Chapter 22. The Passage
Apparently in the opinion of Patricia's father and friends, Aster was good for being a sort of walking encyclopedia and doing manual labor, but not much else, as after the meeting, she was again snubbed, and nobody invited her to sleep in their house. Patricia's father (whose name apparently was 'Dave' as Aster heard a few people call him that) gave Aster another nasty look of hatred mixed with a hint of guilt as he left the barn with Daniel Wolfkiller. Aster still didn't get what that was about. She shot her own nasty look through the closing barn door as the man left, and flapped her arms. It was cold in the barn, but she would make do. They had, at least, left her a couple lanterns, so she wasn't in the dark, and Aster took one and begin looking around the barn. There were some empty burlap sacks piled in one corner that would do for blankets. Aster took a handful of them, wrapped them around her body as best as she could, burrowed under a pile of straw for warmth, and despite the cold and her growling stomach, soon went to sleep.
She awoke even colder, but could tell by the dim blue light peeking between the boards of the barn that it was almost dawn. There was no point in trying to get back to sleep. Aster slid the barn door open a bare 18 inches, slipped out, and crouched down behind a stunted bush to empty her bladder. There were lights on in all the houses, and the smells of breakfast. Mostly oatmeal and apples, but she caught a hint of eggs. No sausages or bacon like she had often had for breakfast back at the Maestro's palace, or even sometimes back at the zoo.
Fuck it. She thought. At least she wasn't taking part in one of the Maestro's cannibal feasts, or worse yet, ending up on his menu. The thought of the smelly, cold oppossum meat in Daniel Wolfkiller's saddlebags actually made her stomach growl. She pulled the jar of the stuff out of the supplies, and opened it. It still tasted and smelled as bad as she remembered. She ate it anyways, and got rid of the taste with a few slices of dried apples. Her mouth still tasted bad, and felt sticky, so she went over to the rusty bucket of water someone had put out for the horse, and drank from there.
There were sounds coming from the houses, of furniture being moved around, and people running back and forth. Probably last minute packing, as Wolfkiller had made it clear that he wanted everyone to start out in the morning. She was fairly sure that Wolfkiller wouldn't leave her behind, he seemed to think she was a fairly useful tool, but she didn't trust Patricia's father, Dave Miller, or any of his friends or relatives, either. She was still unsure what that odd look of shame she kept seeing on their faces signified, but she didn't like it. People often hated thinking about bad things they had done themselves even more than they hated the people who had done bad things to them, and she wasn't sure if anyone would try to leave her behind or arrange an accident for her, so that they wouldn't have to think about whatever guilty secret her talk of the Vampire seemed to remind them of. And she still didn't get what it might be. The Vampire had been attacking and occasionally killing them, so it seemed to Aster that they should be angry, not ashamed. Or maybe she was just misinterpreting what she saw on their faces. She had a hard time understanding what other people felt, much of the time.
The dawn light was getting brighter, and Aster made out the shape of some dead saplings on one side of the Miller's property, near their fence. Young trees often didn't make it in these times, especially if they weren't watered. Aster went over by them, and wiggled their trunks, until she found one, about an inch and a half in diameter, that seemed fairly solid. She pushed it hard, and the trunk bent slightly rather than breaking. Good, it wasn't rotted. It took Aster about 15 minutes of carving with her knife to whittle the bottom of the trunk thin enough to snap the tree off near the base. There was a shout from the house at the noise, and a moment later the door flew open and she saw someone's face - Patricia's father, it looked like, peering out the door, but all he saw was Aster near his clump of trees, so after shooting her what she was sure was another nasty look, the door slammed shut again with a loud 'Bang'.
It took Aster only another 15 minutes to snap off the few spindly branches from the tree trunk, and whittle their stumps away. The trunk was long, about 12 feet, which was inconvenient, so Aster removed the top as well. Now she had a 6 foot staff. She grasped it in both hands, and swung it. Aster grinned. It reminded her of some of the Robin Hood stories in her old book of fairy tales, back when she had been little. Robin Hood and his men had often gotten into fights with quarterstaffs. There was one where Robin Hood had fought Little John, or maybe it was Friar Tuck, on a bridge, and one of them had gotten a good clout with a staff and fallen into a stream. That had always made her laugh, when she had read it, especially with the picture in the book of a green-clad yeoman sitting in a foot or so of water with wet hair dripping over his face and a surprised expression.
Aster had never been trained to use a quarterstaff, but she didn't think that very many other people in Dystopia had, either. Weapons were Pre-War guns, if you were lucky, Post-War guns or electrowhips if you were either very lucky or worked for the Maestro. If you weren't so lucky, weapons were knives, bows, axes, clubs, and spears. It wasn't much of a selection, when you thought about it. There were a lot of weapons mentioned in Aster's old books of fairytales that probably could have been made, but most people didn't know about the majority of them, and didn't really know how to use the ones they did know about. Swords. Slings. Maces. Staffs like the one she had made. It was bizarre, when you thought about it. Most of the people in Dystopia knew more about the weapons that they couldn't make, such as bombs and tanks, than they did about a lot of the ones they could have made. Or maybe not so bizarre. The War, and the weapons used in it, were one of the most common topics of conversation in Dystopia. Go into any tavern in Dystopia, and you could almost be assured of finding at least one conversation about the weather, and one conversation about the War. But knowledge of the Old, old world, before all the machines, was not common. Very few children had grown up reading books of fairytales, like Aster. Increasingly, very few children were growing up reading much at all, or even being taught to read.
The staff cheered her up, as she gave it a few more swings. The weight and length both seemed good. Yesterday, she had had almost nothing except her clothing, her picture of her family, and her bow and arrows. Now she had a second weapon, one she could get out to use much faster than she could a bow. It took at least several seconds to string a bow to get it ready for use. Not a problem when you were hunting deer or rabbits, but definitely a problem if someone was coming at you with a club or knife. Aster had no delusions that she had any sort of skill in using the thing the way Robin Hood or Friar Tuck would have, but giving someone a clout on the head or a good poke with the butt of it would definitely put a hurt on them. And it had a longer reach than a knife, axe, or club. Maybe she could even find something to put a point on it. Or make something. There was a lot of pre-war metal lying around all over the place. If she got a piece, maybe 1/8 of an inch thick, filed it into a point, and used a hammer to make sort of a sleeve on the bottom, she could slide it over one end of her staff and make it into a spear, if she wanted to. And keep it hid if she didn't want to, that way people would think she just had a just a plain old wood staff, and not know that she could turn it into a spear in just a second, if she needed to.
Brilliant. She decided. The sun was peeking above the horizon now, and people were coming out of their houses. Daniel Wolfkiller and a few other men began doing something Aster found odd, they knocked down some of the fences, and let a few thin looking cattle (which had previously been intended at some point to be tribute to the Maestro) loose. A few they slaughtered on the spot and a quick butchering removed the best, fattiest cuts of meat from them. One house was set on fire, and the other livestock was let loose, and some (though not all) were butchered as well. Aster watched this random destruction for a while, and decided they were probably covering their tracks. Good idea. What was left behind would give whoever might investigate the vanishing of the settlement's population a few different plausible explanations, including being raided, or leaving due to some emergency, or for other areas in or near Dystopia that might be (for whatever reason) preferable to their current locale. Not that it was legal, strictly speaking, for anyone to move from their current location to a different location without the permission (or direct orders to do so) from the Maestro, but it was a law that was ignored fairly often. Usually, provided that a person had not specifically been exiled to the Wastelands by the Maestro, and didn't attempt to move into the better part of the city, near his palace, he didn't really care where they went. At least, he hadn't in the past. Given his current madness, it was hard to guess what the Maestro might decide to take offense at.
Despite Wolfkiller's directive of the previous night that they were to leave early in the morning, that didn't happen. Of course. Aster could have told Wolfkiller that if he wanted to move out at first light, to have the people staying up all night to make preparations. It was hard to decide what to pack for a one way trip. Aster derived no small amount of amusement from watching the former stable master running from one house to the other, screaming at people that NO, they could not bring their furniture, or more than two changes of clothing, or any toys for their children. One woman stood in her yard screaming that she absolutely HAD to bring the 6 pre-war silk dresses her husband had found for her under a fallen shelf in a pre-War department store, despite Wolfkiller's insistence that they were completely impractical for any situation or weather, and they didn't have room for them. Finally, Wolfkiller settled the matter by snatching the dresses out of the woman's hands, ripping them to shreds in a few swift gestures, and throwing the remains into a nearby, partly frozen mud puddle.
The woman began screaming. Her screams got even louder, when Wolfkiller opened up the crude wooden trunk next to her, dug through it, and tossed out 3 pairs of high heeled shoes.
"You can leave without the shoes, or stay here with them." The large man told her bluntly. "Either way, we're not taking them. If you have any sort of boots, I'd suggest you get those. It's cold and getting colder."
The people had very few books, and the ones they did have, were all tossed out, other than a few 'Family Bibles' that Wolfkiller relented on, provided they actually had births and deaths written in them. Other than that, he told them that if they had actually read the books, they could bloody well remember what they read, and if they hadn't read the books, then they couldn't be all that important anyways.
Far more was left, than brought along. One heavy item that he did tell people to bring, were a few iron stoves. They drastically improved the efficiency of any fuel for either cooking or heating, and it was unclear whether they would ever be able to manufacture more. A few crude looms were left behind. They were made of wood and scrap metal, and could probably be duplicated, if necessary. Aster was surprised that there was no talk of spinning wheels, but it seemed there weren't any in any of the houses. Perhaps the people didn't know what a spinning wheel was. Aster probably wouldn't have known, if it hadn't been mentioned in several of her old fairy tales. And she had no idea how to make or use one. She wasn't sure if anyone did. Most clothing and fabrics were either of pre-War manufacture, or made in the Maestro's palace by complex machines. She looked over at the oppossum fur vest that Wolfkiller was wearing. Unless someone, soon, figured out how to make cloth with spinning wheels and stuff, everyone left in the human race would probably be wearing fur and leather within another few generations.
Most of what was brought, other than food, were woodworking and blacksmithing tools, that could be used to make things. Or used to make the tools that were used to make things. At Aster's suggestion, they packed a fair selection of seeds of various crops and flowers that the people said did not grow (or at least they thought not) back in Wisconsin, since some of them might both be useful, and survive there, despite the colder climate. There was one wagon with several boxes that contained bottles of high-proof liquor, carefully packed in straw. Good for bribes, or disinfecting cuts.
Finally, around 10 am, everything was packed. Wolfkiller said to Patricia's father that probably at least some mistakes had been made in packing. They had almost certainly brought some things that they wouldn't need, and forgotten some things that they would. But there was no way to predict the future. Sometimes, you just had to live with the mistakes you made, and deal with the consequences as they came along as best as you could. Most of the horses were either pulling a wagon, or tied behind one. A few were killed with rifle shots, or axe blows to the head, and left in random spots on the ground. Aster sat on the back of the wagon Wolfkiller was driving, hunched between a box and the back of the wagon, her arms pulled into her furry vest for warmth. As the horse-drawn vehicle pulled down the muddy road, Aster glanced back at the little group of houses they were leaving. Between the deliberate vandalism, the slaughtered and released livestock, and the burning house, it looked like it had been hit by raiders, either before or after the people who lived there had left.
It looked sad. All those houses, as shabby as they were, had once been the home to these people, but now they were empty. Like the Zoo. Probably nobody would ever live there again, any more than any people or animals would ever again live in the Zoo. The population of Dystopia was going down, every year. Between the poor crop yield, the theft of the best of the crops and livestock by the Maestro, the claiming of the healthiest boys and girls to serve as the Maestro's slaves, the low fertility and high mutation rate of the remaining humans, especially those who lived in or near the Wastelands, people were gradually dying out. And the new unpleasant tendency of the Maestro to cannibal feasts could only make things worse, not better.
Probably in less than 5 years, what was left of the settlement would be as overgrown as what was left of the Zoo, with weeds and brush and stunted saplings growing in what was now fields, gardens, pastures, and people's yards. They passed the last house in the settlement, and Aster saw a tire hung from a tree by a rusty chain, barely swaying in the cold wind. A crude swing that some man had put up for his children. One of the only treats of childhood that still existed in the world. Right now, she could see ruts in the dirt underneath, made by the feet of whatever child played on it. She could envision it in 5 years, the ruts filled with dirt and grown over, dry grape vines covering the tire and creeping up the length of the chain. In 50 years, the chain would perhaps be rusted through, and the tire fallen to the ground and nearly buried by dirt and brush. Or the tree might have died, and fallen to the ground, taking the tire swing with it. In 500 years, maybe there'd be new trees, and squirrels and oppossums might dig around the tire, to hide nuts or make a den. Would people hunt them? Aster didn't think so. She didn't think there would be anyone left in Dystopia, in 500 years. And if she couldn't find the way, the one, slim, barely possible way she had seen for the Vampire, Morbius, to kill the Maestro, likely there would be no people left in the whole world. Once the Maestro finished destroying what he had built in Dystopia, he would turn to destroying what others had manage to build. In Milwaukee. And Iceland. And whatever other small corners of the world where enough people had managed to survive and salvage what they could from what the War had left.
After that, maybe the Maestro would finally starve to death. Or finally go mad enough, far too late, to destroy himself or meet with some unfathomable accident severe enough to kill him. In 5 million years, or maybe 50 million, maybe something else would evolve to live on the planet and make new houses and tools and stories. Maybe the descendents of the opossums that humans ate and skinned for their fur. Or the descendents of the vampire bats that Morbius had experimented with. Maybe they'd dig around and find the remains of the tire or other things made by people. Aster wasn't sure whether anything would last that long. Maybe some things would, and would be found, someday. But not by people.
Aster smiled slightly, envisioning what a future Desmodus Rotundus descended archeologist might make of a tire swing. Bats liked to hang upside down. If they evolved intelligence, while retaining that habit, maybe they would think that whoever made the swing meant it to hang upside-down from. Unless human skeletons lasted that long, and were found, so they had some idea of the normal posture and range of motion of people, there was no reason for them to think otherwise.
The train of wagons went past the outskirts of Dystopia. Most people gave them a slightly curious glance, then turned back to whatever they were doing. Wagons were a common sight. The only thing that drew curiosity was such a large number of them, and so thoroughly packed. Wolfkiller had given all the drivers an answer to give anyone who asked questions, about how their crops had been poor for several years, and they were going to resettle near the ocean, perhaps near the mouth of a small river. and give fishing a try, not that the fishing was likely to be any better, their luck being as bad as it was. This satisfied most people. Migration within the bounds of Dystopia and the wastelands was common, if not technically legal. Unless you were favored by the Maestro, the living was not good anywhere, and it was quite common for farmers to decide to try their hand at fishing, or for fishermen to decide to try their hand at farming, or for the truly desperate to come up with bizaare schemes almost certainly doomed to failure and death, like (so said one man they met) re-opening a Pre-War candle factory, which his two uncles had apparently attempted back when he was a child.
The man took a drink from a small flask that took out of his pocket, swallowed, then spat on the ground, ran his hand through his greasy, mostly grey hair, and offered his opinion that both his uncles, along with their wives, children, and the rest of the population of the world, were mad fools, and who would open a candle factory anyways, when most people made their own candles from left over fat, or had oil lanterns, and anything better such as beeswax was simply ungettable unless you worked for the Maestro, or were filthy rich, which amounted to one and the same thing, and oh, what was the world coming to, and Daniel Wolfkiller and everyone else in the wagon train were all mad fools, as the fishing wasn't going to be any better than the farming, and pretty soon they'd all be eating rats and beetles, regardless of where they were or what they did, right before they all starved to death, so they would have been better off sparing themselves the effort and staying and starving where they had come from and really should go back to.
Daniel thanked the man politely for his advice, but said that since they'd already packed everything and left, they'd go try their hand at fishing anyways. At least for a few years. The man shrugged, apparently resigning himself to the assorted mad schemes of the fools the world was sadly filled with, and they left him in the dust behind the wagons as they moved on. Occassionally, they would encounter what looked like groups of bandits, who regarded the high piles of goods in the wagons with obviously greedy expressions, but after taking in the number of people and weapons in the wagon train, looked as nervous as they were greedy, and did not offer to molest them. Sometimes they would pass clumps of houses, settlements like the ones they had left. Sometimes the houses were well built, other times they were even shabbier than the ones than the wood shacks that they had come from. A few houses looked to be made of old, Pre-War junk, nailed together and gaps in the pieces stuffed with rags, or bits of sod.
One settlement they passed actually consisted of old railroad box-cars that had somehow been moved (perhaps by truck, perhaps by teams of large horses like the Percheron hybrid Wolfkiller owned), set on top of concrete blocks, and holes cut in them for doors and windows that looked to have been salvaged from Pre-War buildings. The box car settlement actually looked fairly prosperous, there were wooden, peaked roofs above each box-car, to keep the rain and snow off it, colorful curtains in the salvaged windows, and there was a large pen full of turkeys in front of almost every long, narrow house. Aster found it odd that they were keeping turkeys, rather than the much faster growing and breeding chickens that most people kept, if they kept any poultry at all, then shrugged. People had come up with all sorts of weird solutions for surviving the world they lived in now, and living in train cars and raising turkeys was neither the oddest, nor the most unpleasant thing she had ever seen in her life, or was likely to see in the future.
Aster couldn't help but feel sad, as the box-car settlement fell out of sight behind them. They actually seemed to be doing fairly well, box cars were solid and warm, and some of the houses looked like they were really made of two box-cars, with their long sides set together. It wouldn't last, though. The place was out of the way, set in an odd curve in the road, and judging by the way the road was overgrown, not very many people came this way. But it didn't matter. It was still part of Dystopia, and sooner or later, the Maestro would find them, and take away their turkeys, their women, their children, and everything else they had. Then they'd probably end up doing what the drunk they met earlier suggested, and eating rats and beetles before they starved to death. She wished that there were a way to bring the people from the box-cars with them, but it was impossible. She couldn't warn everyone they met what the Maestro was doing, or sooner or later, the Maestro would hear about it. Nor could she tell people about the little island of life in Wisconsin, where it might be safe to go and live. It was only safe because the Maestro didn't know that it existed, or that they were going there.
Probably he'd find the place anyways, sooner or later, but if he knew about it, or that they were going there, or if too many people vanished from Dystopia all at once, it would be sooner, rather than later. And Aster it to be later. She needed time. Time to find the Vampire. Time to get him to do what he needed to do. Time for her to do what she needed to do, as difficult and costly as it would be. Time. Time bought, probably, at the cost of the lives of almost everyone they were leaving behind in Dystopia. Aster didn't really know more than a few of them, and those few, not all that well. There was the woman in the Maestro's palace who had once lent Aster a needle. A few guards who looked the other way when she snuck food out of the Palace kitchen. The people who sold meat and fruit and tools in the market square in Dystopia. The old man who had once worked in the Library, when Aster had been a child, and had gotten books off the high shelves for her. Perhaps he was even dead. Perhaps they all were, but if they weren't, they would be soon. It sucked. The world sucked. But neither Aster and her clever mind, nor Daniel Wolfkiller and his strength and leadership, nor even Dave Miller and his snotty looks could save more than the few people they were going to save. If they tried to save more than that few, they'd fail, and doom the rest of the world in the attempt.
As evening came, it became obvious that they had left Dystopia, and were Outside, or in the Wastelands. The few houses they saw looked more shoddily constructed than the equipment sheds at the zoo, were surrounded by fields of stunted crops, and there was very little livestock. Livestock was a luxury. It took three pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken meat. Grain that people could eat themselves. Of course, you could feed some animals on fodder such as grass, that people couldn't eat. But grass didn't grow that well in the Outside, either. And any livestock would have had to compete with wild animals for the grass. Livestock had been bred for thousands of years to be dependent on and subservient to human beings. That did not make for a good ability to compete with wild animals for scarce food. What little wild greenery there was around went mainly to rabbits and the occasional stunted deer.
The few people they saw were fearful. Probably they thought that such a large caravan either had been sent by the Maestro, or was part of a rebellion against him. The latter was fairly accurate, but either way, it was dangerous for them. They ran into their houses at the sight of the line of wagons, slammed the doors, and no more was seen of them as the wagons passed, except a few fearful eyes peeking from narrow cracks in shuttered windows. Aster made a note of the windows. Apparently those exiled to the Outside by the Maestro could not afford glass. They had to choose between darkness, and whatever weather conditions might happen to exist at the time.
As they passed one house that was closer to the rutted, dirt trail than most of them, Aster noticed a bad smell. She wrinkled her nose, sniffed, and looked around. The bad smell was coming from a ditch between the house and the trail. Whoever lived in the house had been using the ditch as a combination garbage disposal and sewer, and there were piles of rotting vegetable waste, several small animal bones, and a great deal of ordure all rotting in shallow water. Aster looked at the ditch and shook her head. It was hard to tell with the light getting dim, but it looked like it stretched on for some distance, and probably joined with a stream at some point. Sooner or later, someone was going to get sick from contaminated water.
This disturbed her enough, that she poked her head up over the level of boxes, and asked Daniel Wolfkiller whether they couldn't dig proper outhouses and a pit for burning the garbage. He shook his head.
"They all die quick, out here. From starvation. From thirst. From radiation poisoning. Sickness is just one more item on the list. There's too many problems, and not enough people or resources to deal with them all. Oh, certainly if several of them got together, they could dig holes and clean up the trash and shit, but to what end? They'd die just as quickly, from something else. So why go to all that work?"
"I don't know." There was an obscene dampness surrounding the ditch, and animal tracks as well. Aster didn't like to think of hunting and eating animals that had been drinking water from there. "The houses here are far apart, but there are a fair number of people. If they all worked together, they could maybe fix most of the things, except the radiation. They could even use the ditches for irrigation, instead of a crap pit, get more crops. Or something."
"They could, but they won't." Wolfkiller shook his head. "Working together for something that won't pay off for months, or even years, takes hope for the future. Hope, and trust in the people you're working with. They don't have a whole lot of either, around here. The Maestro's stolen it from them."
Wolfkiller sighed, and turned the horses slightly to the right, just past a small boulder. Most likely it had been placed as a marker. "I've tried to get people from here to join the ones I'm with. Mostly, it hasn't worked out well. A few of them have said they'd go with me, but tried to rob me of whatever I had in a day or two."
"What did you do?" Aster asked.
"What I had to." The man said nothing for a few moments. "I can't really live without food and water, or with a cut throat, and it's foolish to keep someone alive who would take all of the first, or try to give me the second. Now, the people here know better than to try and rob or kill me, but they really won't talk to me any more at all."
"They probably love you as much as Dave Miller loves me, hmm?" Aster suggested.
Wolfkiller snorted and choked. That was about as close to an actually funny joke as he had ever heard Aster come. "Yes, they love me just as much as that." He glanced back, his eyes twinkling slightly. "No more than that, mind you. But probably just as much."
Soon after that, it was nearly dark, and they pulled the wagons off the trail and behind some small hills with saplings growing on them. That way, they couldn't be seen from the trail. They couldn't risk any light, though, which meant no fires and no lanterns. It didn't bother anyone, they could make their way fairly well by the light of the half moon, and there wasn't really anyplace they needed to go, anyways. Some of the men took turns in 2 hour shifts surrounding the group of wagons in a circle, keeping watch in case anyone did manage to stumble across their hidden camp. Aster, being a woman, was not so burdened. Or so privileged, depending on your point of view. She was tired, and really didn't want to help keep watch, anyways. She wanted rest. She managed to clear a space in the wagon large enough to lie down in by stacking a few boxes on top of eachother, wrapped herself in a few blankets, and went to sleep.
The next morning, Aster was awoken to some loud rustling and snapping noises. Worried that they were somehow being attacked, she grabbed her wooden staff, but then saw that the noise was just some of the travellers picking small apples they had found still clinging to the branches of the trees surrounding them. Wolfkiller was walking around and making sure that the apples got divided 'fairly'. Aster wasn't quite sure what 'fairly' meant, as some people seemed to be getting far more apples than others, and she was only given a handful of crabapples that were no bigger than grapes. She unstacked the boxes that she had moved to make a sleeping spot, so they wouldn't fall over when the wagon began moving again, then sat and nibbled on the withered fruit.
"We'll have to make a note of this place." She hear Daniel Wolfkiller say at one point. "Apples are hard to get. I wonder why there are so many here. Someone must have planted them."
Aster got up, and tramped around on the frosty grass, looking at the trees, taking note of everything she saw. "Nobody planted these trees, specifically. But this place used to be an orchard. The original trees have died, but you can still see some of their stumps, or mushrooms around where their stumps used to be, all in rows."
She pointed out what she meant. "These trees seeded from them. Who knows how many years ago. Some of them could be maybe the tenth generation from the original orchard trees."
Daniel Wolfkiller frowned at this. He was good at finding spoor, but that was animal spoor. It hadn't occurred to him that plants could sometimes be tracked, as well. It normally wasn't necessary, since plants just stayed in the same place, rather than running and hiding, like animals. This was a different sort of tracking, through time, rather than space. A typical Aster sort of thing to think of, but not all that different from hunting. "If this was an orchard, why are most of the apples so tiny. Crabapples, a lot of them. I don't think they grew those in orchards, and I don't think even ten generations is enough for them to get so stunted. Even with the radiation."
"Apples aren't like people and animals. They have really complex genetics." She could see that the large man didn't understand. "A baby apple tree, grown from a seed, most of the time doesn't grow apples anything at all like the parent tree. A parent tree with big apples can have a baby tree that grows crabapples. Or, vice versa. When people planted orchards, they would always use trees that were grown from cuttings… from branches of good apple trees that they put in water until they grew roots. That way they would be exactly like the parent tree, and have apples that were the same."
"So that's why…" Wolfkiller frowned. "I didn't know that. Nobody knew that. People have been trying to grow apples for a long time, since the war. Planting seeds. And most of the trees were crap. Crabapples. A fucking waste, after all the years needed to grow them."
"It's in books." Aster pointed out.
Wolfkiller sighed. "Books. You've probably read more books than anyone else in the entire state. Except maybe the Maestro. And I'm hardly going to chat him up about farming. But there aren't that many books outside Dystopia. Most people can't read, out here, they wouldn't have much time to read if they could, and they've been used for kindling."
"Burning books!" Aster was shocked.
"Better than burning wood they can use to build things with, my dear." Wolfkiller said. "At least from their point of view."
The apples were mostly picked now, except for a few stragglers on high branches that were out of reach. The last few were divided up 'fairly', which meant Aster got another small handful and other people got a large sack. Two runners went out to the trail and came back several minutes later, declaring that it was safe to leave.
"I'm going to get you some notebooks when we get to the Catskills." Wolfkiller decided as the wagons began moving out from the campsite. "I want you to write down everything you know about breeding whatever sorts of plants and animals are still left around here. Probably, you'll write ten times more than you need to. That's fine, I'll have someone else go through it later and pick out the important parts."
The next few days went pretty much the same. The ground became drier, plants became scarcer, houses became farther apart, and eventually there were no more houses at all. Once they passed what Aster thought was a group of bandits, on donkeys. They looked as poorly fed as most of the farmers living Outside, and when they saw the large wagon train, immediately got off the trail to let them pass. They glared at the caravan, and Aster heard two of the men on donkeys get into an argument about whether or not they would have to cook the donkeys pretty soon, and if so, what they would do afterwards.
"That's bad." Wolfkiller said.
Aster looked at the scruffy bandits. "I don't think there's enough of them to attack us. What's bad?"
"That they're planning on killing the donkeys." Wolfkiller explained. "Valuable animals. I'm almost tempted to try and take them away… but I doubt these people would help me, and it would probably get some of them killed even if they would help me. Besides, there's not enough food for them where we're going, anyways. Most likely, we'd just end up eating them ourselves."
He conspicuously shifted the rifle he had on his shoulder, making sure that some of the bandits saw it, as they went past. This brought alarmed looks from the bandits, and their eyes flicked nervously at the stacks of boxes and bags in the wagons, wondering what other weapons might be hidden in or between them, to be brought out at a moments notice. After several more moments, the leader of the bandits shouted something, and they all flicked the reins on their donkeys and trotted off quickly. Probably they were worried that the more numerous and better armed people on the wagons would decide to steal their donkeys and eat them. At any rate, it didn't seem likely that they'd have to worry about the bandits trying to follow them and rob them after dark.
It was a few hours after they had scared off the donkey-mounted bandits that Aster first spotted some mountains in the distance. They camped again that night, behind a hill, though this one was bare of trees, and almost all other plant life except some tough looking tufts of grass. The following day they got up early, and soon Wolfkiller led the wagons through some deep crevasses, between rocky hills. They were going uphill, following a small stream that wound through a ditch on the right hand side of the trail. Wolfkiller said that the water was safe to drink at this point, and occasionally someone would hop off one of the wagons to fill a bottle, then hurry to catch up again.
Finally, they went around one deeply angled bend in the trail, and found themselves in a huge valley, set between mountains that looked thousands of feet high. Higher than any building in Dystopia, even the Maestro's palace. The flat valley was full of large shacks made of wood, sheet metal, and other scavenged materials. There were a number of machines sitting between the buildings, and Aster saw that some of them were actually inside the buildings. Mostly semi trucks, but there were a few smaller cars and trucks, plus some construction equipment. A few people wearing a big helmet of some sort were around one large semi truck and doing something to the engine that involved a light so bright it hurt Aster's eyes to look directly at it. She had never seen a welding torch before, but guess that was what it was, based on mentions of it in some of the books she had read. Supposedly, the light was actually dangerous to look at, and she turned her gaze away. The construction equipment was interesting, and as she watched, a man got into one of them, some machine with a small shovel on one end of it, started the engine, and drove it straight towards the mountain. She followed the machine with her eyes, and it actually went INTO the mountain. Or rather, INTO a large, obviously man-made hole that went into the side. There were several such holes, all several yards apart, set in a neat row. Each of them was far larger than the front gates of the Maestro's palace, and went back farther than Aster could see, into nearly solid darkness. They were more like mouths, than doors. Aster shuddered, almost feeling the cold air she was certain was probably breathing from those dark entrances. The sheer weight of the cold and dark seemed almost as heavy and solid as the mountains themselves, or the iron that had been wrested from it's heart over the years.
Wolfkiller brought his wagon to a halt, and let the other wagons enter the valley. The people in them gaped at the trucks and other machinery just as much as Aster had. The tall Daniel Wolfkiller let them take in the site for a few moments, then waved one arm expansively.
"Welcome to the Catskill Consolidated Iron Mines." He said with only slight irony in his voice. "Or as we like to call it, since the original owners are sadly nowhere to be found - The Underworld."
Author's note - Anyone been reading this? Send me a PM with what you think so far, or leave a comment. I'd like to hear from some of my audience. Thanks.