Desolated

by Lou Cadle

  “What if they burn it?” Pilar said.

  “That’s the worst-case scenario. If that happened, we could either start all over again here, or go away and find another place to start.”

  “So when you’re talking about leaving if we hear them coming,” Pilar said, “you’re talking about taking everything we can. Tools, seeds, potatoes, you name it. Taking everything means moving slowly. They can catch us if we’re too slow. If they have a tracker, they can track us. And even if they go away once, who is to say they won’t come back a month later? Are we supposed to stay ready to flee every other week?”

  Sierra said, “Wait a second. Before we decide what to do about them retaliating, I need to have some idea that we can actually beat them in a fight.”

  Dev said, “I think we might. We only need a bit of luck.”

  “Luck?” Wanda said.

  “Think about it,” he said. “If we can isolate a few of them and kill them, then we take their rifles. And now the sides are even.”

  “No offense,” Arch said, “but that means you and Sierra and Curt, maybe Pilar, will have to remember your firearms skills in a split second. We were good before because we were practiced before.”

  Sierra said, “One of those automatic rifles, you don’t have to be that good. You need to be strong enough to keep it aimed, and spray them without hurting our own.”

  Dev said, “We’d need to get the wagon too. They could have whatever ammo they can carry, and I’m not seeing them wearing bandoliers of it, so that’s where extra rounds must be stored. Once the wagon is out of commission, if we have their supplies, and at least two rifles, we have the advantage.”

  Pilar said, “I don’t see how it would work. We’re relying a lot on Curt and his crossbow skills.”

  Dev said, “Yes, we are. Are you willing to try this, Curt?”

  Cur said, “If we come up with a more specific plan, yes. I wish I had more practice time to shave down my reloading time.”

  “What’s it now?” Barry asked.

  “Twenty seconds, I’d guess.”

  It was a long time.

  “We have twenty-four hours,” Dev said. “I think we need to do our thinking and planning right now.”

  “Why do you want to do this now?” Sierra said. “I mean, beyond protecting Yasmin, which is reason enough. But why not wait two weeks, until they come back through, when we’ve had more lead time?”

  “Because they won’t suspect it’s coming this soon. Not from a group our size. They might from a bigger group, I admit. But I believe it typically takes longer for a group of ten or twenty to stand up to them. I think we’ll have the advantage of surprise because we didn’t move against them at once, so they are thinking we won’t until we start to feel hunger from their BS taxes. Or maybe it’s when the first female conscript returns that communities start to rebel.”

  “What makes you think that?” Curt said. Not argumentative in tone. More curious.

  “I’m guessing, I admit. The rest of you sleep on it. Whatever plans we make today, tomorrow morning, you tell me I’m full of it for my thinking and why. I’ll let myself be convinced otherwise.”

  “Any delay would mean letting two of our people go to—well, we don’t know what, not really,” Pilar pointed out. “And I don’t want to do that.”

  “I won’t do that,” Dev said.

  Sierra said, “I’m with Dev on this. But Curt?”

  “If there’s a plan I like, yes. As long as everyone goes into it with eyes open. It could mean losing everything except our lives. And it could mean losing our lives. I’d like to hear what the younger people think.”

  Troy said, “I want Brandie and our baby protected. If at any moment, they could take her, then it doesn’t matter that much if it’s Yasmin or someone else this time.” He immediately flushed. “That didn’t come out right again. Sorry, Yasmin. I mean, it’s you, but next time, it could be her, or Zoe, or Georgia or whoever. Right? If what we’re all guessing is right, that they would have taken two men had they not planned to—whatever. Rape her, I guess. Then every woman here is at risk.”

  Curt said, “And maybe C.J. Maybe you, Troy. It might not stop with the women.”

  Sierra looked at her son. He wasn’t particularly large. Not that it mattered, if it was five against one. Even Troy, who was the biggest of the younger generation, couldn’t fight off five men with guns. “C.J., do you understand what we’re talking about?”

  “I guess,” he said, but he didn’t sound entirely sure. He had seen chickens mating, of course, and he knew about reproduction. He knew where he came from, but violence that took a sexual course was not something she had touched on in her explanations, except to say that you always asked the person you were interested in sexually if they were interested too. “No means no, and you always respect that,” she’d told him.

  But of course, as nice a thought as that slogan was, it didn’t reflect reality. “No”s were ignored all the time. The person with a gun didn’t need to listen to a “no.” Guns rendered protests silent, whether that was a refusal of sex, or a plea to not steal, or begging for your own life. The victim didn’t get to decide. The shooter did.

  “Maybe your father can explain more later,” she said, looking at Curt, who nodded his agreement. Knowledge was better than ignorance, and C.J. was more than old enough. You might protect a four-year-old from this knowledge. Not a kid C.J.’s age.

  Though if she had a four-year-old right now, she’d explain it to them as well as she could. Though she’d likely explain it to them as they were backpacking away from the neighborhood to hide him.

  A thought struck her. “What about the old place?”

  “What old place?” Dev said.

  “Down the hill. Where the grain farm used to be, and Nina’s family was, and Rudy and his cousin back when.”

  “It burned.”

  “There are still foundations—a crawl space or basement, as I recall. We could store food there and at least it’d be safe from burrowing animals if the concrete is still intact.”

  Arch said, “Awfully close to the highway. You don’t mean we could move there?”

  “No,” she said, but she felt a twinge of regret as she said it. The land was cleared of big trees, and with the wildfire ash added to the soil, and the soil left fallow, it probably would make a good homestead. “I meant to store things away from where they can get to them.”

  “It might serve as a rendezvous point,” her father said, “should we get separated.”

  “I don’t know where it is,” Yasmin said.

  “It’s a long walk down,” Sierra said. “So we can’t show you now, but we could another day.”

  Yasmin said, quietly and with no trace of whining in her voice, “I might not have another day.”

  Everyone went still. The birdsong in the trees seemed suddenly too loud. Every face in the group was troubled. The simple truth of those words hit them all, and Sierra could read grief on some faces, shame on others, and anger on yet others.

  Dev’s face grew only more stern. He looked more like his mother than like Arch, but that expression was pure Arch. “We won’t let that happen,” he said. “Agreed? Everyone. Agreed?”

  Sierra said, “Yes. We fight.” She admired Dev’s timing. He’d taken Yasmin’s innocent, stark statement, and used the moment to steamroll over any fear or hesitation. Who could say no at this moment?

  As everyone either spoke or nodded, the answer to that became clear: no one could protest Dev’s plan.

  Curt waited until everyone else had committed, and then he restated his previous point. “We need a good plan. What is it?”

  Arch said, “The grenades might work. They were stable enough when we unburied them.”

  “And they might not,” Dev said. “So we’ll put them in our plan, but if they fail to detonate, the rest of the plan will still need to work.”

  “What plan is that?” Curt persisted.

  “Okay,” said Dev. “Her
e’s what I’ve come up with so far. It’s partial, and I’m not married to it. Anyone—everyone—if you have a better idea, chime in.”

  They began their planning in earnest.

  Chapter 15

  “We need more rope,” Georgia said, “if we want to stay well back of the dummies.”

  Sierra yelled to C.J., who was running errands for her group. It was the following morning, early, and they had no idea when they’d be seeing Vargas and his men, but they wanted to be ready well before noon.

  Dev’s group had the most dangerous job. If the grenades were as unstable as the bullets had been, they could be blown up at any minute. Sierra was starting at every crack of a stick she heard, thinking it was the start of that horrible noise.

  She and most of the girls were behind the Quinn house, setting up dummies, fake humans that they hoped would fool Vargas’s men for a second or two.

  They’d taken gourds from the barn to use as heads. Every other part of the dummies came from the top and dry parts of the compost pile, corn stalks and tomato stalks and amaranth stalks giving the dummy bodies stability, and wads of inedible leaves stuffed into their oldest clothing to give them the shape of a human being.

  “Looks just like me,” Yasmin said. “If I had a gourd head.” She seemed high on optimism for the moment. She had more to win or lose today than most of them.

  “Not sure how long this will work,” Sierra said. “Surely they’ll notice it’s not human beings they are shooting at.”

  “Dev says he can confuse them by moving around.”

  Sierra was worried about Dev’s job in this. To make the straw figures appear dangerous, someone had to be among them, shooting arrows down on Vargas’s men. On this side of their road, it was Dev. On the grain field side, it would be Zoe, shooting from ground level, back in the grain where she could not be seen. She too would be moving after every shot or two.

  C.J. came running up with an armload of twine. “Dad is on his way. He has them ready, he said to tell you.”

  It had been up to Curt to devise a spring-loaded device that would pop up the fake combatants in a way that allowed them to fall right away. That quick appearance and disappearance might extend the seconds that Vargas’s men would fire at the dummies rather than at the living people.

  Firing at them would waste their ammunition. The more bullets they spent on dummies, the fewer would go into the bodies of the people of the neighborhood.

  Joan, Emily, and Nina were ferrying supplies into the woods. If it all went to hell quickly, they were, on a signal from Dev, going to retreat at a dead run. They’d rendezvous with any survivors where the food was being stored and grab it, and everyone left would keep running uphill together until dusk.

  They had debated splitting up instead at that point, but decided not to. Better to make a last stand together if it came to that.

  And if the worst did not come to pass, and they won the day, they would have time to figure out what to do to prepare for a second wave of men who came after Vargas’s men had not returned.

  A worry for another day. Today, it was dummies, traps, and if they had time, some rehearsal of their own troop movements for various scenarios.

  “Aren’t you scared?” Wanda asked.

  Sierra said, “Me? Yes.”

  “I meant Yasmin.”

  “I’m much less frightened today than I was yesterday,” she answered. “When that man pointed at me, I thought I was going to faint. Or die, maybe, have a heart attack and die right where I stood.”

  Sierra asked Wanda, “Why? Aren’t you scared?”

  “Yes.”

  Brandie spoke. “I feel sick. Sick about leaving you all behind.”

  “Look, if we need to run, and if we can never come back, we need to get the hens to safety. That’s your job. So when you hear the first gunfire, you go. Don’t play the hero,” Sierra said. “Or rather, to be the hero for you is to run with the hens and protect them.”

  “I hope your father has found that thing he was looking for.”

  “Dog kennel,” Sierra said. “He just had it a couple weeks back, so it couldn’t have gone far.” It was Brandie’s job to take the hen and the current clutch of eggs away from the neighborhood. If it all went to hell, fleeing survivors would follow in her steps and scatter the trail markers Joan and them were placing right now, so they couldn’t be as easily followed.

  They had tried to think of every possible outcome. What if? What if they won, they lost, they were captured, one of them died, half of them died, they got a rifle, they didn’t get a rifle, the grenades worked, they didn’t work, some of Vargas’s men rode ahead while some lagged behind. Every possible contingency, they’d tried to anticipate.

  Arch hadn’t been so sure they’d thought of enough. “Stuff always goes wrong,” he’d warned, more than once.

  Sierra had been impressed with how much Arch had let Dev take the lead. She should tell Arch that before the shooting started.

  She should say a lot of things before the shooting started today. It might be her last chance to say them.

  Curt walked up with his new invention. “I’m not sure yet it’ll work with the dummies you made until I can feel the weight of them. Who has one finished?”

  Yasmin and Brandie pointed to the pile of them.

  “Wow. You’ve done a lot. I’m behind,” Curt said. “Hang on a minute.”

  Sierra sat back on her heels and watched him load the dummy into the contraption he’d built. She’d need to learn to do this herself.

  “We’re going to need some sort of way to keep it anchored. Anchor pins for fencing should do it. Do you have any at your place, Sierra?”

  “Everything we have is holding down fencing, I think. But there’s some galvanized wire in the barn, a decent length of it. We can bend it into whatever shape you want.”

  “What gauge?”

  “I don’t know. It’s fence wire.”

  “Probably too light.”

  “So I guess paperclips won’t work either.” She tried to think of what else they had around the house that would work. If need be, she’d pull up the clips holding the fence down and replace them later.

  “Let me show you all how this works. C.J.,” Curt said, “I need you to stand on this part here. Lean back, so the dummy doesn’t clobber you on the way up.”

  C.J. did as he was told.

  Curt attached the cord and played it out. “I designed it so you get the best action if you’re low to the ground, because you should be anyway, to avoid being hit by bullets. Give it a sharp yank, like this.” He yanked the cord, and the thing popped up. But C.J. lost his balance, and he and the dummy fell. “Try again,” Curt said to his son. “Now that you know what direction the force is coming from, you can stay upright and apply more force.”

  C.J. stood and helped his father set up the spring device again. He grabbed a big rock and held onto it, giving himself more mass.

  “Good idea,” Curt said. “Set?”

  C.J. nodded.

  “Now,” Curt said, and he yanked the cord again. The dummy popped up, Curt let go of the rope, and it popped back down.

  The gourd head fell off and rolled away.

  “Guess we need to attach those better,” Wanda said.

  “Your fence wire might do for that,” Curt said.

  “Okay, I’ll go get it,” Sierra said. “And look for heavier gauge wire. What about the electric cabling?”

  “Too heavy and too flexible if we try to take it apart,” said Curt. “I’m going back to finish making these. Now that I’m sure it’ll work, the manufacturing will go quickly.”

  “Good,” Sierra said. “I feel like time is slipping away from us.” The three of them walked back through the Quinn property together. No one was there but Arch.

  “What’s up, Arch?” she called.

  “Fixing this trap,” he said. They were setting up some of their spring animal traps to trap humans and horses coming up the center of their dirt road. A
few broken legs, whether man’s or beast’s, would work to their advantage.

  “See you later,” Sierra called, as they kept on walking. “You’re doing a great job, Curt. You too, C.J.”

  “I wish I could shoot a gun,” her son said.

  “Afraid that’s going to be up to me.” She and Dev were selected as the first two to get a rifle, should anyone capture one. Whoever was nearer, whoever saw the man fall, had to run in and get it, but if she or Dev were nearby, the rifle would be handed to them.

  Curt said, “How you feeling about that?”

  “Resolved,” she said.

  “Still nervous about the big gun?”

  “A little. Arch convinced me it’s pretty easy to hit things with it. I’m terrified it’ll be too easy and I’ll hit something I don’t want to. I want everybody to stay the hell away from me if that’s what I end up with.”

  “You may get a different rifle. Odds are you will,” he said.

  “Good. Those, I can handle.”

  “Do you think you still can shoot well?”

  “I believe so. Pilar and Zoe are backups, if Dev and I can’t get to the first fallen rifles, for whatever reason. Joan said no, she didn’t think she could manage one, after sleeping on the idea.”

  “When we capture four rifles, the four of you will get it done.”

  “I hope we do,” she said.

  C.J. said, “I wish I could shoot a bow, so when Dev doesn’t need his, I could kill the bad guys.”

  Curt and she exchanged a look.

  Curt said, “You don’t know that until you experience it.”

  “I do know,” C.J. said. “They’re like animals. I kill animals all the time.”

  Sierra didn’t disagree. It wasn’t like the old times, when a parent would have corrected their son, told him that all people had more worth than all animals. That probably had never been true, for there had always been evil people, but it certainly wasn’t true any longer. In her heart, she agreed with him, so she didn’t argue with him, for she hated being hypocritical with her kids.