RAINWALKERS

CHAPTER ONE

Willie Taft buried his wife of twelve years in a sandy bank above the Salinas River. She had cooled to the temperature of the soil by the time he took the last hesitant handful of sand and carefully scooped it onto her pale face. He tried to rise, but pain and outrage contorted his body, and he pounded the ground until his knuckles burned and tears dripped over the wound on his bloody cheek.

She deserved so much better, and Will couldn’t bear to leave her. All that love, all that life, led to a hurriedly dug, shallow pit. Why her and not him? He wanted to scream the question but didn’t for fear of being discovered. He knew they’d be close behind him, and he didn’t have much time.

Will rose and looked at her sorry little mound of sand one last time. He wanted to mark her grave, maybe one shiny river stone to commemorate her beautiful life but knew he couldn’t. He collected a few dry branches, covered the mound, then hustled along the bank through the willows to avoid detection.

It hadn’t rained in two days, and now clouds were rolling in from the lower Valley. The temperature was dropping. Will scanned the sky. Somewhere far above, satellites that no longer sent nor received communications orbited in the vast emptiness of space, ghosts of a vanished world. Thin stacks of white chimney smoke rose in the distance. As he ran along the riverbank, the tide of adrenaline ebbed, and his hunger and thirst grew. The bone-deep pain in his cut face was setting in, and Will knew he had an hour, maybe two, to find shelter.

He stood on the levee in the dark. In the field below, a tin-roofed farmhouse glowed faint yellow. Smoke billowed from the chimney at one end, and a single light cast a glow on a stack of split wood on the front porch. He could smell the rain and had to take his chances.

He attempted to brush the soil off his denim and tucked in his shirt. He came up the stairs onto the porch and knocked softly. After a long time, a woman came to the door.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m wondering if I could trouble you for something to eat,” he said while sweeping his bangs off his sweaty forehead.

The woman didn’t answer. He waited while she stared, shaking her head slowly.

A man’s voice came from behind her. “Rose, come away from there. Who is it? Can we help you, son?” asked the man as he pushed past his wife.

“Sorry to bother, sir. I was walking by and saw the smoke from your chimney. It’s been an awfully long time since I had a bite to eat.”

The man thought for a moment, then looked him up and down. “Hadn’t had nothing to eat, huh?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s past our supper, but Rose could scare you up something.” He looked at his wife, who said nothing, but raised an eyebrow. “Alright,” the man said, “you come on in and sit down, but you’re going to have to remove them boots.”

The front room was warm and lit in sepia tone by a single lamp. At one end, was the door to a well-lit kitchen in which sat an old wooden table, from where the couple had just risen.

“Come sit with us in the kitchen,” the old man said to Will.

The woman went to the stove while the man brought a third chair from the living room. She put a full glass of buttermilk in front of him. He looked up at her, thanked her with a nod, and drank half the glass in two gulps. The cold buttermilk tasted so good that his eyes were still closed when he set the glass back onto the table.

“Thank you,” he said under his breath.

“Name’s Grover, and this is Rose.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Will; Will Taft.”

“That’s a serious looking cut on your face, son. Fresh, too. How’d you come by that?”

Will hesitated a moment. “I was coming up from the creek a ways back and hit a willow branch.”

The old man eyed him carefully, then said, “Fine if you don’t want to tell, but ain’t no tree ever cut a man like that.”

Grover waited, but Will just took another gulp of buttermilk. The sound of batter sizzling on the frying pan broke the silence.

“After you eat, you can get it cleaned up.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What are you doing walking through these parts? Since the war’s been on, we haven’t seen many young men.”

“I’m headed back to Gonzales. My wife and I were collected, separated from our daughter.”

“There you go,” Rose said, dropping a plate in front of him. It was the first time she’d spoken, and her voice was much lower than Will expected.

“Thank you, ma’am. Smells great.”

Rose didn’t sit down. “We know what you are. Grover’s got a soft spot for your kind, but you’re going to have to move on after you eat.”

Will was eating ravenously and didn’t look up. “I understand,” he said with a full mouth.

“Rose, will you please fetch a clean towel?” Grover asked. “Thank you.” As Rose left the kitchen, Grover leaned in close to Will. “Tell me what’s going on out there. Are you with the resistance? Is the fighting this far upvalley?”

Will finished his last bite and wiped his lips with his sleeve. He studied Grover’s leathery face. Hard, outdoor living had worn him down, making it difficult to tell his age, but his eyes still had a youthful glimmer of curiosity in them.

“I don’t know. I’ve been running from the UP for two days, and my wife—” Will choked on the words, and his throat tightened as he said them. “I have a young daughter and I need to get to her as quickly as possible.”

“Here's the towel,” Rose said, coming back into the kitchen. “There’s a wash room around back. You can use it on your way out.”

“Much obliged, ma’am. And thank you for the food.”

“You’re welcome. Now go on and get that cut cleaned up.”

Will let the water run into the sink in the washroom at the back of the house. When it got warm, he took a long breath and scooped a handful onto his cheek. A pain burned deep into his jaw while brown, dried blood washed off into the white sink. Will hadn’t felt warm water in many days, and he let it run over his hands and forearms. The pain in his cheek radiated across his forehead, and his battered arms shook under the water.

Will thought again of his wife. How he’d begged her to stay in the work camp, to let him go alone. Tears formed in his eyes and he held the towel against his bloodied face.

Grover was waiting for him on the back porch when he emerged.

“Thank you for your kindness,” Will said quietly.

“Here, take this. It’ll help you on the road. I ain’t got no use for it around here,” Grover said, handing him a brown paper bag. “If you continue along the road, you’ll see an old barn next to a farmhouse just up the way. That’s the Taylors’ barn. They never go out there this time of year. You can stay out of sight and get some rest there. Let that cut close up.” He looked up at the sky and said, “The rain will start up again soon. You need to be careful.”

Will shook Grover’s hand.

“Good luck, son.”

Will was out in the darkness along the edge of the road when he looked into the bag. In the low light, he could see half a loaf of bread rolled in a cloth, and below it was a revolver. The matte-black steel was cold in Will’s callused hand. He opened the cylinder to see the dimpled ends of six brass bullets.

CHAPTER TWO

It was mid-morning when Will awoke from a night of delirious dreams. The rain from the night before had ended, and the faint putrid smell of it hung in the air. Lying still and blinking, Will gently brushed his fingertips over the wound on his aching cheek and stared up at the ceiling of the barn from his bed of dusty hay. His mouth was dry, and hunger pulled on him from a pit in his stomach. All of the previous day’s agony sat like a strange half-reality in his foggy mind, blending with the fading memories of his dreams.

Will closed his eyes and saw the face of an unfamiliar child. That face morphed into another, then another, then another. The faces of twenty different children of varying ages came to him in succession, then all at once they were screaming at him. Will opened his eyes and the vision was gone, and he was once again staring at the ceiling.

Since returning from the war, Will was plagued with such visions. He had told no one about them and didn’t know what they meant. They appeared like fragmented memories of events that had never happened or hadn’t happened yet. He saw the faces of people he’d never met in perfect detail. He didn’t care to have another vision for as long as he lived and, with- out exception, each time he had one, it left him with an uneasy feeling of dread.

Sitting up, he reached for the grimy paper bag that the old man had given him. Tearing a short piece of the stale bread, he began to chew, and a sharp needle of pain threaded around his cheek and shot down his neck. After a second piece, to give his aching skull a break, he took the bullets out of the handgun, spun the cylinder, and replaced each of them carefully.

Will rose and tucked the gun into his belt under the back of his coat. He was about to sneak out of the barn when he heard a diesel motor in the distance. He froze.

Moments later tires were crunching on the gravel driveway between the barn and farmhouse. He crept to the edge of the closed barn doors and peered out through a crack in the old boards.

How had they found him? Had the old man betrayed him? The wife? It was quiet in the barn, and Will could hear his pulse, a sharp thrumming against his eardrums deep inside his aching head.

He knew the light blue uniforms of the Administration’s UP soldiers and had worn one himself for many years. The uniform was instantly recognizable as the only clothing in the Valley colored in any significant way. The Valley Administration supposedly had a large storage of Sudanese indigo from a time long gone. When mixed with the natural tones of the crude, unbleached Valley cotton, the dye created a patchy light blue uniform, invariably worn by each young man in the Valley at some point in his life. The same light blue that Will had once donned with pride invoked fear in most Valley residents.

He watched as two soldiers stepped down from a rusted white jeep and looked around the yard. Their uniforms looked worn and faded in the morning light. Will’s instincts took over and, without thinking, he assessed their weapons, strengths, and weaknesses. Both soldiers were in their twenties, one barely so. The older of the two carried a handgun in a holster on his hip and looked tired and haggard beyond his years.

Will’s mind raced through various scenarios as the soldiers knocked loudly on the front door of the farmhouse. An old woman pushed the screen door open and hunkered in the doorway talking to the soldiers. Will couldn’t make out what was being said, but pulled the gun from his belt, knowing what was about to happen. He hadn’t been in this specific situation before but had seen his fair share of violent conflict. His own calmness often surprised him in the face of mortal danger.

After their brief conversation, the soldier pushed his way past the old woman into the house. She let the screen door slam shut and followed him inside while the second soldier stood with his rifle on the porch, nervously scanning the yard. Moments later, the screen door opened, and a young man emerged from the house followed by the soldier with his gun drawn. Will could see the young man’s face panic-stricken as he held both his hands in the air.

“Leave the boy be,” Will heard the old woman scream as she followed the soldier onto the porch. “He’s injured.”

The boy stumbled on a stiff leg and fell down the porch steps.

“Get up,” said the soldier, “or I’ll shoot you right here.”

The boy pushed himself back up onto his feet and limped into the driveway.

“You thought you could hide. Thought we wouldn’t find you?” The soldier followed him while reaching into his back pocket for a long zip tie. “Down on your knees in front of the jeep. Hands out. Now.”

While the old woman wailed, the soldier secured the boy’s arms to the front bumper bar of the jeep. Going to the front seat, he returned with a long black club. He reached down and pulled the boy’s shirt over his head and hit him hard on the bare skin of his upper back. The boy yelled in pain, going limp onto the ground in front of the jeep.

“Who else is hiding? You have friends from other farms who we don’t know about?”

The boy didn’t respond, and the soldier hit him again across the shoulders. From behind the barn doors, Will could hear the loud thuds of the club against the boy’s bare back.

“Go ahead. Speak up. Where do we find the other cowards hiding?”

An old man pushed open the screen door and hobbled onto the porch, leaning hard and shaky on a cane.

“That’s enough,” he yelled, his old feeble voice barely traversing the yard. “The boy knows nothing.”

“Shut your mouth, old man,” said the soldier turning to him, the sweat on his brow reflecting the morning sun.

“He’s got a bum leg. We asked him to stay here to help us. It’s our fault, not his.”

The soldier turned back to the boy and poked him with the club. “Where are the others hiding?”

The boy stayed silent.

“Alright, you don’t want to talk? Maybe your grandma will.” Turning to the younger soldier, he said, “Bring her down here.”

“No,” yelled the boy, struggling under the shirt wrapped over his head. “Leave her alone.”

The second grabbed the old woman and drug her from the porch to the feet of the other soldier. The boy continued to struggle against the zip ties.

Will’s fists were clenched, and he was frozen behind the barn doors. You need to get to your daughter, he told himself. Don’t interfere. The soldiers will be gone soon, and you can move on.

The soldier poked at the old woman with his club.

Will raised a fist to his mouth.

“Alright, that’s enough,” he said to himself behind the barn door. He kicked the barn doors open in front of him and, while raising his gun, crossed the yard at a run in the direction of the two soldiers. Will was on them before they had a chance to move.

“Drop it,” Will shouted at the soldier whose club was lifted. Turning to the younger one, he said, “If I see you go for that rifle, I’ll shoot you where you stand. Both of you put your guns on the ground in front of you.”

Will was breathing hard, and both soldiers stood with their mouths open, not moving. “Go on. Slowly now. Put ‘em down,” Will repeated, his voice cold and hard.

The younger soldier fumbled with the strap of his rifle, pulling it over his neck, then set the gun carefully on the porch in front of him. The older soldier didn’t move, sizing Will up with the flicker of his eye. Will took a step forward and raised the gun to his head, causing him to second guess whatever plan he’d been stewing. He dropped the club onto the gravel, pulled the gun from his holster, and carefully set it on the ground.

“Move to the tree and sit with your back to it,” Will commanded. “Who are you?” asked the older soldier.

“I’m nobody. Turn around.” Will removed the zip ties from the soldier’s back pocket.

The two did as they were told and sat with their legs out in front on the ground below the leafless sycamore that loomed over the farmhouse yard. Will tied their arms together around the tree, then lifted the old woman to her feet.

“Do you have a way to cut him free?” Will asked her, nodding to the boy.

“Yes. Thank you,” said the old woman looking up at Will through watery eyes. She limped past the old man on the porch and into the house, returning with a pair of garden clippers. While the old woman pulled his shirt back down over the boy’s reddened back, Will clipped the zip tie.

The boy embraced his grandma. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Thank you, mister,” the boy said, turning to Will, cringing at the pain in his back.

As he turned to face him, Will looked at the boy for the first time. He was a late teenager, a good ten years younger than Will. He had a boy’s round face, but his skin was freckled and sunburnt.