find one." Behind the desk was a plaque inscribed in strength we
endure. It had been Buchanan's political slogan when he was first elected so
many years before. It had become his personal creed.
"You misunderstand. Tonight. Only you. I will order Kenton to release you
after the evening meal, on parole until midnight. Take a lantern and whatever
tools you need from the jail shed."
Once Hadrian had been welcomed there, in this office, once the two men had
trusted each other. They had transformed through the years, trying to survive,
each in his own way trying to build the colony out of the rubble of the world.
Survival, he had learned, was not about merely adapting, but transforming.
Those who had not transformed in the early years had died. You had to
constantly slam the door on the thousand things that choked you with emotion,
learn to be grateful for the scars that grew over your soft parts. Now whatever
was left of either man from the old times was so disfigured as to be
unrecognizable. Now they were in their final relationship. Buchanan had won,
and Hadrian was becoming his secret slave.
"He was a big man. I can't do it alone."
"But dead for a long time," the governor observed. "There's probably only ...
Surely the body's not intact."
"The sludge preserved him, like the old bog men."
Buchanan grimaced, then turned to gaze for a long moment over the harbor
and the vast inland sea beyond before tilting his head toward a portrait of Sarah
and Dora. "I lie awake sometimes," he confessed in a near whisper, "worrying
that they think we are going to destroy the world again."
"Why wouldn't they?" Hadrian shot back. It was the endpoint of a thousand
conversations they'd had over the past two decades, a reflection of the strange,
many-layered person Buchanan had become. He would gladly batter Hadrian in
public, would shame him, would outlaw him, but still, when they were alone, he
could become the lonely widower, offering up the unguarded conversation they
had shared in the early years.
"Sarah wrote something on the wall by her bed. We know what we are hut
know not what we may be. I asked where she got the words and she wouldn't
say. Which means they came from you."
"You flatter me. I only recommended she read more Shakespeare." Free from
the contamination of the modern world and being so widely available to the
early salvage crews, the Bard's works filled several stacks of the colony's
collection of approved books. "Fascinating, don't you think, that Hamlet would
resonate with her? The destruction of a royal family."
Buchanan glared at him. "I am going to make you repaint the slogan you
destroyed on the wall of the town square," he growled. "Say it. I want you well
practiced when you recite it to the assembled children."
Hadrian returned the smoldering gaze. "Four weeks of hard labor was my
sentence. Nothing was said about becoming part of your propaganda machine."
"Did I mention another week for escaping today?"
"I refuse."
"I can picture old Jonah now, frost in his hair, his teeth chattering."
Hadrian hung his head. "We have not lost our history. We are free of
history."
A victorious grin split the governor's flinty features. He turned again, this
time to watch a plume of smoke on the northern horizon, a steam-powered boat
working one of the sea's endless schools of fish. "Be at the sludge pit at dusk.
You'll have help," he said, and pointed to the door.
The corridor outside was empty. Hadrian stepped to the front window to
survey the street below. Kenton, obviously assuming the audience would take
much longer, was rolling a cigarette by a row of bicycles, sullenly observing a
group of teenagers beside one of the horse-drawn machines used for scraping
roads. Hadrian watched the sergeant, the skin on his back crawling from the
beating to come, then shot down the stairs, stole a hat from a hook to conceal his
face, and climbed out a back window.
Ten minutes later he stood in the entrance to the two-story log building,
designed like a great barn, that housed the colony's library. Wiping the blood off
his face, he watched the dusty street for the brown uniforms of Buchanan's
policemen, then pulled the hat low and stepped inside. He slipped into a side
chamber, pausing for a satisfied look at the shelves of books that had cleared the
censors, then studied the stairway and the landing above for signs of a sentry
before ascending, a volume of Dickens in his hand for cover.
He paused when he reached the threshold of the large chamber, gazing
through the gaping door upon the slender figure, once the head of a great
university, at the worktable. The sight of the grey-bearded man working with his
nib pen on a sheet of heavy handmade paper always soothed Hadrian's tormented
spirit. The page was from Jonah's secret chronicle of life in the new world, and
every time Hadrian discovered him bent over the project—often by candle at
night—he saw him as a monk from a thousand years earlier illuminating a
manuscript for the ages. As he laid his hat on a chair and silently stepped closer,
he saw that his friend was completing the details of a small sailing boat in the