The Savage Boy - By Nick Cole Page 0,50

wind and the clouds march east, lashing the buckled highway with spring rain. At the end of the day, the Boy felt as though much more had been required of him than just movement. He was exhausted.

On the day he reached the bay, the weather turned warm. At least, if he stood in the center of the road at full noon and turned his face toward the bright sun, the day felt warm. In the shade of bridges and crumbling buildings, the cold had always been and always would be, just like the rusty destruction he found there along the bay’s edge.

He saw the bay from a high hill and on the far side of its blue water, he saw the great pile of rubble that was San Francisco, in the State of California. Only a few tall buildings remained standing. The rest lay buried in the piles of concrete and twisted rebar he could see even from this distance.

Ain’t never been nuked, Boy. Chinese wouldn’t do it. Needed a deep water port on the West Coast. Seattle, San Diego, and of course LA were all long gone. We fought for that pile of rubble for ten years.

The Boy could hear the campfire stories of the great battles and “ops” of the San Francisco of Sergeant Presley.

On Market Street we lost all our armor, Boy.

And . . .

I was the last one off the roof of the Ferry Building. Close one that day, Boy.

And . . .

I saw the TransAmerica Building go down after a Jay Thirty-three went in about halfway up. Dust for days after that one, Boy.

And . . .

The Army will be down along the East Bay. Headquarters in an old college library. That’s where you’ll find I Corps, Boy.

Tell them I made it all the way.

Tell them there was no one left.

Tell them who I was, Boy.

And . . .

You take everything with you.

34

I’M GLAD YOU died, Sergeant.

You thought they would still be here—waiting for you.

The wreckage of military equipment littered the highway that wound its way along the green-grass slopes of the East Bay. Broken concrete pads and burnt black fingers of framing erupted through tall wind-driven grass.

You crossed the whole country and lost all your friends, Sergeant. The general, even. Someone named Lola, who you never told me about. All of them.

The Boy passed a convoy of supply tucks, melted and blackened forty years ago.

“Five tons,” said the Boy as the morning wind off the bay beat at his long hair, whipping his face and shoulders.

Farther along, the tail rotor of a helicopter lay across the buckling highway.

Apache, maybe.

The KIAs and the MIAs and all the people you imagined were still here, waiting for you to come back—they’re all gone.

Later, as Horse nosed the tall grass, the Boy walked around three helicopter transports long since landed in the southbound lanes. They were rusty and dark, stripped of everything.

“Black Hawks,” he mumbled, sitting in a pilot’s seat, wondering at how one flew them through the air like a bird, which was impossible for him to picture.

Climbing up through the concrete buttresses that remained of Fortress Oakland, he came to the tanks.

Blackened. Burnt. Abandoned. High up on the hill he could see the ragged remains of canvas tents and the flower blossoms of spiked artillery pieces.

Sergeant, your dream of finding them here couldn’t have survived this.

He led Horse up the hill through the long grass and around the craters and foxholes long since covered in a waving sea of soft green and yellow.

When he reached the spiked artillery pieces now resting forever in permanent bloom, he could see the remains of the Army, of I Corps, below. All the way to the shores of the sparkling bay’s eastern edge he could see burnt tanks, melted Humvees, helicopters that would never fly, a fighter jet erupting from the rubble of the few houses that remained along the bay.

I followed you through the rain and the snow and along all those long moonlit nights while you told me about this place. The people. What we would find. Who you were.

And.

Who I might be.

He stood among the tent posts on top of the hill.

Of the Army he’d waited his whole life to meet, only ragged strips of canvas remained, fluttering in the breeze.

Off to the right, down along a ridgeline, he could see a field of white crosses. The graves were open and the crosses lay canted at angles.

I’m glad you died with your dream of this place, Sergeant,