If it was true, Eugene presented a problem. They had to get by the ruined city.

Bokuto insisted on taking no chances. Gordon glowered and hardly spoke at all as the expedition wasted three days on frozen, buckled asphalt roads, skirting far to the east of Springfield then south again to arrive at last at the fortified town of Cottage Grove.

It had been only a short time since a few towns south of Eugene had been reunited with the more prosperous communities to the north. Now the invaders had nearly cut them off again.

On Gordon’s mental map of the once great state of Oregon, the entire eastern two-thirds were wilderness, high desert, ancient lava flows, and the mountainous ramparts of the Cascades.

The gray Pacific bounded the rain-shrouded coast range in the west.

The northern and southern edges of the state, too, were virtually impassible blotches. In the north the Columbia Valley still glowed from the bombs that had tortured Portland and shattered the great river’s dams.

The other blot spilled a hundred miles into the southern edge of the state from unknown California — and centered on the mountainous canyonland known as the Rogue.

Even in happier times the area around Medford had been known for a certain “strange” element. Before the Doomwar it had been estimated that the Rogue River Valley held more secret caches, more illegal machine guns, than anywhere outside the Everglades.

While civil authority was still struggling to hang on, sixteen years ago, it was the hyper-survivalist plague that struck the final blow, all over the civilized world. In southern Oregon the followers of Nathan Holn had been particularly violent. The fate of the poor citizens of that region was never known.

Between the desert and the sea, between radiation and the Holnist madmen, two small areas had come out of the Three-Year Winter with enough left to do a little more than scratch as animals… the Willamette in the north and the towns around Roseburg in the south. But in the beginning, the southernmost patch seemed surely doomed to slavery or worse at the hands of the new barbarians.

Then, somewhere between the Rogue and the Umpqua, something unexpected happened. The cancer had been arrested. The enemy had been stopped. To find out how was Gordon’s desperate hope, before the transplanted disease took hold fully in the vulnerable Willamette Valley.

On Gordon’s mental map an ugly red incursion had spread inland from the invader beachheads west of Eugene. And Cottage Grove was now nearly cut off.

They got their first glimpse of how bad things had become less than a mile out of town. The bodies of six men hung by the road, crucified on sagging telephone poles. The corpses had not been left unmarked.

“Cut them down,” he ordered. Gordon’s heart pounded and his mouth was dry, exactly the reaction the enemy had wanted from this exercise in calculated terror. Obviously the men of Cottage Grove weren’t even patrolling this far out anymore. That did not bode well.

An hour later he saw how much had changed since the last time he had visited the town. Watchtowers stood at the comers of new earthen ramparts. On the outside, prewar buildings had been razed to make a broad free-fire zone.

Population had swollen three-fold with refugees, most living in crowded shanties just inside the main gate. Children clung to the skirts of gaunt-faced women and stared as the riders from the north passed by. Men stood in clusters, warming their hands over open fires. The smoke mixed with a mist from unwashed bodies to make an unpleasant, aromatic fog.

Some of the men looked like pretty rough customers. Gordon wondered how many of them were Holnist infiltrators, only pretending to be refugees. It had happened before.

There was worse news. From the Town Council they learned that Mayor Peter Von Kleek had died in an ambush only days before, trying to lead a patrol to the aid of a besieged hamlet. The loss was incalculable and it struck Gordon hard. It also helped explain the mood of stunned silence on the cold streets.

He gave his best morale speech that evening, by torchlight in the crowded square. But this time the cheers of the crowd were tired and ragged. His address was interrupted twice by the faint, echoing crack of gunshots, carrying over the ramparts from the forest hills beyond.

“I don’t give ‘em two months, once the snow melts,” Bokuto whispered the next day as they rode out of Cottage Grove. “Two weeks, if the damsurvivalists try hard.”

Gordon did not have to reply. The town was the southern linchpin of the alliance. When it collapsed, there would be nothing to prevent the full force of the enemy from turning north to the heartland of the valley and Corvallis itself.

They rode south in a light flurry of snow, climbing the Coast Fork of the Willamette River toward its source. The dark green pine forest glistened under its white blanket. Here and there the bright red bark of myrtlewood stood out against the gray banks of the half-frozen stream.

Still, a few obstinate Mergansers fished the icy waters, trying in their own way to survive until spring.

South of the abandoned town of London, they left the diminished river. There followed a long, uninhabited stretch, featured only by the overgrown ruins of farms and an occasional tumbled-down gas station.

It had been a silent trek, so far. But now, at last, security lightened a bit as even the suspicious Philip Bokuto felt sure they were beyond the likely range of Holnist patrols. Talking was allowed. There was even laughter.

All of the men were over thirty, so they played the Remember Game… telling old-time jokes that would have no meaning at all to any of the new generation, and arguing lightheartedly over dimly recollected sports arcana. Gordon nearly fell out of his saddle laughing as Aaron Schimmel gave nasal impressions of popular television personalities of the nineties.

“It’s amazing how much of our youth gets stored away, ready to be recalled,” he commented to Philip. “They used to say one sign of getting old is when you remember things from twenty years ago easier than recent events.”

“Yeah,” Bokuto said, grinning, and his voice took on a querulous falsetto. “What was it we were just talking about?”

Gordon tapped the side of his head. “Eh? Can’t hear you, fellah. . … Too much rock ‘n’ roll, way back when.”

The men grew accustomed to the cold bite of wintry mornings and the soft pad of horses’ hooves on the grass-covered Interstate. The land had recovered — deer grazed these forests once again — but man would for a long time be too sparse to come back and retake all the abandoned villages.

The Coast Fork tributaries fell away at last. The travelers crossed a narrow line of hills and a day later found themselves by the banks of a new stream.

“The Umpqua,” their guide identified.

The northerners stared. This chilled torrent did not empty into the placid Willamette, and thence the great Columbia. Rather it carved its own untamed way westward toward the sea. “Welcome to sunny southern Oregon,” Bokuto muttered, subdued once again. The skies glowered down on them. Even the trees seemed wilder than up north.

The impression held as they began passing small, stockaded settlements once again. Silent, narrow-eyed men watched them from eyries on the hillsides, and let them pass on by without speaking. Word of their coming had preceded them, and it was clear that these people had nothing against postmen. But it was just as obvious they had little use for strangers.

Spending a night in the village of Sutherlin, Gordon saw up close how the southerners lived. Their homes were simple and spare, with few of the amenities still owned by those in the north. Hardly anyone did not bear visible scars from disease, malnutrition, overwork, or war.

Although they did not stare or say anything discourteous, it wasn’t hard to guess what the locals thought of Willametters.