Desolated

by Lou Cadle

  He tried one last thing. “What if we give you food instead of people? Enough to feel all twelve of you for the two weeks of road work?” They’d go hungry this summer if they did, for the food stores they had helped them make it through the weeks when it was too hot to grow almost everything. Better to go to bed hungry some nights than to hand Yasmin over to a bunch of men. Or anyone, but the girls and women would be in the greatest danger.

  “What we said. It’s not up for negotiation. After the highway is repaired, then you’ll want that excess food for trade. Or for your taxes.”

  Dev couldn’t think of a thing to say to that. He sympathized with Sierra and his father. Anger was the easiest reaction to this. But he admired Joan, for she was managing to think, to ask direct questions without being overly combative. Himself? He was just standing here, slack-jawed, a fool, with no idea of what to say to make this trouble all go away.

  Vargas clicked at his horse and turned it, and he led the way down the driveway, his men following in single-file, except for Freddie. Freddie dismounted and wrapped the end of his horse’s reins around a belt loop. He held the rifle in both hands, ready to fire, and he backed away. The horse went along.

  They’d done this many times before. That was Dev’s only coherent thought. They knew how, and they’d already seen or imagined every possible response. What could he come up with that would be new, or effective, against such a superior and experienced force?

  When the men were out of sight, his own people began to move, gathering together. The two who had been watering the horses came back up the driveway, pushing the wheelbarrow and the empty tub.

  Troy took off, saying, “I’m getting Brandie.”

  Joan said, “Get Emily and Nina too.”

  Sierra said, “When they’re gone, I’ll get Curt and C.J. I’m going down to find them.”

  Dev nodded. He could hear the wagon wheels squeaking again, the noise fading. They were leaving. He turned to Joan and waved Pilar closer. “What else could I have done?”

  Pilar shook his head.

  “You did fine, Dev,” Joan said, and she walked over and put an arm around him, giving him a brief squeeze before letting go. “It was an impossible situation.”

  “Thanks,” he said, though he disagreed with her. To the group he said, “We meet in five minutes. I’m going to get my family.”

  He went up the porch stairs, and there was Zoe at the back door. “I heard everything.”

  “Did your grandfather?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dev sighed. “I guess I have to tell him.”

  “I can.”

  “No, Zoe. It’s my job. You go out with the others. Make sure your other grandfather is okay. Pilar hardly said a word and I know how he worries about people.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Love you.”

  “I love you,” he said, and then he was fighting back tears, as he went into his father’s room, over the small exchange, routine most days. Not today.

  A stool stood in the corner of his old room for a guest to sit. His father sat on it now, his hands pinned between his knees, probably stopping the shaking. “Dad,” Dev said, and then he lost it. He was crying. He sat on the sofa and just let the tears fall for half a minute. He was so worried. And ashamed. He wasn’t the leader, but he was a leader, one of the adults of the group, not too old, not too young. And he hadn’t led them anywhere at all.

  “What happened?” asked his father, once Dev had gained control of himself.

  Dev told him.

  “Could have been worse,” his father said. “Probably will be worse, and soon.” His father held his hands up, palm down. They were both shaking badly. “Motherfucking old age,” he said.

  Dev barked a laugh, more surprised than amused. “I didn’t even know you knew that word.”

  “I know lots of words. Like ‘kidnapping.’ Which is what this is, taking two of our people, no matter what we say.”

  “At least we’ll know where they are.”

  “For all the good it does us. What, are we going to go up there with two bows and a crossbow and take out a dozen armed men?”

  Dev was glad for the question. It got him to thinking, and not just feeling despair and fear and shame and sorrow. “Maybe so,” he said. He tried to focus enough to imagine it. “At night. There’d be all the captured people, and they’d have shovels and pickaxes. We should send tools with our people that double as weapons.”

  “Still. Twelve rifles? Who knows how much ammunition?”

  “It won’t be just us,” Dev said. “Wes’s group, Payson, they’re not going to like this any more than we do.” His mood, his despair, his weakness was gone. He felt once again as if it were possible to do something. He wasn’t sure what yet, not entirely. But something. “C’mon, Pop,” he said. “Let’s go outside. We have work to do.”

  “About time,” Arch muttered. He had to use the wall to get to his feet. “Stupid body. Whatever you do, I guess I’ll be out of it. When those men are around, I think my symptoms get worse.”

  “No, you won’t be entirely out of it,” Dev said. “You’ll be important to whatever we do. Your head is full of military strategies. We’ll need you now more than ever.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Before they come back and snatch our people? Only a day. I’d rather not plan anything until Rod and Misha return, if that were possible. We need to know what the others are thinking down the hill. They might have a plan, or better weapons. I wish we still had a working car.”

  “Can’t drive past the platoon. And it’s only good on roads. Better to wish we’d had a horse all along.”

  “We’d have needed a pair. Probably would have eaten one when it got too old to work.” Dev said, “Do you need my arm? Or can you walk?”

  “I can walk,” Arch said. He seemed to have gained his balance. “Let’s go on out there and figure out what to do.”

  Chapter 14

  Sierra had so many emotions flying around inside her, she didn’t know what to do with them all. She was worried and scared. And angry and combative. If she had a rifle and a hundred rounds of ammo, she knew exactly what she’d do, and damn the consequences. But she didn’t. Her best weapon was hardly more than a pea-shooter.

  The armed men were gone, and from their little road where she now stood, the sound of them faded away to nothing. She called, “Curt! Where are you? C.J.?”

  C.J. emerged from the grain field. Pink bits of amaranth grain clung to his hair. She rushed over and hugged him, but he pulled away fast, too excited to tolerate a long hug. “Dad is trailing them. He said only for ten or fifteen minutes, but he wanted to try and overhear what they were saying.”

  “He won’t know the context,” Sierra said, more to herself than to C.J.

  “What’s that word mean?”

  “He won’t know what went on at the Quinn house, so he may be confused about what they’re saying.”

  “What happened?”

  “They’re taking two of our people, even though we said no to that.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  “About what I said to them,” she said. “But they can. They have the rifles and we don’t.”

  “What’s so great about rifles? Dad can take down a javelina with one crossbow bolt.” He was boasting on his father, which was sweet, but also came of his ignorance about firearms.

  “But then he has to reload, and that takes time,” she said. “It’s a little less time with the hunting bows the Quinns have, but still, a few seconds per shot.”

  “So? How fast are rifles?”

  “I forget you’ve never seen one working.” She held his eyes and used her most serious voice. “Fast. The ones they have? Some are like ours, and they can shoot bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger, one a second for a short while. The best ones, though, those can shoot a hundred bullets in ten seconds.”

  “That’s impossible,” C.J. said.

  “I wish it were
.”

  “I’ll ask Dad.”

  “I’m the better marksman with a gun, but sure, ask him.”

  “You can’t even use the crossbow right.”

  She shook her head at him. “I had a lot of life before you were born. For a time, when I wasn’t much older than you are now, I was a soldier. I used a rifle. I shot a lot of people—killed a lot.”

  “You did?” He looked at her with a look she’d never seen on him before.

  “We all did. Arch, Dev, Pilar, me, Kelly, even Mitch.”

  “Who?”

  “Mitch. It was his house before it was Joan’s. I wish you could have known him. And Kelly. Most of all, I wish you’d known Kelly. I miss her.”

  “How about Dad? Did he shoot people?”

  “Him too. He killed fewer than the Quinns or me.”

  “Why?”

  “He was protecting the neighborhood more than I was. A lot of the killing took place down in Payson.”

  “You don’t ever talk about this.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why?” he said.

  Ah, to be so young and innocent that you thought that killing people might be heroic. She hadn’t taught him that, but the lesson was there, in books they had, and taught by implication in hunting big game or culling the cockerels. Kill or be killed. Kill or starve. “It isn’t easy to kill another person. It hurts you, if not at once, eventually.”

  “Even if they’re out to kill you?”

  “Even then,” she said.

  “So you aren’t going to kill anyone again?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I hoped I never would have to again. But to protect you, or Zoe, or Pilar, or Yasmin, yes, I would.”

  “Yasmin?”

  He didn’t know the specifics yet, or what they implied. Should he know? Yes, he should. He’d picked up on that one name she listed that was not blood family. “Any of us. Anyone here. I’d kill to save their lives.” Even if it destroyed her peace and brought back the nightmares, she would. She had no doubt of that.

  “I wish you talked about that time more.”

  “I can’t, C.J. It hurts me to talk about it now.”

  He looked confused.

  “I know you don’t understand. You probably will one day.” If he survived. A sharp pain, all kinds of terrible emotions, stabbed her in the chest. He was so innocent. Of course he’d killed and cleaned animals, dispatched ones in traps that had been suffering, wiped blood off his hands. But he’d never seen people do more to each other than raise their voices in anger—and that seldom enough. Pilar was even-tempered, and she had come to be more like him as she aged. Curt only yelled at C.J. when he was at risk of hurting himself.

  C.J. was losing his innocence, and that’s what hurt her worst. She had learned a bit of Christian religion from Joan and Dev over the years, and she saw the parallels to the fall from Eden. He’d known only the natural world as it was, and farming, with the people around him all being kind to him. And now this. He was being kicked out of the Garden.

  She was sad for her son. But he had to know about this, about the hard parts of the human world, and how to protect himself from evil men and even why Yasmin’s selection bothered her more than anyone else’s. Perhaps she’d failed him in not preparing him before this. He knew epidemics were a danger, and plant disease, and drought. He knew that insects could wipe out a crop overnight if you didn’t pull off the first tiny worms you saw. But he had no idea of the terrible things human beings could do to other human beings.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He looked strangely at her. “Okay,” he said, waiting for more to come.

  “That’s it. I love you. And I want more than anything for you to be safe.”

  He didn’t say it back to her. He hadn’t much since he was small, but she didn’t doubt his love. She knew without a doubt that he loved Pilar, and he wasn’t vocal about that either.

  “Let’s go. Your dad will find us when he’s done.” She wasn’t worried about Curt. He was a great tracker. The military men might have a trained tracker, but they hadn’t hunted to survive for the past thirty-odd years as Curt had. He could stalk prey without it having any inkling there was a man nearby.

  The group looked up as one as they came into view.

  She announced, “Curt’s fine. He’s stalking them for a short time. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  “Glad he didn’t kill them as we’d planned,” Joan said. “We’d have been slaughtered.”

  Arch said, “We may be anyway. We might be slaughtered fast, or we might be slaughtered slow, from starvation.”

  Joan said, “They didn’t take any food this time. Water was all.”

  “Next time they will. Or the time after that,” Dev said. “They’ll strip us of everything.”

  “You sound more sure of that now than before,” Luke said.

  “I think this was well rehearsed. I think they know how to play people, to string them along.”

  “I don’t disagree,” said Pilar, “but why wouldn’t they let us live and work for them? Keep taxing us, make us work ourselves harder, and stress our poor land. They could make that go on for years. Decades.”

  “They won’t last decades,” Joan said. “Something will happen to them. They’ll cross the wrong people.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Barry said. He’d been one to take the water down to the wagon horses. “I overheard them talking. I think they’ve been together for over five years. If they have lasted for five years, why not ten or twenty?”

  Sierra said, “We should wait for Curt to get back. Then start right there, Barry, with you repeating that. Everybody take a break until Curt returns. Get yourselves water. Use the outhouse.”

  C.J. said, “I’ll go wait for him.” He took off down the driveway.

  Curt arrived ten minutes later, C.J. with him, and sat on an empty tree stump. Everybody gathered again in a single group to hear his report. “I didn’t hear much of use. They are headed back downhill.”

  Dev told him what had happened, and Barry repeated what he had said.

  Pilar said, “Even stable governments have to start somehow. They could be around for years more. They might outlive me and you, Joan.”

  “How? Surely someone will stand up to them.”

  “Who?” Pilar said.

  “Us,” Dev said firmly. “We should stand up to them.”

  “If a town like Payson couldn’t, how could we?” Sierra said. “Payson surely has more people, even after the epidemics.”

  “We’ll know that for sure when Joan’s kids are back,” Pilar said.

  “I’m terribly worried for them,” Joan said. “What if they ran into these men and were hurt?”

  Arch shook his head. “They’d hear men on horseback coming from a long way off. Easy as can be to slip into the woods and lie low.”

  Joan didn’t look very reassured by that.

  Sierra thought it might be more likely Rod and Misha would run into trouble in Payson or at Wes’s. After what she’d just seen with Vargas’s men, she wouldn’t take kindly to having some other stranger show up, and maybe Wes’s group had not. But she didn’t suggest it to Joan. She had too many worries on her mind as it was.

  Dev said, “We’ll know soon. I imagine they’ll be here before too long. Especially if this is going on at the other places, this drafting of the unwilling.”

  Emily said a rare sentence. “They can’t take Yasmin.”

  Sierra looked at her, and Emily met her gaze, looking as angry and stubborn as she’d ever seen the timid woman look. Obviously, Joan or someone had told her what had transpired here. Sierra wondered if she was sharing that memory with Emily, the day she and Dev had killed the men molesting her when she was only thirteen. Emily knew, like no one else here did, what Yasmin had to fear from the men.

  Dev very gently said, “I suggested two men. They said no. I think we all know what that means.”

  Troy said f
iercely, “I’ll kill them if they touch Brandie.” Then he looked abashed. “Sorry, Yasmin, I don’t want them to hurt you either.”

  “I can run away,” Yasmin said, her voice firm. “But that would only put someone else in danger. So I won’t.”

  Sierra was impressed.

  Joan said, “Maybe all the girls should hide when they come back. Just the men and me confront them. They’ll be forced to take two of us, none of the girls.”

  “No,” Dev said. “I’ve decided. They aren’t taking anyone. I’m going to fight. You can join me or not, but I’m going to do everything I can to stop this now.”

  “What about retaliation from the full army?” Pilar said.

  “We have to risk that. That’s all there is to it. But we can try and pull this off in a way we might not see that.”

  “How, son?” Arch said.

  “It’s all about dealing with the horses after the fact, I think. First, we clean up whatever mess is left after an attack. We have to kill every one of those men, that’s the first thing, and it’s a big goal, but I know we can figure out how. And we have to try and not kill all the horses, but if we do, we’ll deal with that some other way.”

  “How? No, why?” Gustavo said.

  Dev said, “What we need to do is to take all of the surviving horses up beyond the break in the highway, drive them on, scatter them around up there. Then if they have a tracker—and they probably will—they’ll track the horses up there.”

  Joan frowned. “We’ll bring down the retaliation on someone else’s head then.”

  Dev said, “Maybe so. Or maybe they’ll never know exactly why their men disappeared.”

  “If it was me,” Pilar said, “and I was that kind of man, I might kill everybody from Payson to Show Low in response, if I wasn’t sure who exactly, then install my own excess population in our place to farm it all.”

  Sierra said, “If they have enough population, they may well do that. If not, they could kill us and let the land revert to wild. Our houses are about halfway there as it is.”

  “But we might survive this,” Dev said. “Think about it. Even if they did retaliate, we could set a sentry again, have a plan to get out temporarily when their army comes. Let them do what they will to what’s here. If we have the land, if we have the houses, and some seeds and young chicks, we can start again.