by Lou Cadle
He hadn’t mentioned it to Sierra. What she’d done couldn’t be undone.
He repacked his gear and stood, taking his rifle so that he could look through the scope at town. It took five minutes of bushwhacking to get to a decent vantage point. He lay on his belly and looked through his scope at the town. They were lower than they had been before, so what he could see was limited to a few streets. Again he saw a handful of people working in backyard gardens. There seemed to be a small park, or maybe an elementary school, three blocks in. Maybe Sierra would know better what it was. As he heard Sierra behind him, still coaxing the dog, he realized he hadn’t seen any dogs walking through town.
Probably got captured and eaten when people got hungry.
One of the few children he’d seen, a toddler, a little boy, was running around in a back yard while his mother worked her garden. He was in makeshift diapers, something like paper towels crammed into a cut-up plastic bag, sealed with duct tape. The kid seemed big enough to be out of diapers, but what did Dev know about that?
No troops roamed the streets here. And yet no one tried to escape. He would have. It was easy to say now, looking on, but he really thought he would have in their position—waited until night, packed a backpack or put together one using a tarp and rope, and got the heck out of there. He noticed movement in the window of the house—a cat. So not every pet had been eaten.
“Has to be hostages keeping them there,” he muttered. Or something like that. Some hold over them that keeps them in place. Or maybe it was fear of the unknown that kept them here. At least they had yards and gardens. If they walked away, what would they have then?
“Dev?” came Sierra’s voice.
“Be right there,” he said. He relieved himself before he went back to her. She had rolled up her sleeping bag and was stuffing it in her backpack. “Any luck with the dog?”
“He let me get a little closer, but then he ran off.”
“If he keeps following us, we might eventually convince him to come.”
“We only have two and a half more days, and then we have to be in the car and drive home.”
“I looked into town. Not much going on. Let’s keep going around.”
“Sounds good to me. I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
“I’ll go ahead. I’ll stop in a half-hour and you catch up to me. Have you checked for a cell signal since the morning?”
“No. Thanks for reminding me. I’ll do that right after I pack. See you in thirty minutes.”
The whole day, they kept hiking around town and spying on it. By nightfall, they hadn’t learned much more. There was no vegetable pick-up that afternoon, at least not that they saw.
“Maybe they only do it certain days?” Sierra said.
“Maybe. The people have to eat. Or maybe every day they do half the town, and we happen to be looking at the half that has the day off.”
“I wonder what they’re doing for protein.”
“No idea. If they had cans of tuna or bags of beans, they’ve gotta be long gone by now.”
“People weak from hunger would have a harder time fighting back.”
That could explain the people just sitting there and taking the occupation. “Hungry, they’d be less likely to strike off cross-country.”
“Not sure if that’s good news or bad news. Good news for us, I guess. If they aren’t escaping town, they aren’t coming up our way either. After all they’ve been through, now I’d feel bad for killing them. I would, if they tried to steal, but I’d dislike myself.”
Dev was also feeling his sympathies shifting to the established Paysonites. While a few of them had come up and stolen from them, most had not.
The invaders from Phoenix? He didn’t like them at all.
Chapter 5
“Look,” Sierra said. It was the next to last day of their reconnoitering, and they had made it around to the south-southwest of town, only a few miles from the other main highway, probably four or five miles. Dev was more than a little worried about crossing the highway on this side and what they might find there. It was the main route up from Phoenix. Might be better to wait and cross it at night.
“Dev!” Sierra said.
“Coming.” He joined her where she stood behind a big boulder, resting her elbows on it while she watched through the binoculars. “What?”
“There’s this guard towing a kid. Twelve, thirteen years old. A girl.”
“Towing?”
“Dragging her through the street. No one is stopping him. You should be able to see him in a minute. He’s headed this way. See that bright blue house? Watch the nearest corner to it.”
Dev found the spot and waited for him to appear. Two minutes later, a man was pulling a girl by the arm, his rifle slung over his shoulder—or his elbow, rather, as the strap had fallen down. The girl was putting up a fight.
“She’s getting more agitated all the time. Fighting harder.”
Dev scanned the roads around. There was another man with a rifle two blocks away, standing on a curb.
“Man,” said Sierra. “He just slapped her. Hard too.”
Dev scanned back until he saw the man with the girl. He had his rifle strap up on his shoulder again and he had the girl by the upper arm. As he watched, she fell, on purpose, he thought, simply refusing to move, held up only by the grip on her arm. The man hauled her up and said something to her. She raised her face, and Dev saw it clearly for the first time. “I think I might know her.”
“Who is she?”
“I mean, I don’t really know her. I recognize her, from a Teens for Christ thing at Easter. Her mother is a minister, one of those things like Methodist or Presbyterian.”
“Good memory.”
“I’ve seen her more than once over the years. Not often.”
“Is that her father? Do you recognize him?”
“No. I don’t think there is a father. If there is, he never attended anything with them. There’s two or three girls and the mom.” He watched as the girl started shuffling along, her head hanging again. The two of them approached the other guard. “Maybe this is how they control them.”
“Maybe she’s getting punished for something? Like not turning over all the vegetables or something like that?”
“I sure wish we could hear what’s going on.”
A minute later, he regretted saying that. The guard who had brought her shoved her at the waiting guard, who caught her as she stumbled. He pushed the girl to her knees and unzipped his jeans.
“Son of a bitch,” said Sierra. “Those fuckers.”
Dev wanted to look away, very much wanted to, but something made him keep watching the awful scene. The man shifted, and thank God he couldn’t see everything in sharp detail. Despite his lack of sexual experience, he knew what was happening.
“She’s only a kid!” Sierra said, her voice high and strained.
He wanted to say, “Maybe this is part of how they kept them in line.” Had he been the mother of the kid, though, he would have fought to the death to keep this from happening. Did she know? She had to know, right? So why wasn’t she out here, screaming, throwing a fit? Dev was so confused and upset, he couldn’t think straight. The other guy, the one who had led the girl here, watched for ten seconds, and then he sat on the curb and lit a cigarette, looking around. Ready to shoot anyone who interfered? Probably.
That they were doing this in the full light of day, on a city street, said a lot. For one thing, it said no one in the houses had weapons left. They’d be boiling out of their homes and stopping this if they did.
“I’ll take the one who’s sitting. You’re a better shot, so you take the bastard who is raping her. Head shot so you don’t risk hitting the girl.”
“What?” Dev lowered his rifle and looked to Sierra, who was checking hers and then raising it. “No, no, you can’t. We can’t. They’ll know we’re here. Probably hunt for us.”
“I don’t give a damn about that. Ready?”
He reach
ed over and pulled at her arm, which was hard with tension. “Seriously. We can’t.”
“I can’t watch this and do nothing! Can you?”
“I—” He didn’t know what to say to that. He did not want it to be happening. “It’s not up to us to stop it.”
“If not us, who? I think no one in town will. Don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re terrified or whatever. So if it’s going to stop, we are the ones to do it.”
“Ahh, shit, Sierra. We can’t. I’m sorry. But they’ll come for us. They’ll know someone is here. They’ll kill us. We don’t even know that much info yet to take home. We’ve seen maybe twelve guys, but it might be ten times that many. It’s too risky.”
She yanked her arm out of his grip and aimed her rifle again. “There are times when the utmost daring is the height of wisdom.”
“What?”
“It’s from the first book you loaned me. We’ll run right after we shoot. C’mon, Dev. I’m firing, no matter what you do. And I don’t know I can get the second guy if he’s running away.”
“We’re going to regret this,” he said. But he raised his rifle. Not because Sierra had asked him to. Because he knew that despite the risk to them, it was the right thing to do.
“On five, four,” she said, and then she went silent.
Dev got the man lined up. He’d have to shoot as well as he ever had. With this angle, it’d be too damned easy to hit the girl. No center-of-mass shot. Sierra had been right. It had to be a head shot. He had the back of the man’s bowed head in the crosshairs. He let out his breath halfway and fired, a split second behind Sierra.
His man was down. Not moving. The girl was kneeling, staring at the man who had toppled over to her side. Dev swung his rifle to look at the other man, and Sierra had hit him too. He rolled over, and she fired again. Then the second man quit moving.
Back to his man. Definitely dead. The girl, who he could see now was splattered with blood, was on her feet, looking wildly around. Then she took off running, back up the street. Dev followed her in his scope. “Look around in the binocs, see if anyone is coming.”
“Right,” Sierra said.
“Wonder if the kid was more upset by what we just did than by what was happening.”
“She was more traumatized by the rape,” Sierra said, as if she was one hundred percent certain of that. “No one coming out. Not a door opening. Bizarre. We should get going anyway.”
“We should.”
“Of course, they’re city boys. We know the nature of these pine woods. They don’t.”
“They’ll come after us anyway, expert woodsmen or not. Let’s move.”
They ran to the south, side by side, abandoning their previous, sensible plan of going one at a time. Abandoning all sense, in fact. He resented her for talking him into this. He resented her for suggesting it first because he should have been quicker to act. It made no sense, but he was able to hold on to both thoughts, contrary though they were.
“Highway,” she said, pointing. “A mile or so ahead.”
It was closer than he’d estimated. He stopped, and then she did. “Episcopal,” he said, as the thought came into his mind.
“What?”
“That’s what the mother is, an Episcopal priest. She had a collar.”
“And a daughter who isn’t getting raped right now, thanks to you.”
“I see what you’re doing there. Putting it on me to make me less angry at you.”
“Are you angry?”
“Yes! No,” he said, with less heat. He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it later. Right now, let’s go. But let me go down to the highway first and see what’s up. I don’t want to run into a bunch of them standing there, guarding town.”
“Let me. It’s my fault we’re running.”
“No. Just--. Damn it, Sierra, let me make the decisions for the next thirty minutes, okay? And don’t do anything else irresponsible. Just for thirty blessed minutes.”
“Okay.” She sounded meek.
He looked suspiciously at her. “Meek” was something she was not—not ever. But regretful was maybe in her emotional repertoire, and she might be feeling that.
They walked in silence for fifteen minutes, and then he motioned her to stop and wait.
As he carefully approached the road, he thought about how the world looked so crisp and clear. He held in his mind a bright, still image of the moment right before he had raised his rifle to watch the girl being dragged along. A wisp of Sierra’s hair had blown across her face, which had been intense as she looked through the binoculars. There had been a yellow butterfly, ten yards behind her, moving in what his memory told him was slow motion but could not have been. He was starting to recognize this as part of a firefight, that sharp frozen moment of memory in the calm before the storm. All his senses were heightened still.
Good thing. He might need them to hear the invaders coming for them.
Chapter 6
The highway was clear in both directions. They were between the main part of town and the subdivision several miles from the town center where a lot of fire and police officers lived. He wished he could take them down to that neighborhood to talk to them. They’d be able to answer most of his questions. But he knew the chances of getting shot approaching it were even worse than their chances of getting shot running from the invaders.
He looked back, but he couldn’t see Sierra. He whistled for her to come ahead.
“What do you see?” she asked as she approached.
“Shh.”
“Sorry,” she whispered.
He waited until she was right beside him to speak. “Nothing happening yet. At worst, they’ll have an experienced tracker after us, but if we get any hint that’s the case, we can head up toward Strawberry and make them think we’re from up that way. Lead them in the wrong direction.”
“What about right now? Run for the car?”
“We can’t make it by nightfall. I think we should climb into the hills, as fast as we can. Reach the high ground so we can see down.”
“The mountains are higher back that way.” She turned and pointed. “But that’ll put us pretty far from the car. Give them a chance to find the car, even.”
He didn’t tell her she should have thought all this through before she started shooting at an enemy who hadn’t, until now, even known they existed. He considered the direction she pointed at, which if they crossed over the ridge would take them down into the police neighborhood in a day or two of hiking. “Maybe if they do find our trail up there, they’ll think it’s someone from the old police.” Thinking aloud. “If we see them coming, we can fire at them. That’d reinforce that assumption on their part. And then we can run fast and far.”
“Okay. You’re the boss.”
“If only,” he said, and he adjusted the waist strap of his backpack. “Let’s move.”
They climbed hard, panting the whole time, and he pushed beyond when he wanted to rest, beyond when he wanted to take a sip of water. When he hit a game trail, he used it. Slowly, Sierra began to fall behind. When he saw that, he only pushed harder. When he had gained some distance on her and she had dropped out of sight, he stopped and pulled out a water bottle, drinking half of it. He only remained stopped because he had to catch his breath. He stuck the water back in its pouch and rested his hands on his thighs, simply breathing. He could hear Sierra below him, her breath loud too. Then she came into view. By the time she reached him, she was wheezing and he had caught his breath. She held up a finger.
He said, “Binoculars,” and held out his hand. When she handed them over, he tried looking behind him, and down toward Payson, but the woods were too dense here. He tried from a couple of different vantage points, but no go. They’d have to get higher. He handed back the binoculars and she nodded, still incapable of speech. “We need to go on.”
“One.” She panted. “Minute.”
“Sixty seconds, no more.”
“You’re. In. Good. Shape,” she managed to get out between gasps for air.
He didn’t let himself feel flattered, if that’s what she was going for. “I hope in much better shape than these city boys. It’s another advantage, and we need all of them we can get.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let me drink, and then I can go.” She reached around for her water.
He could have gotten it for her more easily than she could get it herself, but he restrained himself. Then the thought struck him that he was being an awful lot like his father, holding a grudge, letting his emotional punishment drag on. Even pushing so hard up the hill had been a punishment, hadn’t it? “Take a minute more if you need,” he said, relenting. He didn’t want to turn into his father, not in that way.
She drank from her bottle and nodded. “We’re going to run out of water if we’re delayed a day.”
“Can’t be helped. We can survive a day without water.”
“Our folks will be worried if we have to go around.”
“They’re worried anyway. I told my mom not to panic if we were gone a whole week, that situations might come up to delay us, and she said she understood. We have two more full days. And they’ll probably give us a day or two beyond that before they might send someone.”
“Your dad probably.”
“Probably. I’d rather not have him waiting for us at the car, pissed off.”
“I get that.” She reached her bottle around herself, hunting for the place it went on her pack.
“Let me,” he said, and he tucked it away for her. “Let’s try to get to the ridge. See what we can see.”
“Sounds good.”
He moved at a slower pace from then on, letting them take breathers this time. He took those moments to listen for pursuit, but there was none near enough to hear. No distant gunfire. It took another ninety minutes to reach the first ridge, but a second lay beyond it. He moved them off the animal trail, through the trees, until he found a place they could see into town. It was much farther away, of course, than it had been when they’d fired those shots. But it looked normal. There weren’t riots on the street, an army amassing, or anyone marching this way.
