It's Better This Way

by Travis Hill

  Mom looked out into the crowd, and immediately hands shot up. She pointed to a woman about a hundred yards away. Nicole Bronson I think, but it was hard to tell at night and at that distance with a crowd between us.

  “Isn’t what the towers are doing actually good for us? Removing methane was kind of a goal back then, and after twenty three years of no factories, no pollution, don’t you think that has been good for the planet?” Nicole shouted towards the platform.

  The Colonel looked for just a second like he was going to come unglued. The nerve of Oregon hippies is what I imagined him thinking, except with a lot more cursing.

  “That’s all well and good,” Hardaway replied in a loud voice, making sure the damn hippie heard him, no doubt. “But as long as these alien invaders occupy our planet, we can never rebuild what we had. They won’t allow us to have electricity or tanks or planes or…” I thought he was going to say nuclear weapons. I was sure that he and his surviving army or whatever they had built up under Crater Lake were wishing they had the ability to launch nukes at that behemoth sitting in orbit above the planet. Instead he said, “…hospitals, medical equipment, pharmaceutical drugs.”

  Fifty feet to my left another man was alone as the crowd parted around him. “Why would we want to go back to the old days? It was those old days where the people in power, our governments, still had people like you around. Fighting wars that sent our young to die for some cause known only to those who sent them! Who wants to go back to greed, money, power, classes?”

  More buzzing and the crowd parted around another woman, Sheila something or other, who shouted, “We’ve learned how to live without electricity and your tanks and planes and bombs. Even hospitals and pharmacies. But the aliens have never once come to this valley. They’ve never attacked any of us. They don’t interfere with our farming, our trading, or reproducing.”

  “They have come to your valley!” the Colonel thundered, his emotions finally breaking back through. “We shot down one of their transports five weeks ago and it crashed just northwest of here! Or did your ‘leaders’ not tell you this?” The way he said leaders made it sound like dog asses or piles of shit.

  This got the crowd riled up. I tried to find Tony with my eyes, but I only caught Mom’s attention. She motioned for me to get on the platform. I climbed up and stood next to her. Mom stepped forward and put her arms out, and when the crowd quieted down again, she turned to me and smiled, and stepped back. I guessed I was up.

  “We found this ship two weeks ago,” I shouted a little too loud. I cleared my throat and started again. “My partner and I found the transport and two dead bulls. They crashed into the ground about thirty miles northwest of here. There was no sign of what caused the crash, and no available tech or useful items to scavenge. We reported it to the council on our return. Nothing was said for two reasons. One is that we’ve all heard through the network about crashes and other things like this involving dead bulls. The second is we don’t want curious eyes making the trip to see it. Thirty miles is getting a bit beyond our protective coverage, and we don’t even know what might happen if the bulls finally come along to collect their dead and their equipment while a human is there rooting through dead bodies and smashed ship parts.”

  This quieted the crowd. Colonel Hardaway looked like he wanted to slug me in the guts as hard as he could, mostly because he couldn’t be happy that my sensible explanation had seemed perfectly normal to the gathered crowd. And that they accepted it without arguing or shouting. But I was worried. If the Colonel and his army had the ability to shoot down bull ships…

  “Listen, people,” he said in his loud voice. “I get it. You all love the commune. You get to grow your dope and smoke it while you eat your bountiful harvests of tomatoes and steaks and chickens and apples. You get to teach your children how you want. You’ve socked away enough supplies and weapons and good people that you can survive any warlord that tries to set up shop within fifty miles of here.

  “But what about the rest of humanity? If you are so in touch with your humanity, why would you not step up and help the rest of your brothers and sisters who haven’t been as lucky to be part of something like you’ve built here? There are millions of Americans, probably billions of your fellow humans, who haven’t fared even one percent as well as you have. Don’t you think you owe it to them?” Hardaway shouted, thinking to appeal to our touchy-feely hippie natures. Apparently David Hamida hadn’t told him just how dark we could be.

  “Colonel Hardaway,” Mom said, and the crowd quieted down again from their jeering and shouting at the soldier, “We are in touch with humanity. We allow humans into this community that are willing to work hard, be responsible, be good, kind, caring citizens who will help their fellow brothers and sisters in humanity. We keep the riff-raff down in our region. We keep trade routes open and safe for non-citizens. We owe anyone who doesn’t want to be part of this absolutely nothing. It’s a choice people make. David Hamida made that choice once.” I looked over at David, who still looked terrified. “We didn’t begrudge him for leaving and joining up with you instead. We even let him take his rifle and survival gear that we issued to him.” With that, David looked ashamed on top of terrified.

  “These fucking aliens have invaded Earth, goddammit!” the Colonel screamed, more at the crowd than at Mom or me. “We need to shove their asses back off into space or into oblivion. We are Americans, goddammit!” His shouting was starting to make some in the crowd laugh, which only infuriated him more. “We have the ability to kill them, and all we need are bodies to man the stations and perform the tasks. They don’t even fight back! We aren’t asking for your food, any of your metal, your women, your weapons. You people ARE the weapons and we, America, humanity needs you!”

  Tony climbed the platform and walked up behind Colonel Hardaway. I was close enough to hear him tell the Colonel, “I think you’ve lost them, sir.”

  When Hardaway turned around, a shotgun was staring him in the face. Sergeant Waters got one step in his direction before three more shotguns had them surrounded. Arn and Dredge were holding two of them. Kenny had his shotgun pointed at Hackett’s head. No one bothered to point anything at David Hamida since he’d gone to his knees, crying almost the whole time.

  CHAPTER 11 - Two Kinds of Votes

  As a community, we held our vote. It didn’t go well for the Colonel and his crew. In a way, I felt bad for Hackett more than any of them. He seemed like he was along for the ride, a guy that had found a place he fit in, had a job to do. He was good with the projector and staying out of the way. I hoped to get a chance to talk to him, and to Mom and the council about him. Sergeant Waters was a dangerous man. Maybe as dangerous as the Colonel himself. Waters was just a younger, stronger version of Hardaway.

  David Hamida was worse than a mewling baby. I took him down to the basement of the main house. I’d never been down there before, and was surprised to find two holding cells made of concrete and iron. I put him in the same cell that held Corporal Hackett, locked the door, and went back upstairs.

  The twelve of us sat in a circle in the dining room. We had pushed the table to the side and into a corner to give us room.

  “I don’t think we can let either the Sergeant or the Colonel be banished,” Walter was saying as I sat down.

  “Why not?” Dana asked him.

  “Because both of them are too dangerous,” Tony answered for Walter. “Hardaway and Waters are hardcore military. They are trained for survival. I’d bet Hardaway was Special Forces or SEAL or something before the invasion, and has trained Waters with everything he knows.”

  I nodded my head when a few of them looked at me. I’m not sure why they thought my opinion of military things was important. I had been fifteen when the bulls came calling.

  “So you are saying,” Deena asked, mostly to defend her wife, “that stripping those two and running them down the road isn’t going to kill them? I find that hard to believe, especially as we are into the fall and th
e temperatures are dropping.”

  “Those two are the two that are guaranteed to live. The only way to kill them by banishment would be to march them into the mountains about twenty miles and then let them go. Except that they’d probably beat our guys back, and take their clothes and weapons. Worse, they’d escape back to Crater Lake and tell everyone that we intended to kill them,” Tony explained.

  “Worse than that,” I chimed in, “they’d tell the ones back at Crater Lake that we are a bunch of traitors.”

  “What do you mean?” Heika asked me.

  “We are traitors to the human race. Think about it,” I said, nervous that I had the floor and was about to lay some words out for them. “They are still old-America. Old-Earth. Old-humanity. They’ve been fuming for twenty three years about being helpless, powerless to defend their country. Everything they’d grown up for, had fought for, was destroyed in a burst of electromagnetic energy, or in a big ball of plasma. Most of them lost their families either to the bombing or to starvation or riots or gangs or rape after our modern way of living was completely disrupted.

  “Twenty three years these guys have wandered and recruited and plotted and dug a big hole down at Crater Lake to rebuild their armies to kick the bulls off the planet. To them, the old ways are the only ways of society, civilization, evolution. Farming and barnyard medicine and councils and voting are all ancient and worthless to them unless there’s someone at the top ordering people to do those things or making laws allowing them to do it.

  “Now they’ve got some kind of generator going that the bulls haven’t blown up. They’ve figured out how to wire up a dish to talk to the surviving satellites, and spent years learning all they could. They have a plan. They want to exact revenge on the bulls. They want to kill bulls, and anyone who stands in their way will be traitors. Because by not backing their cause, we are helping the enemy remain on our world. And I don’t want to sound like more of a traitorous human than I already do, but was I the only one that heard that the towers were removing methane from the atmosphere and kind of cheered a little inside?” Almost everyone in the circle nodded at this.

  “And they’ve forced us to change how we live. Instead of buying the newest music, clothing, cars, and gadgets while watching mindless entertainment that kept us from doing anything about all the wars, the suffering going on in the world, we now have to actually work together as a cohesive unit to survive.” More nods.

  “When that projector kicked on, I felt fifteen again. My first thought was ‘I want to watch Forrest Gump again’ before I caught myself. How easy would it be to slip back into that old world where we waited for a gasoline-burning truck to deliver empty-calorie food sprayed with vitamins and minerals to our door while playing video games and arguing on the internet over ridiculous nonsense?”

  I sat down, realizing my face had turned red. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said that much in the span of a couple of minutes. Not since I lived up in Winlock eleven years ago and had the closest thing I’ve ever had to a wife.

  “I agree,” Mom said, looking at me strangely. I thought it was respect, but it felt like something more. Or maybe I was imagining things. “The important question is what do we do about them? The vote went against them, but as you say, we can’t banish them. Hamida and the mousy little guy would probably last about two days, if that, but I believe that the other two are a serious problem. I’m more worried about them getting back to their little base first instead of coming back for revenge right away. They’ll get their whole crew together to come and hurt us. And if they can shoot dropships out of the sky and kill bulls indiscriminately, I’m going to guess they’ll be able to put The Farm to the torch pretty easily. I wouldn’t put it past them to kill four thousand of us as a lesson to everyone else who won’t go along, either.”

  It was the most serious I’d heard Mom speak all night. I knew the woman had some steel in her, but she impressed me constantly with her ability to take and keep control of challenging situations. Everyone else was quiet for a bit.

  “So what are we going to do about them?” Kim So asked.

  “How do we really know that they are telling the truth? Or even that they wouldn’t just decide that we weren’t worth the trouble and would recruit others who weren’t part of large, strong communities like ours?” Benny Valera asked. At thirty, he was one of the youngest councilors and didn’t remember much about before the bulls arrived.

  “I think it is pretty obvious,” I said. “But we can always question David. He’s pretty soft, softer than I remember him for sure, which is weird considering he joined a hardcore military outfit. But I say we get him alone and find out what he’s told them, and what they’ve told him.” I realized that this was my chance to talk about Hackett as well since everyone seemed interested in what I had to say. “Corporal Hackett, on the other hand… I don’t know what the protocol is for council votes or if we can overturn vote decisions, but I’d like to defend Corporal Hackett. I don’t believe we should turn him out in a banishment.”

  “Why not?” Jerry asked me. “He came with them. He’s part of their group.”

  Mom watched me closely. I had that sensation again that she was trying to look inside me, or through me, and it made me uncomfortable, but not in a bad way.

  “He’s not like them, though. He’s kind of bookish. I’m sure he’s probably killed men, we all have, those of us that spent hard years living before coming to The Farm. But I don’t think he’s a steely-eyed killer like Waters or Hardaway.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Mom asked me.

  “I don’t know. Gut maybe? Hunch? I’m not saying we turn him loose so he can run back home to his army buddies. I’m saying we should hold on to him where he’s at for now, let some time pass. See if he’s able to hack it if we let him go. Maybe treat him like a human being so when we let him go he’ll be inclined to stay here instead of possibly getting vaporized by the bulls when some operation they pull goes wrong, or maybe when the mothership torches them from orbit because they have power and a military base.”

  There was some grumbling, but Tony gave me a smile, as did Deena and Dana. The two were a cute couple, and though sometimes they seemed naive, it was because they wanted to see the good in everything. They were happy with the status quo. No one at The Farm looked at them funny, said anything nasty behind their backs or in front of them, or if something ugly was said, it had nothing to do with their sexuality and everything to do with being bad councilors.

  Same for Thad and Walter. Both were in their forties, both sporting mostly gray mustaches, lean builds, and the lifetime tan of working in the fields. They weren’t nearly as naive, but they were good people as well. Jerry was a bit of a sourpuss, but that came with being at least sixty I think. Mitch was quiet, slightly plump, which was an oddity at The Farm. I didn’t know much about him, but he gave me a wink to let me know that I was on the right side of things.

  Kim So always looked like she was ready to rip out someone’s throat. We didn’t know how old she was. She looked twenty-five, but she talked a lot about the pre-invasion days, so we figured she had fantastic Asian genes and was fifty. How she kept the gray out of her hair though was a mystery that only a few of the women knew how to do now, and was one of the most closely guarded, jealousy-inducing secrets at The Farm.

  Benny was a darker-skinned young guy, probably thirty, but he was good people, and he had a soft spot for Heika. A really soft spot if I believed the rumors. Good on Benny for giving love to an old lady, and good on Heika for still going for it. She had to be at least seventy, but all of us men looked at her and knew she had to have been a knockout when she was younger. Ben usually deferred to Heika on most things, and while Heika was quiet, she was usually adamant about her point of view. She reached over and squeezed my hand.

  And then there was Mom. She gave me another look that I couldn’t tell the meaning of. “How about it?” she asked finally, breaking eye contact with me. “Is Evan’s plan s
olid? Interrogate Hamida and see if we can integrate Corporal Hackett into the fold?”

  Everyone gave a yes or nod of their head.

  “Right. Evan, you and Tony get to do the dirty work with David. Not that you are being punished for being new, but because out of all of us, I think you two are the hardest inside. You’ve both voted your share of banishments, even though some of those people had to have been a friend or even a lover at one time. Being new and fresh from the outside where you were doing real work like scouting, I think you understand the position that we are in better than anyone as well. Don’t kill the man, but get whatever you can out of him and we’ll come back tomorrow at lunch and talk about it.”

  CHAPTER 12 - Interrogations

  “I’m sorry. I swear, I wouldn’t have come back if I knew it would be this way,” David said.

  “What way did you think it would be, David?” Tony asked him. We had David tied to a chair, a rope around his neck.

  “I didn’t think you would lock us up and kill us!” David shouted. He was quickly going insane with fear.

  “No one has killed you yet, David,” I said to him, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder. He flinched at the touch. “What we want to know is what you told Colonel Hardaway or any of his superiors at this Crater Lake place.

  David looked at me, then at Tony. “I… I…” he stuttered.

  “Don’t make it harder on yourself, David,” Tony said to him.

  I nodded when he looked at me. “If you are honest with us, we’ll tell Mom that you helped us, and you will probably still be banished, but you should be able to at least leave with the clothes on your back, probably the gear you brought in minus the assault rifles.”

  David looked at both of us again, trying to decide if we were telling him the truth. He decided we were and told us everything. He’d given a detailed inventory of what The Farm had stockpiled, where we stored it, how many weapons we had, how the council and Mom functioned, everything. He’d spilled every secret that he knew about at The Farm to Colonel Hardaway.