In the evening of the third day, the wind shifted and ravened from the west. Ryan climbed down from the wag on the leeward side, finding to his dismay that his rad counter began to cheep a warning, the needle sliding into the red.
“Must have picked up some hot shit from beyond the Miss,” J.B. said when Ryan told him about it. “Some real glow spots that way. Better keep in and move on when we can.”
In one of the places where they lost the highway, they plowed through an old burial ground.
“Where the fuck’s this?” Jak shouted, his sweaty hair tangled around his face. It was early in the morning, and a thin slice of sullen sun glowered balefully over a low range of hills to the east of them.
As far as the eye could see, there were great rows of pale stones, most with carving on them and words that had been virtually obliterated by long years of wind, rain and chem storms. Doc Tanner offered to get down and take a look.
The door slid open, and the old man vanished into the hazy dawn. They watched him from the ob-slits, seeing his gaunt figure, stooped like a crow, picking his way among the headstones. He hesitated now and again, hunkering down to peer at the lettering. Once he looked back to-ward the wag.
“I’m getting out t’join him,” Ryan said. “Anyone coming?”
He was underwhelmed by the response. Suddenly everyone had something to do.
“Sorry, lover,” Krysty said. “This country’s too full of graves for me to want to go look at any more. You go.”
The wind was cold and fresh, biting at the skin across his cheeks. On all sides Ryan could see rolling hills, mem-
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ories bringing back so much of his brief and long-gone childhood round-topped mountains sprayed thick with pine forest, torn rags of fog lingering in some of the gentle valleys.
Doc was standing with his back turned to Ryan, his hand gently stroking the top of a gravestone. He glanced around at the sound of Ryan’s boots crunching on the gravel.
“Welcome to the place of old dying, my friend.”
Tears flowed down Doc’s furrowed cheeks, washing away the dust in rosy streaks over the silver stubble on his chin.
“Private Joshua Clement. First Minnesota. Fell on the second day of July in the year of 1863. Aged twenty and two years.”
“This from the old Civil War, Doc?”
“In my childhood this was possibly the best-known of all cemeteries. Here rest so many good fellows and young. There’s another stone there, tumbled in the long grass by time and nuking. Look at it, Ryan, and see how little has truly altered in two hundred and thirty years.”
Ryan stooped, cocking his head to read the worn let-ters. He read it out loud.
“‘Drummer Horatio Makem of the 20th Main Regi-ment. Born in Connaught and died here, aged eleven years and three months.'”
“Children, Ryan. Younger even than that bloodthirsty albino in the truck. So many died here. Oak Hill. The Peach Orchard and Little Round Top. Cemetery Ridge and the Devil’s Den. The wounded begging for death. A bullet in arm or leg, Mr. Cawdor, meant cold, blunt steel. The piles of severed limbs quite o’ertopped the tents where the surgeons labored.”
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Ryan straightened and looked around at the quiet fields and hedgerows, their lines still visible among the tide of fresh vegetation. A wood pigeon was cooing softly in a grove of immensely tall sycamores near a narrow, mean-dering stream. It was a scene of perfect, idyllic peace.
“You say this was a big fight?”
“A big fight, Ryan?” Doc queried. “Oh, I think that I might say that. Some fifty thousand men and boys were killed or wounded in those three days in bright July. Five years before I was born. Fifty thousand lost, Ryan.”
“Who won? North or South?”
Doc Tanner scuffed at the ground where one of the tablets had toppled over. “General Lee hoped for the one great battle that would turn the tide for the South. This was to be it. Gettysburg. The high-water mark for the Confederate States of America. The war was not yet over, but now the die was cast and the count was against the South.”