Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) by Michael Lane

grins on the hollow-eyed faces; the way their hair
jerked and waved in the wind.
    One
long street of burnt-out cars had dozens, maybe hundreds of doll heads, each
glued to the hood of individual cars like Rolls Royce ornaments in hell. The
pink plastic heads with bright blue eyes were everywhere. He’d spurred his
horse out of that street quickly.
    There
were too many eyes in the city, too many spots to hide and snipe, and within
eight or ten hours he’d been shot at once and warned off a dozen times by armed
men. Grey moved out, back to what had been the suburbs and farmland surrounding
the city. Raiding had damaged much of this as well, but as food supplies from
homes and farms dwindled the survivors had returned to the city to scavenge.
Half the houses and buildings were stripped or burned, the rest abandoned.
Spokane followed a pattern he found repeated over the years; a central rotten
core with too many people and no food, surrounded by a stripped no-man’s land,
surrounded, finally, by sparsely populated semi-wilderness with game and some
semblance of civilization. He wondered why people didn’t leave the city.
    He
never stopped looking, but he never found the last three men.
    Spring
finally came, and a short summer, then winter again, and hunger with it. Grey
found others like himself, riding the edges of the ruins, looking for food, for
ammunition. Grey took what he needed to live, killing where he had to. He
preyed on others with guns for the most part. He did it in part because they
had the best gear, and partly in hopes of finding the last of the men from the
cabin. More than once, when desperate for shelter or food, he took what he
needed from others. He killed an old man who drew an empty revolver on him in a
frozen field over a half-full plastic bag of wrinkled sugar beets.
    The
cold weight in his gut could cover all sorts of things, he discovered.
     

Chapter 7: Thaw
     
    March
was a bitch. The weather couldn’t decide what it wanted to do and sudden thaws
alternated with northern blasts of wind and temperatures plummeting far below
freezing. It was worse in the higher elevations, and Grey found his trap lines
hard to run. He kept at it until the thaws set in for real, bringing in a few
late-season pelts. He spent most of the month inside his cabin, reading, with
brief forays outside to get water or split more wood for his stove. In
mid-March he packed up and set out east, following the old route of highway 33.
    The
woods were noisy now, the silent majesty of winter replaced by the crack of
trees shifting, the thump of snow cascading from the boughs. The sound of water
was everywhere. Streams carved dark channels through the remaining snow as they
broke free of the ice, leaving deep, shadowy gulfs full of slick black rocks.
Water grumbled endlessly around the stones before diving into sapphire-blue
tunnels beneath the snowpack to emerge a hundred yards away, foaming and
leaping.
    Grey
took a pair of snowshoes and he wore them for a stretch of fifteen or twenty
miles across the highest part of his route, but in most places the crusty snow
supported his weight, or was shallow enough it didn’t matter.
    Others
had passed that way already, and Grey read their tracks as he walked: A single
man with a horse or mule, a small party with dogs, one pair of ragged boots
coming down from the true high country that flanked the route and crossing it
to climb again into the uninhabited mountains. The tracks thinned and then
stopped for a stretch of a few miles, then began to reappear as he started the
descent into the Dell.
    It
took him six days to travel from Kelowna to the valley. He smelled chimney
smoke long before he saw the first house.
    The
Dell was laid out in a simple cross, with most buildings flanking the highway
route and a few off to either side along the old secondary road that
intersected it. It had survived with little change since the middle of the
previous century. It had been a small town, dying