CHAPTER FOUR

THE BEAR

 

 

NOW, YOUR STANDARD grizzly bear stands about eight feet tall and weighs about eight hundred, maybe eight hundred and fifty pounds.

Which is a hell of a lot of bear.

Yogi was a little taller. Cade figured that one good swipe from Yogi’s claws was probably going to take his face off – just unzip the flesh from off his head and tear it loose like peel off an orange.

Hell of a thought. One swipe, knocking your head to the side, maybe cracking your neck, so’s the one eye you got left gets to see something wet and red flying off to the side like a pink deflated balloon. Something with a nose and a mouth, wrapping around a tree, while your grinning skull waits there for the jaws to crack down on it and burst it just like an egg in a grown man’s fist. Thought like that’ll keep a man up nights.

It didn’t trouble Cade overmuch, mind, but Cade had a habit of not troubling himself with the details. The important thing at this particular moment was to pick a weapon and stick with it.

He had maybe less than a second. Not much time at all – not near enough to go for the switchblade, or pop one of the lengths of chain on his arms. He’d have to take the bear on with just his hands, which was going to be a problem. That said, Cade didn’t worry too much.

He had the knuckledusters on, and Cade was a man used to making do.

He snapped his right arm forward, slamming his fist into the bear’s stomach, then did the same with his left, then his right again. The three punches took less than a second to throw, and he felt one of the bear’s ribs go with the last one – on account of the lead weight sitting on the end of each fist, turning every punch into something like being hit by a sledgehammer.

Cade wasn’t under any illusions. The bear wasn’t about to get any easier to fight. Fact was, now he’d wounded it, it was going to be pretty damn mad – killing mad – and eight hundred and fifty pounds of killing mad bear could probably tear a man right open without even letting the thought cross its mind.

He’d just have to kill it before it did that.

The knuckledusters were simple but effective – studded lead weights that fitted his fingers neatly. They were a good pair of tools, and Cade had gotten a fair amount of use out of them in his time. Cade wasn’t generally known as a man who got into bar fights – not as a rule – but once upon a time, he’d been ambushed in an alley on the way back from a long session at Muldoon’s. Sore loser who didn’t like having his money taken away from him by a straight flush and figured he could take it right back. Cade wasn’t of the same opinion.

Cade had never learned the man’s name. They’d found him in the alley the next morning and identified him using dental records, from the bits of jawbone laying a few feet away from what was left of his face. Cade never heard anything more about it, so he assumed the detective in charge of the case hadn’t had much luck. Too bad.

The knuckledusters were useful, all right. But that was then and this was now, and there was a hell of a difference between a drunk with a blackjack and eight feet of pissed-off woodland killer.

Cade had his work cut out for him, in other words.

One of the razor-sharp claws came for his face, ruffling his hair as he ducked under it. The damn bear was howling up a storm now – Cade could see that in just about a half second the animal was going to spring forward and slam all that weight down on him. And while Cade was pretty capable of lifting a thing when he had a mind to lift it, he wasn’t about to lift eight hundred and fifty pounds of bear, most especially angry bear. Not if that bear decided to grab his head in its jaws and crush it like a damn eggshell and then pull what was left off his neck like a chicken drumstick.

Yogi roared at the top of his lungs, showering Cade in bear spit. Another swipe from those claws... Cade veered back, getting far enough out of the way not to lose any more than a button off of his shirt, then stepped back inside the bear’s reach and swung his left. Cade had a pretty fearsome left hook, and with the knuckleduster on, it could kill a man without trouble. But a bear’s not a man.

The lead weight slammed against the side of Yogi’s head, caving in half of the beast’s teeth and most likely fracturing the jaw into the bargain – at least if that hard, flat crack, like a rock breaking underneath a chain gang hammer, was anything to go by.

It was a hell of a punch, no doubt about that. But it was a lucky punch, and Cade wasn’t going to stay that lucky for long.

Next thing he knew, he was flying across the dirt road with a warm gash opening up in his side. In the moment he’d taken to register his own hit, the damn bear had backhanded him. On account of not having any hearing on his left side, maybe. He slammed into the dirt, the impact knocking most of the wind out of him and sending a wave of fire through the fresh wound on his side.

Yogi was already lumbering towards him as he rolled back onto his feet. At least he could get on his feet and still keep his guts inside him. Cade figured that meant he hadn’t been tagged that bad – maybe a deep cut, but nothing a few stitches wouldn’t cure, if the bear didn’t decide to stick that smashed muzzle in it and root around for whatever it could get.

He braced himself as the bear charged.

Cade lashed out again, aiming for the head – a solid right, connecting above the eye with an unholy crunch, leaving a dent. The bear’s momentum kept it moving, those eight hundred and fifty pounds slamming into him like a freight train, knocking him off his feet and damn near crushing the breath out of him. Cade snapped another punch up, into the jaw, a left hook that landed with the power of a drop hammer. Then a right, into the throat, crushing the windpipe. He felt it go – felt his hand sink into the flesh, rupture the organs the animal needed to breathe – and then he was buried in fur with eight hundred and fifty pounds crushing down on him, breathing bear. This was it. If the damn thing wasn’t dead by now, it was going to rear up and those jaws were going to rip him into bloody pieces before it even thought about breathing. The pain from the broken jaw would just make it bite harder while it could.

The bear didn’t bite. The jaws lolled, drooling spit and blood. The body shook, convulsing, as Cade managed to work himself out from underneath the dead weight of it, careful of the still-twitching claws.

The damned thing was dead, all right. So much cooling meat. Cade had killed it when he’d cracked the skull, probably put a few pieces of bone right into the animal’s brain.

Lucky punch.

Cade stood, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly as his fingers moved over the gash in his side. Not even deep, just plenty bloody. Ten or twelve stitches would see to it.

Just as soon as he’d done something about the old woman.

She was standing, looking at him, a cold stare that didn’t blink once. There was a lot of hurt in those eyes. Hurt and hate and frustration, because the fight was over and she’d thrown her best at him and she didn’t have much of anything else to throw.

And he was still standing.

“You killed Yogi.”

Cade nodded. It was a fact.

“You killed Yogi and you killed my boys.” She swallowed, shaking her head slowly. “They was just going to rob you some. You didn’t have no reason to kill ’em for it.”

Cade nodded again. He didn’t feel the need to say anything. She was right. He hadn’t needed to kill ’em. But Cade only fought one way, and people didn’t get up again after it. That was just the way the man was.

Nobody said anything else for a good minute. Cade looked at the dead bear, and the old woman looked at Cade until he turned those grey eyes of his in her direction again.

She shook her head. “It ain’t right, that’s all I’m saying. Ain’t meant to happen this way, not to the family. We had the good blood – we could all of us live through the sickness. Good blood, kept in the family, that’s what pappy said. Allus had it. We all kept our bloodline pure.”

Cade looked into her eyes, old and confused. Crazy as it was, there was a hell of a lot of logic to it. There was that one blood type that the plague didn’t hit; Cade knew that from the news reports, and presumably these people did too, before the news reports quit on them. Inbreeding might keep that special strain of blood flowing.

Once upon a time, these people were probably the scum of some community down south or in a trailer park somewhere even people as damaged as Cade and the Duchess wouldn’t end up. A bunch of inbred hicks, a sick town joke. And then the bad times had come and turned the whole damned world into the punch line. And suddenly the hillbilly scum family everybody laughed at turned out to be the last survivors. Any of them who could read or switch on a wireless would put two and two together and the first thing such a clan’d do sure wouldn’t be to stop screwing each other. Keeping it in the family would go from general policy to an article of faith.

Keep it in the family and you kept the blood pure.

The old woman’s eyes glittered, hard little stones in the grey flesh of her face. “Who’s gonna keep it pure now? Got Maybelle and the baby waitin’ back in the woods. Their brothers are dead now – so who’s gonna get ’em with child? Who’s gonna keep that blood pure? You tell me that!”

She was crying.

“We was gonna start again! Gonna... gonna...” – she groped for the word, clawing the air with her fingers – “gonna repop... repopulate the world! You killed the world today, yes you did, killed the whole damn world! Killed the future of the world...” She shook her head. “You best kill me too. You better had – better put me in the dirt right now! Because I’m going to come after you!”

Cade looked at her. She was thin as a rake – malnourished, probably full of cancer.

She grinned, and there was one tooth in it. “I’m going to come after you! And I’m gonna kill you and anyone you love, like you killed mine, boy –”

Hell with it, thought Cade.

He figured you should take your elders at their word.

He swung his right into her face, the lead weight smashing just above her eyes, crushing the skull inward and turning the frontal lobes to jelly. She tottered back for a step or two, her head dented in like a car bonnet after a death-crash, whatever was in her bladder and bowels hitting the ground with a wet slap, then tumbled over like a rag doll. Twitching on the ground, she looked like nothing quite so much as a puppet with the strings cut.

Cade figured she was probably just crazy, but there was a chance she had some clout – maybe she could have caused him trouble on the way back. He was better off dealing with her now. Anyone coming across the scene would probably put the picture together, but Cade’d be long gone by then.

He reached down and gripped the handle of the combat knife, tugging it free of Burn This Flag’s skull. Cade wasn’t a man who worried himself a great deal, but there was a troubling aspect to the encounter. These were probably the most screwed up people he’d ever encountered outside the confines of his shaving mirror, but they made some sense. Their blood was an antidote to the thing that’d murdered a planet, so inbreeding made sense. Screwing your own family, bearing children by them, that made sense. Pretty good sense, in fact.

That worried Cade.

He wondered if there were crazier people waiting for him in Frisco. More dangerous people. And if there were, he wondered if they were going to start making sense to him too.

 

 

WHEN CADE GOT out of the woods, he put the truck in gear and pointed it south, down Highway 101. Behind him, to the north, was what was left of Sausalito and Marin City. Part of him had been hoping Woody was wrong about that, but one look at the column of smoke still rising up towards the horizon was enough to set him straight. Woody wasn’t wrong. Sausalito had most likely been razed to the ground, and the chance he was going to find what he needed there was slim to none.

San Francisco lay ahead, across the Golden Gate Bridge. Cade gunned the engine, narrowing his eyes.

There was something strung across the bridge. Something white and flapping, half-burned, stained with blood in places. A banner. Cade strained his eyes, and read:

 

HIPPY donT let thE Sun set on yu HERE!!!

 

Cade didn’t figure that was a good sign.