Concealed in the Shadows

by Gabrielle Arrowsmith

  “There are homes everywhere.” I am perplexed by the scatterings of houses as we drive the abandoned road back toward Miles. Most of the houses are average-sized. Some are brick, but most are painted or sided in white, brown, soft blue, or a variation of tan. I imagine they are covered with dust and cobwebs on the inside, and barren of all homey furnishings and belongings, but if you didn’t know better they could look occupied from the outside, except for unkempt yards with long grasses, weeds, and garden ornaments that have tipped over or blown about.

  “They’re not everywhere. Not out here. Most of these are homesteads. Have you noticed all the red buildings?” Cy asks.

  “The barns?” I return.

  “Yeah. You know that, huh?” Apparently he’s surprised that a county girl like me knows about farms and barns. He probably thinks I don’t know any better than to assume the plants and animals we eat live and grow on the cargo planes that drop them off. We’re not that unaware on the inside, at least I’m not.

  “I’ve learned what I can,” I tell him.

  “Good for you. This area was mostly farming communities. No population overgrowth threats here. But they were still made to go. Anyone east of this highway went to Billings and everyone west went to Miles.”

  “Neighbors. Split apart by a road,” Della sighs dramatically.

  “Not just neighbors, families,” Galvesten corrects. “Brothers.” I detect he may be alluding to his own past, but I decide to leave it alone. I know it can be difficult to talk about being separated from your family, and I’ve only just met this man.

  “So how long have each of you been out?” I ask.

  “You make us sound like inmates catching up after the slammer,” Galvesten laughs.

  “Counties aren’t too different,” Cy joins in. I don’t know a lot about that. Large cities used to be hubs for crime, but chips have prevented much of that. Miles County doesn’t even have a prison. A serious criminal or fraud comes up now and again, but they’re shipped to the Billings Penitentiary. If you’re not a government official and you’re allowed to travel outside the county, you’re either one of Miles’ rarely produced criminals or Olympic athletes.

  “When we got out, I was twelve and Crewe was fifteen, right?” Cy asks his brother.

  “Seven years ago,” Crewe confirms.

  “How’d you do it?”

  “Same way it happened to you,” Crewe says. “The captain found us the day we made it outside—outside of the orphanage and outside of Miles.”

  “You’re from Miles?” I can’t picture these foreign brothers growing up in the same place that I did. “I lived in the orphanage for three years.”

  “No kidding?” Cy says. “When?”

  I turn my attention to the younger Davids brother since he seems interested in the coincidence. “First from when I was twelve until I was fourteen, then again from fifteen to sixteen. I got a living variance then.”

  “How old are you now?” Cy asks.

  “I just turned eighteen. Yesterday, actually. That’s how I was able to get my sister back.”

  “Well, happy belated birthday. I’m nineteen, so I suppose Crewe and I got out of the orphanage the year before you got in.”

  “Still sounds like prison talk,” Galvesten notes.

  “Were you from Miles?” I ask the doctor.

  “Nope. I lived in Billings.”

  “I was from Tennessee,” Della laughs. “When I was growing up we were still the land of fifty united states,” she beams. It’s clear Della doesn’t hold the ‘world teetering on famine and devastation’ view of the old world that EduWeb presents. “My family moved to Nebraska when I was in high school. After I graduated, I was all set for college, but my parents were too nervous to let me go. The colleges were buzzing with radical ideas of reform that my parents didn’t want to see me involved in. They talked me into waiting a year, which I’m glad I did, because I was going to go to NDSU to study nursing, which means I would have been in Region Three, forever separated from my family.”

  College students and men and women in the armed forces were among the people most often misplaced into a county in which they didn’t truly belong. Since the mapping of the counties within each region was done according to census data, the government was rigid about movement from one’s last-known address. Keeping military recruits in clusters was a tactical maneuver, so those appeals were quickly cast off.

  Initially, the newly established county courts heard appeal cases for absentee students or families, like Galveston’s, which were split. Eventually, the courts needed to turn their attention to cases of crime and outrage as people protested the implantations of chips. The dispersed family members were told video chat would have to suffice for the rest of their lives.

  “Does your family live in Sheridan?” I decided to ask Della.

  “No. Only Mom and I were able to escape. My daddy and my brother made sure we got out, but they stayed behind to try to fix things. You know men. They were both killed at the hand of the government, God rest their souls. My momma died just last year due to complications of pneumonia.”

  “I’m sorry,” I offer.

  “No worries, baby doll. She was sixty-two,” Della says proudly. “She earned two extra years of life in Sheridan. Her life had more quantity and quality than it could have inside a county.”

  “How many people live there, in Sheridan?” I ask.

  “Two hundred forty-nine,” Crewe answers without hesitation.

  “Two hundred fifty-one if we make it back safely with you and your sister,” Cy picks up. “There’s sort of an unspoken competition right now between the seeksmen who cover counties Nine, Six, Four, and Twelve. Two-fifty is a milestone, and each team wants to be the one to bring that number home.”

  Crewe flashes a sharp glare at Cy in the rearview mirror. Crewe is certainly more mature than his brother, and understands that any slight correlation between the danger my sister faces, the danger we all face, and a stupid competition will not please me.

  “Our mission is to seek people who visit the outside frequently, and carefully determine when it’s their time. The population count is only circumstantial to the time we felt you were ready,” Crewe counters.

  “How long have you been watching me?” I feel more compromised now than angry. I think about all of those times I stripped down to run in my sports bra and spandex while my outer clothing dried. The forest was my haven, my getaway. And here I’m finding it never belonged to me at all. I was the invader to the seeksmen’s territory.

  “What’s your end goal?” I wonder out loud when neither of the brothers answers my question. I want to know what the purpose of all of this is—the hiding, snooping, and abducting, the competition over which team of righteous abductors will add the two hundred and fiftieth person to their microscopic town. Why are they trying to grow their population when the rest of the nation is trying to reduce it?

  Crewe does respond to this question. “We don’t know, yet. Obviously we want people to have the option to live in freedom. I have my own personal ideas, but they’re not necessarily everyone else’s. Right now our aspiration is to help anyone we can. If we grow our numbers in doing so, great, because we expect to meet resistance inside Region Two someday. And two-hundred and fifty pales in comparison to 1.4 million.”

  “More,” I state. “Two hasn’t made that reduction goal yet.”

  “I know, and Boise is paying for it,” Crewe adds.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You know that all the counties have identical square mileage, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Each county’s limited area has nothing to do with preserving the natural world—you can see there’s plenty of it out here now.” I had noticed that during this ride.

  “It was all to make the people feel contained so that they’d fear population overgrowth and work to lessen it,” Della says.

  “No,” Crewe counters. “They compacted the people t
he way they did in hopes to help spread disease more quickly in the counties that needed to make the most significant losses.”

  “What?” Can that be true? I know the world Americans live in now has been turned upside down from what it once was, but I had no idea the government could be so revolting as to try, actually put forth an effort, to destruct its people.

  “Boise has more than ten times the amount of people that Miles has. I haven’t seen it, but can you imagine? The government’s hope was for epidemic to break out and reduce that large population in Region Two exponentially compared to the other counties.”

  “But it hasn’t happened naturally in the eighteen years everyone’s been under the government’s confinements and restrictions. We have inside information that the government is going to initiate an epidemic in one,” Cy conspires. One being Boise County.

  The counties within each region are ranked according to their population size. Miles has been twelfth since 2015 when the bill was written and the incarceration initiated.

  “How?”

  “We don’t know,” Crewe states. His square jaw line tenses again as he contemplates the potential calamity. Unexpectedly, I’m beginning to feel in sync with him. He lived where I lived. Some misfortune left him and his younger brother orphaned. He found a way out, and learned of an outside world that he and his brother could join. But he didn’t stop there. He fights for Sheridan to grow to preserve the human heart and the existence of true freedom. Crewe Davids’ heart burns for righteousness and his mind searches for the tactics to ensure it.

  “What’s our plan, Crewe?” Galvesten changes the subject to the matter at hand, to acquiring Evvie.

  “We go to the house. Eat. Take out the guns and teach these two to shoot,” he answers, referring to Della and me. “We call Merick and let him know what’s happened and what we plan to do. We set stations for each of us, we go in, and when night falls, we watch for her.”

  “And for them,” Cy adds.

  “Who’s Merick? Is he the captain, the one that got you out?” I ask. There are endless questions that I want answered, now that I know I belong with these Sheridans. I know their cause enough to believe that this is the right move for Evvie and me.

  “No,” Cy responds. “Merick isn’t the captain. If there were an official hierarchy, Merick would be only a rung below him. Merick is always in Sheridan, so he feels more like our town’s leader. But the captain is the one who started the effort to seek and acquire refugees.”

  “Where does he go when he’s away from Sheridan?”

  “Other towns. Other collections of the free inside Region Two. There’s a small cluster between Bozeman, Missoula, and Great Falls counties. They’ve named their town after their staying leader, Braves. There’s another between Idaho and the other two Falls counties. They’re just called Idaho, like the old state.”

  “There’s a leader named Braves? Was he from Miles?”

  “No, why?” wonders Cy.

  “Nothing. Never mind,” I say. I suppose now I’ll never know why Tuli and Tigonee Braves were shown to be the foster children of my deceased mother. “Why is your town called Sheridan?”

  “I can answer that one,” Della smiles. “It was named after a Unites States general from the Civil War. We didn’t name it,” she clarifies. “We just decided to resurrect the old name.”

  Sheridan is home to almost two hundred and fifty people. There are two other refugee towns in Region Two. I’m estimating that there are roughly seven hundred non-county inhabitants in Region Two. That’s seven hundred more than I knew existed, but far less than what would be needed to create any kind of resistance to even just one county. “What about Cheyanne and Rock Springs?” I ask when I realize I haven’t heard anything about these Region Two counties.

  “Eleven and Three? We don’t know. None of us have ever met up with anyone fleeing from there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” Cy speculates.

  “What about other regions? Are there towns of refugees in other regions of the nation?”

  “We don’t know that either,” Crewe answers. “Do you know about the armed boundaries?”

  I shake my head. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It sounds awfully oppressive.

  “Armed guards line the latitude and time-zone boundaries around each region. There are bases where operatives watch for vehicles, boats, jets, or people on foot trying to cross it.”

  “That must take a lot of manpower.”

  “Not too much. They use mechanized, thermal imaging to detect infrared energy waves being emitted,” Crewe explains. “The guards are alerted if any large-massed body with a temperature between ninety-six and ninety-nine degrees comes within a mile of the border. The machine bypasses deer, mountain lions, bears, and other large mammals whose body temperatures are normally above one hundred degrees. It’s brilliant technology, unfortunately for us.”

  “I’m involved in developing ideas for healthily inducing fevers among a force from Region Two that may try to travel across into Three to search for others like us,” Della shines. I hadn’t expected her to be a component in a ploy like this, but I suppose doing research in a lab and blogging about it constitutes as being involved for Della.

  “Problem is, we don’t know what kind of technology they have in Three, and what kind of hostility they’ll bring if they spot our invasion,” Galvesten reminds all of us.

  Crewe lets out a sigh heavy with responsibility. I feel the weight of it too. This conversation is stirring questions about tonight, therefore agitating me. We may be detected if our every move is not being monitored already. We could be caught. If we are, we have no idea what decisions the agents in Miles will make. I get the impression that both the merciless, quick kill and the torture for surrender of knowledge methods have been used in the past.

  “We’re here,” Crewe announces.