by John L. Monk
“Go ahead and sit down,” Jack said.
“Why?” Eric said in a shaky voice. He didn’t sit.
“I want to talk to you.”
“But what for?”
“I’ll tell you when you sit down.”
Eric angled cautiously in and sat down. “Sorry, Jack. I’m real sorry for trying to scare you.”
“You mean shoot me,” Jack said. “But that’s not what I want to talk about.”
“Don’t throw me out. It’s too cold! I’ll miss my friends. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.” He went on to say how it wasn’t his idea to escape. How it was Robert’s idea, and how Eric tried to talk him and Elsie out of it, but they wouldn’t listen.
Jack waited him out. When he finally stopped talking, Jack said, “What’s your problem with me?”
Eric blinked, caught off guard. “Uh … I ain’t got no problem with you, dude.”
Jack holstered his gun and sat on the adjacent seat. “That day we sent folks out looking for chickens, remember? Larry hit you. What was that about?”
“Nothing! Just goofing off. I always goof off.” He smiled goofily to show how he always goofed off.
“And then yesterday,” Jack said, “you kept pushing me. Then you started on Tony when it was his turn to talk. Saying he couldn’t read. Interrupting him. Totally rude. Why’d you do it?”
“Man, I was—”
Jack’s voice lowered dangerously. “If you say goofing off again, I’ll shoot you now and say you attacked me.”
Eric cringed, edging as far away as possible, and his voice grew high and whiney. “Man, I … I was … because.” When he spoke next, there was a hardness in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “Because Ray was my friend. That’s why.”
Jack wracked his brains. Which one of those cabbages was Ray? A second later, he remembered—and then he felt ashamed for having forgotten.
“You were friends with him,” Jack said.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “And you killed him. For nothing!”
Jack shook his head. “Not for nothing. He killed two very good friends of mine. One of them an eight-year-old girl. I don’t care if he had the cure to the Sickness. Someone does that to my friends, they die. Period.”
“Ray wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Eric said.
“He admitted it.”
A small lie. Ray only admitted to being with the ones who’d done it.
Jack sat with Eric in silence while the cold seeped in. He felt acutely aware of his jacket lying outside in the snow. If he went for it, the moment would pass, never to return.
“I heard about that,” Eric said in a softer tone. “About what happened. I thought he was just with them. You know … like, hanging out.”
“You’ve got a little brother, right?”
Eric nodded. “Toby. Yeah. In the Satch.”
The Satch—the Dragsters’ name for the Saskatchewan.
Jack said, “What if I was just with some people who’d killed your brother? Hunted him down? How would you feel about that? If you were standing there after it happened, looking right at me, would you let me live?”
Eric shifted in his seat, back against the cold metal wall, hugging his legs. “Well, no, but …” His voice grew hard again. “I couldn’t do nothing. Everyone knew we were friends since first grade! You don’t know how it is. They’d think I was a chump.”
Jack shook his head. Some kind of honor thing. And he was right—Jack didn’t know how it was. Didn’t have to live with them, packed in like sardines with nowhere to go. For Eric, it wasn’t so much about Ray as it was about keeping face. To do that, he had to even the score.
“Well, in a way,” Jack said slowly, thinking about it, “you did do something. You did a lot, actually. You’ve been a pain in my ass since you got here, right?”
Eric snorted quietly. “Yeah. I guess.”
“And you pulled the trigger out there. I heard it click. Your friends did too. They’ll tell everyone, and everyone will know you did Ray proud. They won’t think you’re a … a chump then, will they?”
“Yeah, except you’re still alive and I’m in here.” A second later, Eric gasped at his own words. “Sorry! But I mean, you know, that’s how it’ll look.”
“Nope. You busted through the chains,” Jack said. “You broke out, held me at gunpoint and had a misfire. You’re a regular badass now.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Now, I could go back and get another set of cuffs and leave you here. But I need something from you.”
“What?”
“Your word.”
“About what?”
“That I won’t have to do this again. That you won’t disrupt. We need everyone working together to make it through the winter.”
Jack paused for a breath. Curiously, his heart pounded heavily simply thinking about what was ahead of them—a world without their parents’ technology and medicine and police to protect them. Now he had to deal with honor issues.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “I won’t do that stuff no more. I’ll be cool. But do I really gotta read every day? Math and stuff?”
Feeling as if a weight had eased off his shoulders, Jack said, “Not math if you don’t want to. You can pick anything. Give it a try. You might even like it.”
Eric grudgingly agreed.
When Jack exited, he flinched in alarm at the chorus of cheers and hand-clapping from the assembled Dragsters. They’d come outside after the gunshots to see what was up.
11
A day didn’t pass when when Lisa wasn’t cleaning the coop, feeding the awful chickens, hauling water from the cave (the pipes had burst one night, and were now useless), or doing exercise. She was also reading—trying to catch up on three hundred years of technological advancement all by herself. Chemistry, math, metallurgy, biology, and of course medicine.
Sitting there every night with her LED camp lantern, Lisa pored through one book after another, moving the stack on her left slowly and steadily to her right in no particular order. Most were reasonable in size, but some were huge—like the one on chemistry. Much of it was packed with charts and tables she could skim after first reading the classroom material. She had no illusions that she was some sort of genius. Without a teacher, everything would be much harder, so she concentrated on the basics: the periodic table, atomic structures, chemical reactions, acid-base chemistry, Lewis diagrams, and stoichiometry (the math behind chemistry). Stuff she’d need to know if she ever hoped to make her own medicines one day. She didn’t have any medicine-making books with her, though she’d found a promising section at the university library in Front Royal. She figured she could use their chemistry lab to do the work needed … but that was a long way off. Really, she wanted to draw as little attention as possible to the university so as to keep the Dragsters from going there and playing with stuff. Breaking stuff. Dragster stuff.
When Lisa wasn’t studying science, she exercised with her dumbbells. There were books on exercise, too. The general theory was to pump iron every other day, give her muscles a rest between each session, and eat protein before and after workouts. The rest was all about execution, form, and pushing herself a little more each day.
Because of the snow, she couldn’t run, so she did brisk calisthenics. She wanted to be strong enough so that, if she couldn’t win a fight by strength alone, she could outrun her enemies, circle back, and then kill them while they were gasping for breath.
For those times she couldn’t run away, Lisa practiced karate, knife fighting from a military book on hand-to-hand combat, and marksmanship behind the house.
Still smarting from the shots she’d missed against Cassie and her deluded ex-Dragster friends, Lisa finally discovered her problem: she liked to jerk the gun with each trigger pull in anticipation of the kick. Once she figured that out, she could suddenly shoot almost as well as Jack.
With every milestone she crossed, Lisa almost hoped some psychopath like Carter would try putting his hands on her again. She’
d prove to him that her survival wasn’t a fluke. That it meant something. That she meant something more than a thing to be taken and consumed by some stupid boy.
And every night after her egg and venison dinner, after reciting the atomic weight and number of every element in the periodic table, she’d offer a heartfelt prayer to Mrs. Ferris—Jack’s mom—for opening her eyes to the strengths and weaknesses of her own biology.
At the end of a late-February thaw, approaching evening, Lisa was down by the stream with the bucket she used to haul water. It was nice having an actual toilet to use, so she filled the basin every night. That way she could do her business in the morning without getting dressed and going outside. A rare luxury—one of the few that beat the comfort of the cabins. Big Timber had toilets, but they didn’t hook to anything.
As usual, Lisa had her rifle with her, though she only carried one magazine in it. Thirty rounds, in her opinion, was good enough for anything that came up. And with the way the roads were looking—almost passable—she was being extra cautious.
A nagging something-or-other caused her to glance at the gate, and she gasped. Her car had been pushed out of the way! Probably when she’d been inside reading about iron crystals and their formation during the quenching process. Interesting reading, and if the book hadn’t been so short, she’d probably be dead. But it had been short—about eighty pages—and she’d decided to turn in early.
Five cars burst through the gate at high speed, one after the other.
Lisa dropped to her stomach, even though they probably couldn’t see her in the fading light. They parked in front of the house bumper-to-bumper to form a barricade. Kids leaped from the doors farthest from the house and took cover—behind the fuel cars, the chicken coops, the woodshed, and the barn. She counted fifteen, boys and girls, and all with guns. Lisa recognized Cassie right away. She and a few of the others had ARs this time.
Cassie had a bullhorn, and she didn’t mind using it: “WE’RE BAAA-AAAK! GET YOUR SKANK-ASS OUT HERE NOW!”
The nearest boys and girls laughed.
Lisa swore. But for a lucky break in her reading, she’d have been trapped. The girl was a nut job.
There were a lot of them this time, and they fanned out smartly. A mark in their favor. But Lisa knew the land and they didn’t. A mark in hers. Also, she was Lisa, and they weren’t, and that’s all the marks anyone needed.
Stepping from rock to rock, Lisa followed the little creek to the cave with the pipe. She liked to get her drinking water there, where it was purest, but hadn’t actually gone in because because the water came to her knees. Now, crouching just inside, she ignored the numbing cold and gazed downslope at the house. A boy next to the woodshed was peeking around the corner in the wrong direction. A girl stood off to the right behind one of the empty coops. Lisa took careful aim, steadied her breathing the way the book on shooting said to, and pulled the trigger.
The girl jerked back and fell over, and Lisa screamed in pain and nearly fell. The sound echoing off the cave entrance had turned a nearly intolerable blast into a deafening explosion!
The boy by the woodshed was definitely staring her way now. Abruptly, he ran, making for the safety of the covered patio.
Lisa sloshed into the open and fired quickly: BAM! BAM! BAM!
The boy went down and she turned her attention to the corners of the house the kids would have to come around … if they were stupid … which they assuredly were.
Someone fired a rifle, and the rock face behind her erupted in a shower of stinging rock chips that got her in the neck, head, and arms. Cassie! She was standing near the stream, aiming up at her.
Lisa fired back, but the girl was already running. Lisa fired twice more, but moving targets were much harder to hit, and the girl got away.
No one else came around the sides of the house. She wished her ears weren’t so badly muffled. She needed to know if they’d started their cars.
Lisa climbed down the rocky ledge and into the stream. The water was shockingly cold as she crept forward, trying to aim and stay balanced on numb feet at the same time. She needn’t have worried. They were fleeing through the gate with their tails between their legs.
Like last time, she made sure they hadn’t left anyone behind. She stalked a wide circle around the property, staring into every shadow in a hunt for hidden intruders, but didn’t see anyone. When she got to the woodshed, she saw movement. It was the boy she’d shot, and he was still alive.
Weaponless, mewling in terror, he crawled through the snow toward the spot where she’d burned the bodies from the house.
After making sure his wounds were bad enough that he couldn’t run, Lisa went inside, found some rope, then came back and tied him up.
12
That winter, the population at Big Timber grew by one when Molly had her baby—a healthy girl named Melody. Everyone lied and said she looked like Steve. Jack sheepishly passed a suggestion through Olivia that Molly should breastfeed and not use the formula they’d stocked for Tyler, the other baby in the group. Molly balked at first, displeased with the watery milk she made when compared to the rich, creamy formula. Some of the other girls chimed in saying it was actually good for the baby, and offered any number of reasons why.
Jack didn’t know if breastfeeding warded off allergies, like they said. Or depression, or fussiness, or whether it’d make the baby prettier when she grew up. But he did know they couldn’t keep hunting for cans of formula for the rest of their lives. If that made Molly happier, he was all for it.
In the middle of January, two thirteen-year-olds shot themselves in a suicide pact. They wanted to be with their parents again and had agreed to shoot themselves in the head—her first, then him. The girl died immediately. When the boy saw the blood, he chickened out at the last second and shot himself in the side, then thrashed in agony for three days before dying.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the group also suffered a number of accidents:
A little boy was shoved against a stove and severely burned.
One of Larry’s Dragsters chopped his foot instead of a log and bled to death.
An older girl broke through the iced-over pond and couldn’t be retrieved until it melted.
Jack tried to hammer home into their thick, cabbage heads the importance of safety. There were no doctors anymore, and precious little medicine left—at least not anywhere they could get to quickly enough with the world sealed in snow. The problem, he knew, was that he couldn’t force them to listen when his back was turned. All he could do was give orders and hope nobody got too hurt that they needed antibiotics or pain meds, because they were almost out.
Sometimes, when he felt overwhelmed by how vulnerable they were, he’d find himself holding his breath and clenching his fists. He’d swear to himself, to the sky, and to his parents if they could hear him that he wouldn’t go out without a fight. Wouldn’t scrape in the dirt living on cast-offs the rest of his life.
He worried constantly about Lisa. Was she okay? Had she managed to bring down a deer?
Sometimes, usually at night when he couldn’t sleep, he’d pack a bag to hike the twenty-or-so miles to the farm to get her, only to come to his senses in the morning. It was simply too cold, too far, and there were too many things at Big Timber that he needed to attend. Besides, he trusted her. If she thought she was in danger, she could abandon the farmhouse and make her way back, staying in houses along the way until she made it. But she hadn’t. And that was that.
Freida and Carla radioed every day about their herd of twenty-four cows, their flock of chickens, and their mutant dog, Max, who didn’t care much for Jack. Jack trusted the sisters not to do anything dumb. Well … he trusted Freida. She was smart, steady, and tough. Her younger sister had the tendency to turn the guards he sent against each other. When Jack responded by sending girls, they’d end up fighting and demand to come back. Freida lobbied almost daily to have Carla stay at the cabins, and Jack had refused her each time, saying—quite
honestly—that there simply wasn’t room. Also, he didn’t need the drama.
The weather officially took a mild turn at the end of February. Almost overnight, it was spring, and suddenly everything was dripping and melting and wet. Under Jack’s orders, Larry and some volunteers took a few tentative trips up I-66 to see how clear it was. Jack wanted to reunite as quickly as possible with Lisa and the other chicken-sitters. Larry reported that if the weather held, they could reach them in a few days.
As if in support of Larry’s assessment, Big Timber received a surprise visitor: a kid named Corey—one of the boys in attendance when Eddie of the Pyros had gunned down Blaze, their leader. He arrived in the afternoon, wet and half-frozen when the car he’d been driving swerved into a ditch thirty miles out. He also came with troubling news.
Jack listened quietly, only interrupting once or twice for clarification before sending him to sleep in Lisa’s bed. Then he called a meeting.
They were sitting around the big dinner table in the Paul Bunyan. All officers were in attendance: Greg, Steve, Tony, Molly, Olivia, Brad, and Larry.
“What’s El Dorado?” Brad said.
Brad was big, almost sixteen. In Jack’s opinion, he was probably the most centered of all the survivors. He had to be. Raising his baby brother alone while avoiding the food gangs required a tough, independent personality. And it helped that he had the biggest muscles in the group.
“When Cortez came to rob and enslave the Incas,” Jack said, “their king—Montezuma—lied and said there was a city made of gold way out in the jungle. He hoped to distract Cortez so he’d leave the Incas alone.”
“What’s Montapalooza gotta do with us?” Steve said absently, prompting a laugh from some of the others. He’d been trying to tickle baby Melody, and Molly kept slapping his hand away to let her sleep. Considering she and the baby were living in the Bunyan with the other officers, Jack mentally urged Steve to keep at it, if it tired her out. He was sick of waking up every night to a crying baby.
