Now the best that he could hope for was that he and his friends would be like a single wave, beating upon a polluted shore, washing over it and withdrawing, leaving the shingled beach a little cleaner.
“Look at this newspaper,” Krysty said, picking it up carefully. “It’s like dried ashes.” She laid it down again on the table, moving the drink can out of the way.
Ryan leaned over to read the faint newsprint. It was called the Ginnsburg Falls Courier , and was apparently registered at Ginnsburg Falls, Oregon. It was dated January 19, 2001.
“Day before Armageddon,” Krysty said.
“What is it?” Lori asked.
“Newspaper from the last day of the old world,” replied Krysty.
“Where’s Oregon?” Ryan asked J.B. “Up north and west, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Lay ‘tween California and Washington. Lot of mountains. Not much else.”
“Never got there with the Trader.”
“Nor me.”
The two men had known each other for nearly ten years. Both of them had joined the wagon trains run by the man called the Trader. Ryan had become the right-hand man on the wags and J.B. had been Armorer. They’d roamed most of the central part of Deathlands, buying cheap and selling expensive. It was a profession with a high risk factor. Times you met folks wanted to pay less than your price. Times you even met folks didn’t want to pay at all. That was why the ordinary trucks were guarded by war wags. That was why you saw a heap of dying when you rode with the Trader.
“What’s it say?” Ryan asked.
Krysty stooped lower, her shadow almost obscuring the delicate newspaper. As she moved it with one hand, parts of the edge flaked away, turning instantly into dust. “Don’t breathe on it, or it’s going to fall apart,” she said.
Everyone moved back a little, except Doc Tanner, who seemed almost hypnotized by the crumbling artifact from before the Big Chill. “What was concerning the good people of Ginnsburg Falls on the very day before most of them went grinning to meet their Maker?” he asked. “Or was this just for the mindless robots who ran these redoubts?”
“Front page says in big letters, ‘Zoning Row Splits Council.’ Doesn’t say anything about there going to be a war or anything like that,” Krysty told them.
“It must,” Ryan said.
“No. Next story’s about women picketing a porn-vid store on Red Maple Street.”
Ryan shook his head and read more items from the front page. ” ‘Councilman Hewer Promises Ped Xing Review.’ And what’s this? ‘Shock Scam Threatens Thrift Store.’ There’s not a word. It can’t be right. Doc? You know most ’bout the past. It can’t be from the day before it started.”
“Before the missiles darkened the skies and night eternal fell upon this land of the free?” the old man muttered. “Oh, yes. If one saw a bigger paperthe Los Angeles sheets, or the Times or the Post , they would have carried it for months. Building international tension. Threats and promises. Folks up here in rural Oregon wouldn’t have been that worried. There’d been the talk before. There was Cuba. Sweet Jesus, but that wasOh, such a yearning for small-town trivia that stirs my bosom, my dear friends.”
“I can read,” interrupted Jak. “This here is ’bout librarianto do with books. Says got ban some foreign writers. Can’t make out names.”
Doc Tanner peered at where the young boy was pointing. “Tolstoy. Chekhov. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Dostoyevski. Fyodor Mikhailovich. Russian writers. She was banning them, was she? A short step from burning them.” He gave a cackling laugh, muted in the small, low-ceilinged room. “Too late, she was. Oh, yes, I guess I was wrong. It had reached Ginnsburg Falls, after all.”
Finnegan had been looking through the notices pinned to the board. The first one he touched disintegrated in a shower of fine dust, mingling with the pale gray powder that covered everything.
“Just rosters. Names and times for duties. Lotsa letters and numbers. Nothing fucking means a thing now. Lists watch times right through to the end of the month.”
“No warnings? No clue that the world was going t’fall out of their bottoms?” the chubby gunman said, grinning.