After the Fall: Catherine's Tale Part 2: The warrior's fight for survival begins

by David Nees

  Jason led them out onto the front yard. “Have one of your men grab some wood scraps from the barn and stick them into the barbed wire on the fence.” He went into the house and returned with the M110. He handed it to Catherine. It was bigger and heavier than her .223 carbine. She looked dubiously at it as she hefted it in her arms. The clansman came back from the fence, having inserted four pieces of wood in the wire. Catherine got down and stretched herself out on the ground and looked through the scope.

  “Remember to keep the butt tight against your shoulder and don’t put your eye close to the scope,” Jason said. “You’re clear to shoot.”

  She took a deep breath and struggled to set the crosshairs on the first piece of bark. She was aware that the clansmen had gathered in the yard behind her. She was nervous. The larger caliber’s kick would be stronger. She exhaled, tried to slow her heart beat, then took another deep breath and let it out slowly. The cross hairs settled on the target, her right hand squeezed. She couldn’t keep her eyes from closing in anticipation of the shot.

  The rifle’s loud report and recoil startled her, even with her expecting it. The shot went high and wide, a small puff of dirt appearing far out in the field. She looked up. Bird looked at her, his face impassive, unreadable. No one spoke.

  Catherine felt her face flush with embarrassment. She resettled herself on the ground and again steadied the crosshairs on the target. You can do this. It was now a matter of showing the group her skills and confirming Jason’s comments about her to the others. This time she closed her mind to the kick. The rifle barked again and this time the scrap of wood splintered.

  She could almost feel the crowd exhale.

  “It’s a little hard to shoot with an audience,” Catherine said.

  “You want to try some more shots? You should make sure you’re comfortable with it,” Jason said.

  “Yeah, but let Bird take a shot, make sure he’s dialed in. I don’t want to use up all the targets,” she said with a smile.

  Bird lay down in the yard and after a short moment fired off a round, shattering the second board. They spent the next fifteen minutes going through a dozen rounds each. The man went back down to the fence three times to replace the targets with ever smaller bits of board. By the end she knew that Bird was a good shot and that she was comfortable with the M110.

  Jason went over the rifle with Catherine. “If you’re going to be a sniper, you have to know more than just how to shoot. You’ve got to be able to figure distances and windage and factor in whether or not you’re shooting up or down elevation. Before the EMP attack, we had hand computers to do the figuring and we had rangefinder scopes that would give us the distance. Now you’re more on your own.” He handed her a well-worn notebook. “I brought this with me when I left Hillsboro. Never thought I’d need it but didn’t want to leave it behind.”

  The book contained tables for putting corrections in for distance and windage. “I hope you don’t expect me to memorize all of this before I go up there.”

  “Just the important parts.” Jason’s face was stern. “You’ll be shooting longer distances. There are scope-adjustment tables to get you close.”

  He showed her how to take the average height of a male, around five feet ten inches, and estimate the range using the binoculars with their ranging scale in the lens. Next he showed her how to adjust for windage using the tables in the book. Adjustments could also be made for how many degrees up or down she was shooting. It was somewhat intimidating, but Catherine was a quick study, eager to learn all the elements of being a sniper.

  Then he gave her more ammunition. They continued to practice, with the distance to the targets being changed, and at the end she was hitting every target. Bird’s shooting had been accurate and steady throughout the exercise.

  Clayton was grinning at her from the porch railing above her as she got up. “She looks like she can handle the rifle,” he said.

  “How do you feel?” Jason asked.

  “It’s definitely more powerful, but I can handle it.”

  Most of the audience had dispersed back to the tents. Catherine went up onto the porch, Bird following her. Jason was standing there with his serious look. He wasn’t done teaching.

  “That’s marksmanship. The next thing is positioning,” Jason said. “It’s vital to your survival. Remember, your job is to fight from a distance. You’re outnumbered. You have to always have a back door, a retreat path, and a new position to set up again and continue shooting. In a direct confrontation, you lose, so make them fight you on your terms, and never up close.”

  Early the next morning, as the sun rose, Catherine and Bird started walking up the valley road. They wore backpacks carrying two days of trail food and one hundred rounds of ammunition each. Catherine carried the M110 slung over her shoulder. Strapped to her waist was her 9mm pistol. Bird had only his rifle. They trudged along the road in silence. Bird didn’t seem the talkative sort, and Catherine was enjoying the quiet of the morning.

  The sun warmed them as it rose in the sky, and they soon began to feel the heat of the day. When they came near the end of the paved road, they veered off to the south and began to hike up the slope.

  They worked their way through the trees, staying close to the deepening gorge on their right. The old two-track road, off to their right, came over the saddle on the west ridge and wound its way down into the valley. They were ascending the south ridge, and the ravine separated the south slope from the western one. They were looking for outcroppings or clearings that would give them clear sight lines to the road as it came over the top and down the ridge across from them.

  Periodically on their climb, they detoured to the right to look for the old road and to check their altitude. The road was sometimes hard to pick out. The trees covered it under their canopy for long stretches. After studying the terrain, Catherine realized that they would only get clear shots where the road emerged to make sharp U-turns on their end. The ravine separating their ridge from the one to the west forced the road into its serpentine course as it wound down the slope.

  “We’re only going to have clear shooting at the switchbacks,” she commented as they stared through the trees.

  “Got to make the shots count,” Bird replied.

  “Yeah. Let’s get higher, so we can start shooting while they’re further upslope. We’ll have to take full advantage of each switchback.”

  “Might make them stop and think before each turn,” Bird offered.

  They turned back to their uphill climb. The day grew hotter as they worked their way uphill. Both of them were soon sweating and swatting at flies that harassed them.

  Catherine remembered her discovery of the road. It had surprised her. While it was difficult to see up on the slope, the old road was even harder to detect when it got to the valley floor, where it was heavily grown over with grasses and small willow shrubs. A close inspection would reveal the traces, but a casual observer would not notice it. The paved valley road ended in a turnaround as it approached the west slope. What one didn’t see through the willows was the old road connected off to one side. Unless you knew it was there, your eye would not pick out its faint path.

  When they had climbed well over halfway up the slope, Catherine stopped at an outcropping that was shielded with a few trees and mountain laurel bushes.

  “This is a good spot. We’re not far below the west saddle. We can shoot at them as they come over the ridge. They’ll be skylighted against the horizon.”

  Bird shook his head. “That ain’t good.”

  “Why do you say that? It’s a clear shot at them where they’re most exposed.”

  “We shoot at them at the top of the road, they just back their trucks down out of sight, leave ‘em, and spread out through the woods. That’s what I’d do. We won’t know where they gone.”

  Catherine thought about that. “So we have to wait for them to get over the ridge? That means we don’t shoot until that switchback about fifty yards downslope fr
om the top.”

  “We start there. If they jump into the woods, we’ll see the direction they gone. I don’t think they’ll be very good in the woods, so we can fight them that way too.”

  “I hate to let them get further into the valley, but you may be right.”

  They were in a good position to hit the first switchback. They stepped back from the edge of the outcropping and began to set up their shooting positions. They cut some brush and wove the branches through the laurel to better hide their position, and they piled up stones for shooting rests. When they were finished, they moved down the slope and searched out two fallback shooting positions that had sight lines to the other exposed switchbacks on the bark road. By the time they were done setting those up, the day was ending.

  They climbed back to the first position to spend the night. Each had a blanket and a ground cloth. They would alternate sleeping and keeping watch. There was no way to know when the attack would come.

  If it came at night, Catherine hoped the attackers would be using their headlights to light their way.

  For now, she and Bird settled down to dried venison and water, accompanied by some early blackberries they had packed. After they had eaten, they got as comfortable as they could among the rocks, nestled in their blankets and ground cloths, with their backpacks under their heads. With the sun gone, the cool of the night began to advance. Even in summer, the nights often remained cool in the mountain valley. There was no question of a fire. The buzz of insects from the day had faded with the sun. A stillness surrounded them like a thin blanket, soft and loose. Over it an occasional hoot from an owl could be heard in the distance. Frogs began their ritual croaking somewhere below in the ravine.

  As the first stars began to show, Catherine thought about Bird. He was the only teenager she had come into contact with outside of the valley after the EMP attack. It made her think about school and the normal life that had ended. “Do you miss school?” she asked.

  “Nah. Never liked it much.”

  “Did they call you Bird there?”

  “Yeah. Everybody did.”

  “So they called you Bird Early in school? Did that cause you any problems?”

  Bird looked at her. His face was scowling. “You mean like changing it to ‘early bird’…getting’ the worm?”

  “Yeah. I’m not making fun of it, Bird’s a nice name really, but I know how kids can be. I got kidded a lot in school.”

  “I got that. Got in some fights over it.”

  “That why you didn’t like school?”

  “Some. I didn’t like sitting in a chair all day…being inside.”

  They were quiet for a while, with only the sounds of the forest intruding on their silence.

  Finally Catherine spoke again.

  “You miss the power being on? I mean how much it’s changed our lives?”

  “Not so much. I like what I do now…being in the woods and all…you know, huntin’, fishin’, trappin’. I always liked that. Now I get to do it every day.”

  Catherine thought about that for a while. “I kind of miss going to school…learning things.”

  “Bet you had a lot of friends. You’re pretty. I didn’t have many friends. Most looked down on kids like me.”

  Catherine smiled at him. “Thank you. I had a few friends, but not that many. A lot of the kids were more popular than me. I was pretty quiet.”

  “Quiet’s good. Most people talk too much anyway.”

  “Some of the kids looked down on me and my sister since we came from this valley. They really treated Billy bad.”

  “Who’s Billy?”

  “Billy Turner. He’s my age. He moved to Hillsboro two months ago.”

  “I think some of us are related to him. I heard Clayton talk about it.”

  “I didn’t know that. Turners have lived in the valley for a long, long time.” Catherine thought about Billy. “He’s a country boy like you, that’s for sure. But he wasn’t always nice…like you are. You have an honest look and nice, clear eyes. I like that.”

  Bird looked down at the ground, grabbed a stick and began to poke around with it. “You got a boyfriend?”

  Catherine smiled. “Yes. We’re getting married as soon as this fighting’s settled.”

  “Pretty young to get married, ain’t you?”

  “Not really. Times have changed. I’ll bet you got some girls eyeing you.”

  Bird snorted. “Maybe. Some of ‘em just too fussy for me.” He looked up at Catherine. “They not be like you. They can’t shoot and take care of theirselves. I like that you can do that.”

  “Most boys don’t, I think.”

  “Well, I do. Not sure I’ll find a girl like you.”

  “You’ll find a girl. Maybe you just have to teach her how to shoot and hunt. Jason taught me.”

  There was an awkward pause.

  Catherine tried to change the subject. “You think they’ll come this way?”

  “Can’t be sure, but I think you right about watching this road. It’s what I’d do if I was to attack the valley. ‘Specially since they know how you fought at the bridge. Bet they don’t want any part of that.”

  “Then we have to stop them.” Catherine felt the burden of their task pressing down on her. If her fears were proven right, they would have to significantly slow down the attackers until help could come. It was up to her and Bird to keep them from hitting the farms, killing their friends, and destroying what they had all built up.

  She wanted to steer the conversation back to lighter things, but the import of the moment pressed other thoughts from her mind.

  Bird said, “Look, if something happens to me, you get out of here. Don’t try to save me and get yourself killed.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you. We’ll just shoot at a long distance and keep out of sight. I doubt they can shoot all that well.”

  “Still, I don’t want you to get hurt…or worse, caught by them. No tellin’ what they’d do.”

  Catherine had faced down outlaws that had killed, raped, and even participated in cannibalism. In that fight she had known the fate that threatened her, and it had only made her fight harder.

  She spoke in a quiet tone. “We’ll both be all right. I’ve been up against even worse than these.” Her voice sounded so sure of itself, but there was a kernel of fear inside her that tried to grow and take over her confidence. She pushed it down.

  She yawned and stretched out her arms. “Okay then, you go to sleep,” Bird said. “I’ll watch first.”

  “All right, but wake me. I don’t want you to stay up all night. We both need some rest.”

  Chapter 11

  Lori Sue and Billy lay in their bed, spent from making love. Billy savored the feeling of intense satisfaction coupled with a deep relaxation. He had found a girl that liked him, that made love to him, that respected what he knew and what he could do. He was calmer now when they made love. Lori Sue had shown him how to please her. And she certainly knew how to please him. He rolled over toward her and propped himself up on his elbow, “I love you, Lori Sue,” he said quietly.

  “That rhymes,” she said with a giggle. “Maybe you could write a song about me.”

  “I doubt it. I ain’t good with words. But I’m sure glad I found you.”

  “Me too,” she answered.

  After a moment she turned over to put her face close to his. “You know we been talking about what we can do after Stansky‘s gone. I know you don’t want me to keep doin’ what I’m doin’—”

  “I don’t like you seeing other guys…now that you’re with me.”

  “I know. But the way things are now, it’s what I gotta do.” Lori Sue put her fingers to his lips to keep him from responding. “But after, things’ll be different. I’m thinkin’ we can start a bar and restaurant. You can hunt for the food, make the moonshine, and I can run the place. I used to work as a waitress in a bar before the power went out. We could do that. I even know how to bartend. We’ll have good food to eat
, lots to drink.” She went on, excitement building in her voice. “We’ll have sawdust on the floors. It’ll be warm inside and smell like beer. I’ll find us a cook and some guys to play country music. People will come and drink and dance and have a fine ol’ time. We’ll make lots of money.”

  Billy looked up at her. Her eyes were gleaming, excited. She grinned at him. “Whaddaya think? Want to do it?”

  Billy looked at her, this honky-tonk girl who had opened his horizons, made him feel wanted, accepted. “Yeah. I’d do that with you.” He figured he’d do almost anything she asked him to.

  Lori Sue fell onto Billy and wrapped her arms around him, wiggling her petite body all over him, trying to connect every part of her skin to him. “We’ll be famous…and rich!”

  Billy smiled as his body started to respond to her embrace.

  Suddenly a thought came to his mind. “What will people use for money? How they gonna buy the food and drinks?”

  “Oh, they’ll get money going again. There’s people know all about that stuff, you’ll see. We can’t just keep tradin’ things, it’s awkward. So people will get paid to work on projects, they’ll come into our bar and pay us to eat and drink, and we can buy what we need with the money, so you can keep hunting and making liquor. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.”

  Billy thought it sounded good, but he couldn’t quite picture how all that would get started. Still, it had to start again sometime, he supposed. The prospect of living his life with Lori Sue warmed his whole body. He began to run his hands over her back and bottom. She responded to his touch, and soon they were lost in kissing and nuzzling one another, the rush of the vision now replaced by the rush of their bodies enjoying each another.

  They lay entwined in their bed; a nest safe from the world outside. Through the window came pale light from the moon. The city outside was dark. Some of the empty buildings might never be lit again. Grass and weeds grew in cracks along the streets and sidewalks. Broken windows went unrepaired, and the rooms behind them lay open to the elements and had become homes for birds and bats. In the empty quarters of Hillsboro, the desolation advanced with nothing to slow it down. Wildlife crept back into the city, taking over abandoned spaces even within the great curve of the wall, while the people huddled together in the smaller inhabited parts of the city and worked to keep the decay at bay, at least on their own blocks. The hopes of Lori Sue and Billy warmed them in their nest, but the outside world seemed indifferent, even impervious to their plans.