The Savage Boy - By Nick Cole Page 0,25

life.

DAWN LIGHT FELL across the ledge outside the cave. The Boy looked up from the skin he’d worked on through the night. The light was golden, turning the stone ledge outside the cave from iron gray to blue.

He felt tired as he returned to the skin once more, rubbing the brains of the bear into the hide.

“This is all I can do to cure it,” he said aloud in his tiredness, as if someone had been asking what he was doing. As if Sergeant Presley had been talking to him through the night. But now, in the light of morning it all seemed a dream; a dream of a night in which he worked at the remains of a bear.

But I have not slept.

“There is too much to do,” he said aloud.

You done everything, Boy. Now sleep.

The Boy lay down next to the fire and slept.

17

IN THE DAYS that followed

He rubbed ash from the fire into the hide of the bear.

He smoked meat in dried strips.

He swept the cave with pine branches.

He had to lead Horse down the mountain to drink from the river at least once a day. He could think of no method to bring Horse enough water.

Winter fell across the mountains like a thick blanket of ice.

The Boy constructed a thatched door to block the entrance to the cave.

At night he stared at the wall and the moving shadows in the firelight.

By the time he’d collected firewood, watered Horse and foraged enough food, the daylight was waning and he felt tired.

In the night he enjoyed listening to the fire and watching the shadows on the cave wall.

Winter had come to stay, and it seemed, on frost-laced mornings and nights of driving sleet, that it had always been this way, and might continue without end.

18

ONE NIGHT, AS the wind howled through the high pines, he took Sergeant Presley’s bundle out of his pack.

He stared at it for a long moment, listening to the wind and trying to remember that autumn morning when he’d found it next to the body.

Take the map and go west, Boy. Find the Army. Tell them who I was. Tell them there’s nothing left.

In the bundle was a good shirt Sergeant Presley had found and liked to wear in the evening after they had bathed in a stream or creek and made an early camp. That was the only time Sergeant Presley would wear the good shirt he’d found behind the backseat of a pickup truck they’d searched in the woods of North Carolina.

Red flannel.

This my red flannel shirt, Boy. Shore is comfortable.

The shirt would be there.

The map. Sergeant Presley’s knife. The shirt.

He undid the leather thong on the bundle and tied it about his wrist.

The soft cloth bundle opened and out came the shirt, and within were the knife and the map. And there was a leather thong attached to a long gray feather, white at the tip, its spine broken.

He laid the knife on his whetstone.

He laid the map on another stone, one he ate on by the fire. He left the broken feather and its thong in the bundle.

He held the shirt up and smelled Sergeant Presley in a draft coming off the fire.

He took off his vest and put on the shirt.

It was comfortable. Soft. The softest thing he’d ever felt. And warm.

He sat by the fire.

When he took up the map, he stared at it. He had seen the map many times, but always when it was laid out, Sergeant Presley was making a note, or muttering to himself.

The Boy unfolded it, laying it on the ground. It was large. It was both hard and smooth. In the light it reflected a dull shine.

He stared at the markings.

Above Reno he read:

CHINESE PARATROOPERS. DUG IN. BATTALION STRENGTH.

Over Salt Lake City, in the state of Utah, he read:

GONE

Over Pocatello, in the state of Idaho, he read:

REFUGEE CAMP FIVE YEARS AFTER. OVERRUN BY SLAVERS.

Above this, across the whole of the northwestern states, was a red circle with the words WHITE SUPREMACISTS written in the center.

Across Omaha in big letters was the word PLAGUE, and then a small red face with X’s for eyes. There were red-faced “X eyes” listed over place names all the way to Louisville, in the state of Kentucky.

At Washington, D.C., he found an arrow that led into the middle of the ocean. Words were written in Sergeant Presley’s precise hand.

MADE IT TO D.C. IT’S ALL GONE. BUNKER PROBABLY HIT EARLY IN THE WAR. NO REMNANTS OF GOV’T AT