The Postman Read Online Free Page A

damply off the misty heights. Gordon limped up a dry stream bed and leaned on his staff as he climbed a set of switchbacks. Then, when he guessed he was within a quarter mile of his goal, the path suddenly failed.
    He kept his forearms up to protect his face while he tried to move quietly through the dry undergrowth. He fought down a lingering, threatening urge to sneeze in the floating dust.
    Chilly night fog was flowing down the mountainsides. Soon the ground would shimmer with faintly luminous ground frost. Still, Gordon shivered less from the cold than from nerves. He knew he was getting close. One way or another, he was about to have an encounter with death.
    In his youth he had read about heroes, historical and fictional. Nearly all of them, when the time came for action, seemed able to push aside their personal burdens of worry, confusion, angst, for at least the time when action impended. But Gordon’s mind didn’t seem to work that way. Instead it just filled with more and more complexities, a turmoil of regrets.
    It wasn’t that he had doubts about what had to be done. By every standard he lived by, this was the right thing to do. Survival demanded it. And anyway, if he was to be a dead man, at least he could make the mountains a little safer for the next wayfarer by taking a few of the bastards with him.
    Still, the nearer he drew to the confrontation, the more he realized that he hadn’t wanted his dharma to come to this. He did not really wish to kill any of these men.
    It had been this way even as, with Lieutenant Van’s little platoon, he had struggled to help maintain a peace—and a fragment of a nation—that had already died.
    And afterward, he had chosen the life of a minstrel, a traveling actor and laborer—partly in order to keep moving, searching for a light, somewhere.
    A few of the surviving postwar communities were known to accept outsiders as new members. Women were always welcome, of course, but some accepted new men. And yet there was so often a catch. A new male frequently had to duel-kill for the right to sit at a communal table, or bring back a scalp from a feuding clan to prove his prowess. There were few real Holnists anymore, in the plains and Rockies. But many survivor outposts he had encountered nevertheless demanded rituals of which Gordon wanted no part.
    And now here he was, counting bullets, a part of himcoldly noting that, if he made them count, there were probably enough for all the bandits.
    Another sparse berry thicket blocked his path. What the patch lacked in fruit it made up for in thorns. This time Gordon moved along its edge, carefully picking his way in the gathering gloom. His sense of direction—honed after fourteen years of wandering—was automatic. He moved silently, cautious without rising above the maelstrom of his own thoughts.
    All considered, it was amazing a man like him had lived this long. Everyone he had known or admired as a boy had died, along with all the hopes any of them had had. The soft world made for dreamers like himself broke apart when he was only eighteen. Long since then he’d come to realize that his persistent optimism had to be a form of hysterical insanity.
    Hell, everybody’s crazy, these days
.
    Yes
, he answered himself.
But paranoia and depression are adaptive, now. Idealism is only stupid
.
    Gordon paused at a small blob of color. He peered into the bramble and saw, about a yard inside, a solitary clump of blueberries, apparently overlooked by the local black bear. The mist heightened Gordon’s sense of smell and he could pick their faint autumn mustiness out of the air.
    Ignoring the stabbing thorns, he reached in and drew back a sticky handful. The tart sweetness was a wild thing in his mouth, like Life.
    Twilight was almost gone, and a few wan stars winked through a darkling overcast. The cold breeze rifled his torn shirt and reminded Gordon that it was time to get this business over with, before his hands were too chilled to