Episode Four: The Sisterhood, #4

by Tali Inlow

  The Sisterhood: Episode Four

  The Sisterhood, Volume 4

  Tali Inlow

  Published by Tali Inlow, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE SISTERHOOD: EPISODE FOUR

  First edition. December 14, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Tali Inlow.

  ISBN: 978-1393862628

  Written by Tali Inlow.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  EPISODE FOUR The Shepherd

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  Also By Tali Inlow

  About the Author

  EPISODE FOUR

  The Shepherd

  AUTUMN’S TRAVELS HAVE been productive. She’s always been a fast walker, and there’s little she fears, even out amongst the wilderness as she’s been. Despite her confidence, the new Midwestern desert of the continental United States has its obstacles—the Unmen raiding the village a day and a half ago had been reminder enough. Nothing is certain, not Now.

  The sun crept past midday a bare few hours ago, and the sands beneath Autumn’s feet had begun their slow shift into firmer ground. Scrub brush now dots the surrounding land. With only three days remaining until her deadline for meeting Iris, she knows that she has a fair bit of ground yet to cover. The only reprieve: that the Winds have died down the further west she’s moved. Yesterday, Autumn had removed her scarf before sunset. This very afternoon, she has already unfurled it and tucked it into a pocket of her pack.

  Even with the changing of the Winds, Autumn knows enough to exercise caution. The Winds are just a small part of the dangers in the world after the End, but they are fickle.

  Fickle, and furious.

  Unforgiving.

  If Autumn’s memory serves, the world collapsed in on itself economically around eight years ago. Maybe a little longer than that, but time becomes more of a circle the longer a person dwells on it. But Autumn remembers how the weapons of mass destruction and psychological warfare alike had been deployed in the aftermath of the economic and political fall of nations. The electromagnetic and nuclear disturbances had been horrific, but in some places, the propaganda was nearly as damaging.

  The Winds came not long after the worst of the fallout had subsided. Autumn had been south of what had been Chicago, just Before. Farmlands had been the most susceptible to desertification, and the whole corn belt and even much of the land south of it had turned into blistering sand dunes, barely habitable. But humans have always been adaptable. What remained of the population, they made it work.

  Until the Winds came. And riding upon them, the Sickness.

  One of Autumn’s first bouts with the Winds had been one of her worst. And no matter how hard she tries to forget it, she’s sure that it will be one memory embedded firmly in her brain until death comes for her. Perhaps it will survive even then.

  Autumn had still been young and naïve when things changed, that kind of irrevocable change that civilizations cannot hope to undo. Out of Whitmore for barely a decade, still excited by the possibility of the challenges set before her, out to accomplish things where and when she could without the help of her Sisters. She had finished her assignment in Chicago, even as rumblings were reaching her through various networks of contacts—her Sisterhood and others alike—about shit on the horizon. The nasty shit that implied anyone with a decent head on their shoulders should get out of major population centers, especially in a country as polarized as the United States.

  Autumn had left the city limits at sundown, her superbike carrying her at ungodly speeds away from the shores of Lake Michigan. She’d had the best of intentions—of looping down to her family’s neck of the woods, visiting for a bit before heading to the Carolinas, perhaps even seeking out the Whitmore School, or at least her old haunts in the mountains the school calls home.

  But the universe had other plans. Not just for Autumn, but for every human being the planet across.

  The initial blast caught Autumn off guard, and she wrecked her prized mode of transportation in epic fashion, only her wits and sharp reflexes keeping her from a fate half so gruesome as that of her bike. It had still taken her weeks to recover, and when she did, the world that greeted her was hardly recognizable.

  Without knowing where else to go, what else to do, what goddamned course she was possibly supposed to take, Autumn had traveled east. She would get to her family eventually—but first, Whitmore. If there were answers to find, resources to use, networks to tap into, that was where they’d be.

  Traveling with a sizeable group, Autumn and her anonymous compatriots began navigating the harsh landscape, headed towards the East Coast. Back in those early days, no one was safe, not even Autumn. People had not yet learned the truth: there was as much safety in numbers as there was in traveling alone. That is, none.

  In fact, the hardest lesson had not yet come: that more people equated to more danger, not less.

  Especially when the Winds came. And especially when the people they beat down on were unprepared.

  They were all vulnerable. Autumn vowed to never be so vulnerable again.

  The children succumbed first. Their reaction to the Winds, to the Sickness carried on it, that was what still to this day woke Autumn, a scream threatening to burst from her lips, sweat-drenched and shaking. When the Winds had whipped up around them, unsuspecting and pitiless, Autumn and the people she’d been traveling with were perfect prey—unassuming, unprepared, and utterly, utterly helpless.

  The Winds themselves were bad enough. Sharp and blistering, they could burn a person’s skin in seconds. Only Autumn’s sharp wits had allowed her to cover her skin, quick enough to avoid permanent scars and deformations. The mothers had covered their kids, but not fast enough. Because young ones, the Winds seemed especially keen to infect.

  What was it that the Winds carried? Autumn has still not gotten a satisfactory answer. Hazardous particles, nuclear waste, infectious organisms... Carried on the Winds from place to place. Unseeable. Unknowable. And the results of exposure? Terrible, permanent.

  When the children breathed in the air of the Winds, they were hit with an illness that shook them from head to toe. Most of them seized and twisted so violently and forcibly that they broke their own backs, bent themselves in half. Died, red foam frothing from their mouths as the Sickness tore them apart from the inside out.

  That, at least, Autumn could recognize as a mercy. A blunt-edged, harsh mercy. But mercy nonetheless.

  Their fathers, on the other hand... Their fathers survived. But that survival was no mercy. For those infected by the Sickness turned into things wholly different from the humans they had been before. Later, Autumn would hear them called Unmen. But when she first witnessed what the Winds and the Sickness did to them, there in the desertscape of the Upper Ohio River Valley, not half a year after the End of the world, Autumn couldn’t have formulated a name for the grotesque beings they became right before her eyes.

  The men twisted, turned. Bones breaking and realigning, skin separating and reforming, stretched and skewed monstrously. Their eye sockets became sunken, their mouths gaped like fish out of water. Arms and legs elongated, bent, became weapons in their own right. When they spoke, spit left their hungry jowls like venom. When they moved, the earth seemed to shake beneath their heavy tread. They were no longer men, no longer human—but still with something that threatened intelligence in their gazes.

  As quickly as Autumn could reach her blades, she dispatched of every last one of the Unmen in th
eir party.

  She may not have known much back then, but she learned quickly enough—about the Winds and the Sickness, the Unmen and the End of the world. And what she learned was simple: better to kill them before they could gather that frightful, dim-witted bit of thought into something sharp enough to maim.

  Better to kill than be killed.

  And the women in their party, the women...

  Nothing.

  Or next to it.

  And all right, Autumn could admit that it wasn’t every man. And not every woman went entirely spared.

  But the children... Every one of them, gone.

  She’d find out later that they’d just been an unlucky bunch. Not every child succumbed to the Sickness, as not every man became undone and not every woman went unharmed. But children with immunity were a rare thing—treasured. Blessings, some people called them.

  Autumn knows enough of the world to know that very well may be true. She also knows that it’s probably luck, more than anything else. Even if something prettier than luck would be nice to believe in every once in a while.

  The heat of the afternoon brings her back into herself. Her mind pulls away from the memory like the soft, fleshy pad of a finger pressed carelessly to an overly sharp blade. She leaves the memory where it belongs: in the past. But she also knows that it will stay there only so long as it wants.

  Autumn shakes her head, kicking her stride up a gear. Her wandering mind had caused her footsteps to slow, and she really couldn’t bear being late to her meeting with Iris.

  She’s nearly to the rolling hills and mountains of the Ozarks, in the northwestern part of what used to be Arkansas. While the ground beneath her feet has been changing for some hours now and the scrub brush has been thickening, there are also scraggly, crooked trees making themselves known around her. The elevation has been picking up for some time, and she knows that she’s got to make it past at least a ridge or two before she stops for the night, or else she’ll surely be late. These hills, they’ll slow her down. But she had planned for this.

  Autumn has always been a planner.

  It’s been more than a decade since Autumn has visited this part of the country, and while it looks different, she also recognizes that it looks very much the same. The surface has been wiped clean and rewritten over the past handful of years, but the heart of it still beats the same rhythm, still lub dubs in that familiar, steady way. She has miles and miles to go before she gets to her destination, but it is what it is: home.

  For the past half hour, the ground has shifted into a lightly worn path of sorts. Autumn could have moved away from this trail, away from the people who may or may not be using it at this time of the year. Instead, she continues along it, exercising caution in every step. Her eyes and ears are primed for any sign of trouble. And before night comes, she’ll depart the trail, moving to an area of better cover. After all, she may be strong and fully capable of protecting herself—but where’s the sense in tempting fate?

  The path disappears up ahead of Autumn, curving up and around a bend in the hillside. The trees are becoming thicker here, more closely resembling the scenery of her childhood—but with a twisted, aged, beaten look about it all.

  And perhaps it is the slightly thicker foliage that has muffled the sounds coming from up ahead of her this long. But once she catches wind of a scuffle, Autumn can’t ignore it. She crouches low, treading lightly to keep from being discovered—until she hears the uproarious shout of a woman, at which point Autumn throws subterfuge to the Winds and takes off.

  When Autumn careens around the curve in the path, she immediately takes stock of four figures. Her eyes scan the periphery quickly, but she is certain there aren’t any other foes hiding, ready to attack. The group in front of her is comprised of three middle-aged men and one woman, younger by far than the men, if her looks can be trusted.

  And the men are men—not Unmen—but it is immediately clear to Autumn that they are a deviously-minded trio.

  The first man looks gray from head to toe, and not just his clothes, which are as gray as an elephant—his skin is a mottled gray, too. Even his hair looks like a bad black and white movie, as if he got stuck in someone’s old timey television set while they were trying to tune the dial. He’s fidgety, twitching like a rodent caught in a trap and just as dim-wittingly doomed. The woman’s bag is open at his feet, and his grubby hands are rifling through it like he’s after something in particular, something that he thirsts for fiercely.

  The next man is as tall as a tree—taller even than many of the stunted trees that pathetically line the path and hillside around the clearing. His eyes look heavy, drooping sluggishly; like nothing that is happening around him could keep his attention for any significant length of time. His stance is wide, his massive boots like anchors weighing him down to the ground. He’s shirtless, which is its own sort of death sentence with the sun and the heat and the Winds and the occasional bursts of acid rain pouring down from the sky. And his scarified skin shows exactly such a story. This new world has aged him, as it’s aged them all—but more harshly than the rest. This man, he could be twenty-five, sixty-five, or anywhere in between.

  The last man is wearing an orange and white windbreaker, ripped and ragged but still zipped up tightly under his chin. He has a look about him that hints at cowardly prowess in another age; unearned authority in another world; greatness never realized, but always coveted. It is this man who is closest to the young woman, who is standing over her menacingly. The woman’s head turns away, and she spits blood in the dirt before looking defiantly back to the man. It’s clear to Autumn that she’s arrived immediately after some blow has been delivered, forceful enough to knock her off her feet and to the ground.

  And Autumn realizes it suddenly: devious, these men are not. They are steeped in something worse than that. There’s an evilness lurking there, especially in the last man’s eyes. While Gray and Tree are passive, agendas not their own, Windbreaker is out for something Autumn has always found reprehensible: he plans to take, to break, to demean and maim and ruin. And for what purpose? None, none. His eyes, they glint like glass and are just as blank. Remorseless, and strong, and with cronies at his back—a wicked, wicked combination.

  But Autumn has dealt with men like this one all her grown life. She’s dealt with worse. And when she finishes with these three, not a one of them will be Shepherded anywhere but to a shallow Windswept grave in the dirt.

  “Fuck you!” the woman yells, scrambling to her feet while staying just out of Windbreaker’s reach. She rubs her thumb against her lip and winces at the sensation. “Fuck,” she hisses again, quickly followed by, “You’ll fucking pay for that, man!”

  Autumn can’t help it when her lips quirk into a ghost of a smile. She’s got guts, this one. Maybe she doesn’t need help after all.

  And that voice... Autumn steps silently to the side to try and get a better look. But the woman’s face is obscured by loose blonde hair. Autumn waits.

  “Oh, you’ll make me pay, will you?” Windbreaker snarls, stepping into the woman’s personal space. He reaches out, his movements quick but ill-conceived. At the moment that his fingers move to grip the woman’s wrist, she twists it violently, using the heel of her other hand to punch upward. With a roar and a spray of blood, accompanied by the sound of crunching cartilage, the woman has heartily broken Windbreaker’s nose.

  “You fucking cunt!” he yells. With every ounce of his pent-up rage at having his nose broken, Windbreaker swings a vicious backhand upward across the woman’s face.

  Autumn can almost imagine that the woman’s feet leave the earth for a moment, so strong is the man’s blow, fueled by his potent fury. The woman crumbles to the ground, blinking a bit stupidly from the blow to her chin. Autumn can hardly blame her—what’s more surprising is that she’s held onto consciousness.

  But then Tree moves forward, taking a few lumbering steps before drawing his foot back, ready and primed to avenge the apparent ringlead
er with a kick to the woman’s stomach, incapacitated as she is.

  And here, Autumn draws the line, poised as she is to assist.

  As Tree’s leg begins its pendulum swing forward, Autumn dispatches one of her throwing daggers through the air with practiced, deadly force. It catches him right in the chest, a whistling thud of an impact—sharp and precise and so fast as to nearly be missed. His foot still connects with the woman’s stomach, but not half as hard as it would have if he wasn’t already dying, and slowly.

  While Gray looks stupidly at Tree, who falls to the ground with a comical slowness, Windbreaker continues to nurse his profusely bleeding nose. The woman on the ground takes in the knife, embedded as it now is in her assailant’s chest cavity. She blinks hard, confused—before sweeping her eyes across the way to where Autumn is standing.

  The moment those eyes meet Autumn’s, the world shifts beneath her feet. She doesn’t show it outwardly, because she learned to hide her weaknesses a long, long time ago. But those eyes... Hazel and bright, eyebrows sharp. Full bottom lip and apple cheeks. Her hair, long and blonde and in a braid that’s come undone in the scuffle.

  Their eyes are locked for a moment that lasts all of the last eighteen or so years—for Autumn, at least. Autumn feels eighteen years old herself, eighteen and alone in the world. Eighteen and heart-broken. A child, on the cusp of an adulthood that was reaching out its spindly dark claws to pull her, kicking and screaming, into the future.

  Hazel eyes and blonde hair, familiar enough to Autumn after all these years. Athletic build and proud, proud features.

  Autumn knows, or believes she knows, this woman in the dirt before her. She would know her anytime, anywhere—now, or three decades hence. Were the world to ravage her body and the Sickness to ravage her mind, Autumn still believes in her ability to know this woman. Even though she’d only met her once, all those years ago... Had only met her for so brief a time as to have imagined it.