Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  “What’s going on?” Terrence moved to the window and took in the mob of people moving across the field through the dark. Some moved furtively, but most didn’t appear to have the energy; a hundred or more plodded toward the farmhouse.

  “What should I do?” Sage begged.

  “Shoot them,” Terrence yelled. He lifted the partially raised but stubborn window with a loud creak and propped his hunting rifle against the window frame, ran the bolt, steadied, then fired.

  The massive boom inside the room dizzied Sage, but he collected himself and braced his .30-30 against the other side of the window frame. The mob had already cleared most of the back field, the front wave lumbering toward them, just twenty yards from the back door.

  Terrence fired again and Sage joined him.

  Like a video game, Sage picked a target, squeezed the trigger, ran the lever, and picked another target. He had no idea if he was hitting anyone, but the number of sprawling bodies in the backyard grew steadily.

  Just a video game, Sage repeated to himself. Modern Combat. Medal of Honor. Just a video game.

  He ran the Winchester like a stick-shift car, more machine than weapon.

  Press the clutch, shift gears, pop the clutch.

  The Winchester kept doing its mechanical job, locked in its mechanical rhythm.

  Finger straight, run the lever, pick the target, press the trigger.

  The process repeated itself until the rifle ran dry. When that happened, it took Sage several seconds to remember what to do next.

  Reload.

  Sage dug in his pocket for more shiny, brass cartridges and pressed them into the little port on the side of the rifle, his hands quaking like the last leaves of fall.

  The mob kept coming, unfazed by the shooting and death in their ranks. They reached the farmhouse and broke like a wave, some pouring into the house and others flowing around the building and heading toward the animal pens.

  Sage heard the big farmer pounding down the steps, letting loose with his six-gun, running it dry. A long scream rang out, then another. Cacophony filled the farmhouse. Sage abandoned his shooting position and turned to help the farmer.

  As Sage ran downstairs, he dared not shoot. The first floor was full of shadowy people, cloaked in darkness. He couldn’t tell the difference between family and intruder. People yelled, screamed, and wailed. When Sage hit the floor, he almost fell; the wood was slick with fluids. As soon as he recovered, an onslaught of bodies jostled him. They shoved past him in the dark, hungrily climbing the stairs.

  Panic gripped him, and Sage made an about-face and scrambled back up the steps, catapulting through the mob. He burst into Terrence’s bedroom and scooped up his backpack, stabbing his arms through the loops and pulling it tight against his back.

  “They’re coming up the stairs,” Sage shouted to Terrence, who was still firing out the window. Terrence turned to shoot at the door.

  “Don’t bother. There are more than a hundred. Get your mom out of here.” So long as Terrence kept shooting, Sage felt like a coward. Better to run. Better to carry loved ones to safety than to kill.

  Terrence snapped out of his bloodlust and headed toward his parents’ bedroom. Muted light filtered through the window shades, a harbinger of daylight.

  Sage stopped to think. The farm had been overrun. He had maybe ten bullets left. He topped off the tubular magazine of the 30-30 with two more rounds. It was probably too late to hide any of the animals or the family’s food storage. He could hear a mass of people in the kitchen below, laying waste to the pantry.

  The bedroom door burst open. Sage reflexively aimed the .30-30 at the tangle of bodies shoving through the doorway. The first couple of intruders noticed the gun and fell to the floor, covering their faces. The people behind pushed past, their eyes scanning for anything to eat or steal. Sage stood his ground but couldn’t bring himself to shoot. The wild-eyed invaders surged into the room and went to work, tearing through the closet and nightstand, occasionally glaring up at Sage as if to say: you can shoot us, but hunger will kill us anyway.

  Sage wondered at their feral recklessness. They burrowed into Terrence’s drawers and closet, finding nothing edible or even useful, but they dug through clothes, magazines, and shoes anyway. With the rifle waving impotently at the pack of human animals, Sage side-stepped the savages and fled.

  The hall was empty. In every room, he could hear creatures tearing at the belongings of the Holland family. Sage peeked into the master bedroom. Thelma was gone, replaced with hunched foragers digging through her nightstand and armoire. The guns had fallen silent, and the mob had more to fear from one another than they did the Hollands. Any food discovered was instantly devoured or carried off at a run to keep another person from stealing it.

  With his backpack on his back and his rifle in hand, Sage felt strangely neutral, like an observer to incomprehensible chaos. More than anything, he wanted to check on the family. But, with darkness still holding sway on the ground floor of the farmhouse, and with a hundred bodies crammed and thrashing within the home, Sage couldn’t tell friend from foe.

  He shoved his way to the front door and looked back. He could see Farmer Holland fighting a man for a big jar of bottled peaches. Sage considered helping but, no matter who won, a bottle of peaches would be a symbolic victory at best. Sage abandoned the claustrophobic house and fled into the front yard. Terrence and Thelma stood, helpless and frustrated, near one of the huge cottonwoods.

  The only member of the family Sage hadn’t seen was Angelina. He assumed the laborers were with their families at the laborers’ village a quarter of a mile up the dirt road. Sage looked around in the growing light. The mob grappled with animals—trying to capture and subdue cows, chickens, and geese. The goat already lay dead, people setting to it with knives in a grotesque parody of Julius Caesar.

  In the distance, Sage recognized Justin. He was directing people and shouting orders, though the mob seemed largely loosed from any control. Once again, Sage considered shooting Justin and demurred. Instinct told him it would be a just and due price for the devastation of the farmhouse, yet he couldn’t raise his rifle. He argued with the reality before him―Justin had made good on his threat of destruction, but Sage could not face the responsibility to kill a man, a man he knew, a man who deserved to die.

  Instead, he strode across the yard toward his enemy, holding the Winchester out in front of him like a rattlesnake stuffed in a sock.

  Justin noticed him coming in the dawn light. “Is that our little man? With an assault rifle, even?”

  “You destroyed a good family by coming here. I hope you realize that.” Sage yelped.

  Justin held out his hands. “I told you. The days of the elite are over. This man is going to have to share his food. Hundreds are starving down at the road. Who is he to keep all this for himself?”

  “Those people will starve anyway,” Sage answered, searching for the perfect retort but coming up short.

  “Oh, so now you’re God? You’re going to let those people starve so this family can have plenty?”

  Sage ignored the question. “Where’s Penny?”

  “Penny?” Justin laughed and pointed his finger at Sage. “Oh, yeah, you were hoping to bang her, weren’t you? You might just have a chance now, big shot traitor with a gun. She’s dead… And that’s on you. You led the farmer to our camp, and now Penny is dead in a ditch next to the interstate and you killed her.”

  Sage struggled to take this information in as the world shifted under his feet. He barely knew Penny, but she hadn’t deserved to die. His eyes filled with tears he didn’t want Justin to see, so he whipped around and went back to his search for Angelina.

  “See you later, turd,” Justin called out behind him.

  Sage trotted past the animal pens, now overrun by the mob. He ran into the barn and darkness engulfed him again. As with everywhere else, the barn was filled with the grunts of human scavengers. The sheep were all dead, and Sage assumed the horses wer
e dead, too, because they had ceased to whinny. He looked into the stall of the mare and, as expected, she was dead, a long, ragged gash across her throat. As Sage took in the scene, he realized that a person lay pinned under her.

  Fearing the worst, Sage dropped to the ground and set his shoulder to the dead horse, jamming his legs between the carcass and the wall of the barn, then pushing with all his strength. The body of the horse rolled and came away from the inert form of Angelina. Sage pulled the girl clear, and the horse rolled back to its former repose.

  Angelina had bled profusely from her left ear and the front of her face, on top of her port wine scar. One of the stall shovels lay on the concrete floor, slick with her blood. As he hunted for a pulse on her neck, Sage pieced together the scene. Angelina had placed herself between the mob and the mare, and someone had slammed her aside with the shovel.

  He found no pulse. Angelina was lost, having given her life to defend a doomed animal. The feral mob hadn’t eaten the horse while it lay on top of the dead girl. Killing her had probably been enough to cause them to move on, at least for the present.

  All the bright promise that had once drummed in her veins had poured out into the straw on the bottom of the horse stall, all in exchange for a wasted horse, a horse the mob had declined to eat anyway. Maybe if they had ever seen her dance on the lawn, they would have let her live. All they would have had to do was pass by this one stall. They could have even killed the other horses, and she probably wouldn’t have stopped them. This horse had meant enough for her to give her life.

  If they had seen her dance, maybe they would have thought twice about smashing in the side of her head with a dung-encrusted shovel. Or maybe they had lost the ability to know dance, to acknowledge beauty. Maybe they were no more human than vultures at this point.

  He couldn’t leave her in the barn with the wandering packs of human animals, so he scooped her up with a grunt, grabbing his rifle in his free hand. He simply wasn’t strong enough to hold her in his arms, so he hitched up his strength and pitched her over his shoulder. He staggered into the dawn light, carrying her away from the abattoir the barn had become.

  He stumbled as far from the farmhouse as he could, eventually laying Angelina’s body on a stack of pallets by the woodshed. He looked up to see several laborers running toward him, led by Antonio. Most were armed with rifles, though a couple had baseball bats. Antonio carried his pellet gun.

  “What happened?” Antonio asked, looking down at Angelina with horror.

  “The farmhouse was overrun. She’s dead.”

  “And Mr. Rolland? Mrs. Thelma?”

  “I think they’re okay. Stay here and watch Angelina. I’ll be back.” Sage didn’t know why he wanted them to stand vigil over her. Part of him feared the rabble would eat her body like they had the goat’s.

  Sage ran to the big cottonwood. Farmer Holland had joined his family in the yard and stood helplessly watching the horde gut their home.

  “Come with me. Angelina’s been hurt.” Sage couldn’t bring himself to tell them she was dead.

  When they came around the corner and saw her body, splayed unnaturally over the pallets, they somehow knew she had been taken from them. Her father searched for a pulse frantically, sobs coming from deep within him. Her mother wept disconsolately beside him, her hands covering her mouth. Terrence stood stock still, his eyes glazed over.

  Sage turned to Terrence. “We need to take the house back. The mob’s thinning. We can retake the house if we move now.”

  Whatever Sage said, Terrence must have heard a call for revenge, because it pulled him out of his grief. He nodded, and Sage motioned for the farmhands to come with them. They rounded the corner of the woodshed and animal pens, seeing that many of the pack retreated with armloads of looted food, scampering back toward the highway to feed. The pace of the larceny had slowed, and the gang’s number had fallen to a fraction of its former size as the pillage passed its apogee. The easy food had been taken, and only the mangled bodies of the farm animals remained.

  Sage picked Justin out, directing the remaining marauders as they set upon the meat, shifting into a more methodical attempt to render the dead animals into food.

  Sage pointed to Justin. “Terrence, that man—the one in the plaid shirt and the beard—he’s their leader. Once he’s gone, we can take back the house.”

  In this new world, this world of thin margins and fragile life, a feckless, selfish soul like Justin would take and never give. He would consume people to make his way, as he already had. But Sage’s rifle hung at his side, inert.

  His eyes ablaze with anger, Terrence asked no questions. He settled against the woodshed corner with his rifle and fired.

  Justin spun as though an invisible giant had kicked him in the shoulder, and he slipped sideways to the ground. Terrence looked up from his scope, unbalanced by his vengeance. Justin writhed on the ground for a moment, then climbed to his feet and stumbled away, back toward the highway.

  Terrence lined up to shoot again, but Sage rested his hand on the rifle, pushing it away.

  “He’s gone,” Sage said. “He won’t survive that wound without medical care. Save the bullet.” Sage waved to the laborers and the group fanned out, driving the remainder of the throng before them.

  A couple resisted and earned savage beatings at the hands of the farm laborers. After ten minutes, they had driven the looters off and regained control of the farmhouse. The scavengers wandered away toward the highway in small, hobbling knots.

  Farmer Holland carried Angelina’s body onto the porch, still crying unhindered, repeating “My beautiful girl, my beautiful girl, my beautiful girl…” Thelma walked upstairs in a trance.

  The kitchen and pantry were destroyed. Not a single bottle, bag, or can remained. Food was strewn across the floor, ruined. Even the stored animal feed in bins outside had been spilled and cast about. The laborers went to work recovering everything they could. Luckily, the silos of feed corn were still intact, though some had been dumped on the ground.

  Sage cleared his rifle chamber, slid the Winchester into his pack and walked back into the barn. Terrence followed.

  “We need to save all this meat,” Terrence said, “even the horse meat. We’re going to starve this winter if we don’t.”

  “I think I saw two chickens out in the field. They must’ve gotten away from the looters,” Sage told him.

  “Two’s a start,” Terrence answered, turning to anything that might distract him from his pain. “I hope a rooster made it.”

  The two young men stopped at the corpse of the goat, the bloody flesh seeming to clot and gurgle before their eyes. Sage had butchered several large animals with his father: two deer, and once a dairy cow. An animal’s body, expertly divided into edible portions, was remarkable in its implicit organization—as if God designed it to be split up and enjoyed by humanity.

  An animal’s hide pulled neatly away from the meat, a layer of fat smoothing the process. Muscle groups tucked together in sacks of fascia, a plastic membrane that collected and protected them from the oxidizing effects of atmosphere so they could be safely seasoned without hardening prematurely. The organs of a beast and, Sage presumed, a human, were contained in tidy sacks that kept the heart and lungs away from the putrescence of gut and spleen. With a modicum of care and skill, an animal came apart in neat packets for human consumption, clean and efficient; a gift from God to his elegant creations.

  What Sage and Terrence regarded before them had once been a goat, but had lately become a wasted mess—an indiscriminate blob of blood and gore. The steely knives of the marauders might have extracted some scant portion of edible meat, but the majority had been left to intermingle with gut and bile, the gravel and dung of the farmyard―a life discarded in exchange for a few mouthfuls of raw flesh, the gift of God defiled.

  “Terrence,” Sage said, shaking his head, “you know they’re going to come back, right? You can’t stay here.”

  “We have to stay here. O
ur water’s here. Our fields are here. This is our land.”

  “You’re too close to the highway. Even if you were willing to kill every one of those people on the road, more will come. They’ll walk here from as far away as Yakima. You can’t stay here.”

  “We have to. We’ll die anywhere else,” Terrence argued.

  “You can’t afford to feed me, then,” Sage reasoned with him. “I’ll help you get the meat jerked, but then I should go.”

  Terrence looked off in the distance. “We could use your gun, but you’re probably right. I don’t know if we can even feed our own family. It’s going to be bad without the animals and our storage.”

  Even as Terrence agreed with him, Sage knew he was doing them no favors by leaving. Sage didn’t need their food for the winter; he had his own. But, if he stayed at the farmhouse, he would doom himself along with the Holland family. It would require an arsenal and an army to fight off the constant gangs of marauders, and they would keep coming until there was nothing left but a burned-out scar where the farmhouse once stood.

  Sage would keep his word to his father instead of sacrificing his life for the Hollands. Some tragedies could not be avoided, but they needn’t be witnessed.

  “Can I stay on the farm? Maybe out by the pond?” he asked.

  “Sure. Of course.” Terrence’s mind seemed to drift toward his grief.

  Sage pulled him back to the dismembered goat and the world of the survivor.

  “Show me how to jerk this.”

  Maxwell Canyon, Hildale, Utah

  Cameron figured the rifle he had stolen was a Mosin Nagant—a World War Two Russian rifle that could be purchased in any of a thousand U.S. gun stores for eighty bucks. He had seen it on Tales of the Gun on the History Channel. That probably explained why most of the polygamists carried the same rifle. It was a rifle they could buy by the crate. The box of shells said “7.62 x 54mmR,” which meant nothing to him. They looked like big bullets, about the size of his grandpa’s 30-06. So long as the little scope turned out to be sighted in properly, it would be perfect for what Cameron had in mind: dealing death from a distance.