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

slowly like most small towns,
before the Fall, with the nearest gas station thirty miles away. The end of the
world hadn’t been that big of a deal in the Dell. People already grew
vegetables and hunted or poached as needed. The defunct mill had been running a
few years after the Fall, powered by an old steam engine that had lain rusting
in the ferns since the early 1900s, a relic of the old mill. Much of the lumber
was used locally, and the Dell had grown as raw-plank houses and businesses had
replaced or expanded old single-wide mobile homes and rotting houses from the
1950s. As the Okanagan and Kootenays recovered in the decade that followed,
wagons would make the trip to buy lumber, and the old mill town returned to its
roots, with mule teams and oxen skidding logs down the main drag to the mill, and
millhands fighting Saturday night at the saloon. It was well-placed, on the
route from Alberta to the coast, and as traffic slowly picked up in the
aftermath, the armed convoys brought in money and trade.
    Grey
stopped at the Dell’s trading post – an expansive storefront run by a fat man
with a ferocious moustache and a Dutch accent. The shop was crowded with axe
handles, bags of salt from the mines by Edmonton, wax blocks, lamp oil in old
wine bottles, hammers, bolts of raw wool cloth and unbleached linen, blankets,
and a multitude of knickknacks that predated the new world. Grey turned over a
straight-bladed dagger in his hands, one of six on display. The shopkeeper
informed him it was from Japan, and had come aboard one of the merchantmen that
docked now and then in Vancouver. When he heard what the merchant wanted for
it, he sat it down.
    The
mustachioed tradesman argued for a bit in a good-natured way, and Grey
eventually traded eight mink hides he’d packed along for two pounds of salt, a
serviceable No. 2 Victor trap that was probably a hundred years old and ten
rough-milled silver coins about the size of a nickel. Outside the larger trade
centers coins were sometimes not accepted, but they were portable, and that
made them necessary. He thanked the man and left.
    At
the drygoods store he traded one of the coins for four pounds of dried beans, a
new steel striker and flint and a stick of rock candy that he sucked on for the
next hour, while he looked for Georgia.
    He
found her at the blacksmith’s. She had Josie’s eyes, but was thinner and much
harder, with a face that showed little of what she thought. She was trading a
set of old horseshoes in and bargaining for a new set. Grey waited while she
shaved the blacksmith down. She ignored the newcomer until she had shaken on
the deal, and then gestured for him to follow as she went outside. The two
walked to the street’s far side, wading through a mix of snow and mud, and
Georgia sat down on a bench on the porch of a closed-up hall of some sort.
    “Georgia
Dunn, I presume?” Grey asked, shrugging out of his pack and sitting.
    “And
you’d be Grey?” Her voice was deeper than Josie’s, and very controlled.
    “I
would. Did Josie get word to you?”
    “She
did. She sent a letter with a trapper named Willis.”
    “Joe
Willis? I didn’t know he was still around.”
    “He
is. He’s moved up by Gemside now but he still makes runs to the Port. Roads
have gotten to be safe enough for that.”
    They
sat a minute. Grey looked at her. Georgia was about five-three he thought,
maybe one-hundred and ten pounds – though her fur jacket made that hard to
gauge. She had a gnarled stippling of white scars on her left cheek and throat,
as well as a slight squint on that side. Her ears were pierced, and she wore a
small rhinestone in each.
    “You
finished examining me?” she asked.
    “It’s
funny, you look like Josie but you don’t remind me of her at all.”
    “We
lived different lives. Get to what you came to talk about.”
    Grey
leaned back on the bench and stared across the street. The blacksmith was
making nails from scrap, his hammer ringing in a perfect