by David Moody
Stace used the weathered remains of the feral’s pant leg to wipe black goo off the arrowhead and held the shaft up to her eyes, making sure the length was still straight. Satisfied, she slid the arrow into the quiver on her backpack and let her eyes fall back down to the body. The three shots replayed in her mind with perfect clarity. Three shots to kill a barely-walking feral.
I don’t wanna be a farmer.
She decided not to take an ear home as a trophy.
‘Let’s get a move on, Stace,’ her father said, his voice quiet yet still carrying unmistakable authority. She shook her head to clear her thoughts and jogged toward the opposite end of the clearing, finding her other two arrows sticking out of the densely-packed tree trunks. She worked the arrows free and hurried back to him.
He panned ‘noculars down the hill and across the small valley where they had picked up the feral’s tracks. She guessed he was looking to see if there were any more of the things nearby. Standard Ranger fieldcraft. If you’re stopped and waiting for something, learn your surroundings even if you’re on familiar ground. Thinking of Ranger doctrine bit at her. Her father had been teaching her this stuff for most of her life. Her first time out on a real patrol and she’d really screwed up.
When he heard her approaching, he cased the glasses in a belt pouch and turned to face her, his expression unreadable.
‘Got all three,’ she said, hoping to buy any advantage whatsoever in her father’s mind.
‘So you did.’ He paused, looking down at her and then frowned. ‘Stace,’ he said, ‘you know that your mother and I love you very, very much...’
How many times in history, Before or After, had anything good come from a parent after that sentence? She took a sudden, uncontrolled breath that hitched halfway down her throat.
Her father stopped speaking, opened his mouth, seemed to consider something for a moment, and started again.
‘We’re very proud of you, no matter what you end up doing with your—’
Boom-Boom-Boom
Stace flinched and looked south where the signal flares had gone off. She looked back at her father, but he had already dropped to a knee and whipped off his backpack, rifling through the contents. Signal flares were super-serious business. Something huge had happened back home.
‘Dad, what—?’
boom-boom-boom
Further away and to the west.
‘Rally signal,’ her father said. ‘We have to relay it on so everyone out on patrol knows.’
‘Won’t noise like that draw more ferals?’
‘Worth the risk to get everyone on the same page.’
Stace had no idea what books had to do with it, but she held her tongue.
‘Plus,’ he said, ‘those signals—’ two more went off from north and east, almost at the same time, ‘—coming from all over should confuse any ferals that want to track toward something.’
Shawnee Lodge had once had a lot of little two-way radios, but over the years these had been lost in the wilderness, stolen by ‘Rauders, or simply stopped working. There were plans to make more from scratch, just like there were plans to do a lot of things, but higher priorities, a shortage of parts, or the simple lack of someone with the right knowledge always seemed to get in the way. For the time being, the only two working radios were kept where they were needed: one in the Lodge itself and down at The Neck, a massive wall and gatehouse that stretched right across old Highway 125 at the valley’s narrowest point.
Her father fished out his flare gun and a small white cylinder with a black number three written on it. He chambered the flare and stood, pointing the pistol-shaped launcher straight up.
‘Look away,’ he said, an edge to his voice that demanded instant obedience. Her stomach tightened as she turned. Anything that would make her father change his mood so suddenly had to be bad.
There was a loud whoosh from behind her. She waited a couple of heartbeats then looked up. The flare rose on a shower of blue and yellow sparks, bright against the overcast sky. Stace stood mesmerized, watching it go up and up. She smiled despite the confusing situation. It was beautiful, in its own way.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
Sound and concussion from directly overhead washed through Stace’s body, so powerful it made her teeth click together.
‘Come on!’ He turned to run. ‘We’ve got less than five minutes to get to the top of the hill.’
Running was something she could do. All of the sadness, the worry over his opinion of her performance today, the confusion about the flares, it all melted away as her legs started pumping, picking up speed as she ran after her father. He moved quickly through the clearing and past the body of the feral. Stace lengthened her strides to keep up.
‘What does that signal mean?’ Stace had pulled up to just behind him as he knifed through the high grass and plunged through the wall of underbrush at the clearing’s far edge at a small gap in the brambles she hadn’t even seen.
‘Recall,’ he yelled back. ‘All patrols to return. Three pops means rally at The Neck.’
Two more triple airbursts sounded from the east and north. Stace knew about the system, had heard them go off a couple of times over the years, but she didn’t know what each one signified. Now she understood why all the older Rangers complained about not having ‘lectric radios.
‘We have to be on the hilltop within five minutes to see what colour the Commandant sends up,’ her father said, dodging between trees as they climbed. ‘That’ll tell us what’s going on.’
They reached the top and stopped. Breathing deep, though nowhere near winded, Stace watched her father. His eyes darted around and settled on a spot twenty yards away where an outcropping of rock jutted out of the hilltop like the front of a rowboat. He climbed to the edge and looked southwest, toward home. Stace joined him, looking around to see if any more rally signals had gone up, but there was nothing in the sky and no sound but the soft cacophony of the damp forest.
Though their position was higher than the Citadel at the heart of Shawnee Lodge, hills in-between blocked direct sight. The only structure visible was the very top of the new water tower. Her gaze tracked south, counting the smoke plumes from hearth fires that rose in a ragged line, following the meandering valley that ran from Turkey Creek Lake, at the base of the Citadel, all the way down to the ruins of Friendship, a town that ran along the northern bank of the Ohio River.
In school, Stace learned that this area had been known Before as the Shawnee State Forest in what was then called Ohio. Southern Ohio, to be exact, only a few miles from the big river. A land of high, forested hills and narrow, fertile valleys. Shawnee Lodge had been a park Before, where families had flocked for weekend getaways, camping, and boating. The Citadel, a reinforced descendant of what had once been the Shawnee Lodge And Conference Centre, sat atop a flattened hill with steep slopes on three sides.
Shawnee Lodge had not only survived, it had prospered. Access to the nearby spring-fed waters of Turkey Creek Lake had allowed people like Stace’s family to hole-up and weather the chaos when the dead rose to attack the living. Her mom said it was a perfect storm of having the right people in the right place at the right time. Her father believed it was more Commandant Edward’s doing than anything else.
Jacob Edwards had once been a different type of Ranger in an army that no longer existed. After everything fell apart, he took leadership of the disorganized refugees and set to shoring up Shawnee Lodge’s defences against both the dead and the living. That, more than anything else, Stace’s father had told her many times, had enabled them to survive the rampaging swarms of ferals in the early years and all the ‘Rauders since.
‘Rauders didn’t seem too bad to Stace. More often than not, so all the oldsters said, they were just small groups of lazy people, unwilling to work for a living, gathered around someone that still had a working gun. Weak groups of barbarians that would flee at the first sign of strength and would never, ever, attack a place as well-defended and fortified
as Shawnee Lodge. So what could possibly rattle her father? What would worry the Commandant enough to recall all the patrols?
‘What do you think’s happening, Dad?’
Her father had taken out the bag containing the flare gun charges and had palmed three of them: one yellow, one red, and one green.
‘No idea, hon. Could be your brother’s militia unit found a bigger ‘Rauder group than they could tangle with and came back for reinforcements. Hopefully it’s nothing more than Mister Tinny getting stuck down in Portsmouth again.’
That was something she hadn’t considered and a pang of worry made her blink. She rather liked the rotund little metal merchant.
‘Why does the council keep sending Mister Tinny’s wagons into Portsmouth if the ferals keep cornering him?’
‘We need the metal,’ her father said. ‘No good supply of it in the ground around here and we’ve turned everything inside our borders from Before to good use. Hush, now. You’ve got my six.’
Stace winced. Proper fieldcraft dictated that she should have been watching her father’s blind spot the second they jumped up on the rock. She turned and crouched, pulled out her bow and nocked an arrow. She held the weapon ready, determined not to miss if anything came out of the trees.
Maybe if he’s looking in the other direction, I’ll be able to hit something, she thought and smiled in spite of herself.
Scanning the forest in a wide arc, she imagined two dozen other pairs of people, other Rangers with a kid close to Selection age like her, spread in a miles-wide circle all around the Citadel. She imagined all of them doing exactly what she was at that very same moment. In an odd way, it was a comforting thought.
Behind her, Stace’s father whispered, but not to her. Where there had been an edge of concern before, now there was pure dread in her father’s voice and it made her skin crawl.
‘Not green. Please lord, not green. Not again.’
Stace knew the different colours meant something, but she didn’t know them by heart. Her father had undoubtedly listed them to her at one time or another, but she had probably not been listening, counting on his patronage to make her a shoe-in for Selection. But now, actually out here in the forest, she regretted not paying more attention.
She knew she shouldn’t talk right now, but curiosity got the better of her. ‘Dad, what’s green?’
Beyond the hills to the south, right where militia headquarters were located, a silent point of brilliant light rose into the overcast sky trailing a beautiful tail of sparks. It faded completely and Stace wondered if it was a dud or if all the dampness in the air had extinguished it. A split second later, a pinpoint of white appeared and exploded into a near-perfect circle of coloured lines flying out from the centre like spokes of a bicycle wheel before they all sagged as gravity took hold. Green lines.
‘Good God,’ her father muttered.
Stace ignored her rear-guard responsibility and stepped next to her father. He jammed the green cylinder into his flare gun and pointed it skyward.
‘Eyes,’ he said, his tone iron-hard. She turned her head and squeezed her eyelids shut as the charge whooshed from his gun. When she looked again, she could see other bursts of green exploding over distant hills in nearly every direction.
‘Dad...’ Stace said, ‘What does green mean?’
‘A swarm,’ he said, putting his signalling equipment away. Stace couldn’t take her eyes off the sparkling blossoms, their dread portents completely out of kilter with such gossamer beauty.
In ones and twos ferals usually weren’t supposed to be very dangerous, especially the older, slower ones. But once enough of them gathered in one place, a sort of critical mass occurred. The entire group would turn and head north, their collective noise drawing in other ferals along the way. Stace’s mother thought it might have something to do with the Earth’s magnetic field, that they moved north like migrating birds. The difference, of course, being that ferals never came back south. Nobody liked to think about how many of the things might be in Canada, but everyone hoped the Great Lakes and the cold killed them off once they got that far. Nobody really knew one way or the other. Regardless, the green signal meant that a large number of ferals had been spotted heading toward Shawnee Lodge.
It had been ten years since a large number of ferals had rampaged up the valley, devouring everything in their path and slamming into a hastily-stacked wall of old cars and logs. Stace remembered that fight with razor-sharp detail.
She had only been a toddler when the first outbreaks drove the Tomlinsons from their home in Dayton, fleeing by car until the petrol ran out and then on foot. All she had of that chaotic time were glimpses of images, barely remembered feelings of fear and anger absorbed from her parents who had radiated both constantly. Nothing concrete. Nothing to dread.
But during that last swarm she had been old enough see, to understand, to fear. The children and infirm had holed-up in the cabins overlooking Turkey Lake while every able-bodied adult in the growing community had gone down to the barricades to fight, using up their last bullets and dying by the score. In the end, it had come down to hand-to-hand combat, and finished with the survivors killing their own infected before they went feral.
In the aftermath, the newly-elected council unanimously voted to organize a militia under Commandant Edwards and start construction on a vast perimeter wall, all in the hopes that they would never again have to pay such a blood toll. Given the hectic needs of rebuilding, of simply surviving through another harsh winter, the only fortification that had been built that year was The Neck.
In time, the town healed and grew prosperous through trade with its neighbours, while fewer and fewer ferals were spotted every year. Lumber was still felled and sections of the wall continued to go up, including a series of stockades the militia took turns manning, but continued work on the perimeter had nothing like the urgency of just after the swarm. Now, they only built when labour could be spared in the fall, after the harvest. The original plan had been to run the wall in a rough circle five miles across with the Citadel and Turkey Creek Lake as its centre, but some of the older folk muttered they didn’t think the youngster generations would ever get around to it.
Stace watched the sky for more green airbursts, but it looked like everyone that was going to acknowledge the signal already had. Two dozen Rangers and their juniors would be packing up and moving out to reach The Neck as quickly as possible.
◆◆◆
Stace’s father put his hands on her shoulders. ‘It’s less than three miles as the crow flies, but that’s over uneven, wet ground. We’ll get there faster if we stick to the road.’
She nodded anxiously. For someone that daydreamed about running free in the forests outside the security wall, the sudden yearning for the safety of numbers and a strong, high wall made her head spin a bit.
‘I’m going to set a Subotai pace,’ he said. ‘You let me know if you can’t keep up, hear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, moving her shoulders to ensure her backpack was seated correctly on her body, the straps tight. A Subotai pace was somewhere between jogging and sprinting, an efficient energy-saver that ate up the miles on long distance runs. She had once asked about the strange-sounding name and her father tried to explain it, but she didn’t know who Conan The Cimmerian was. Just another person from Before, she supposed.
The rain had stopped completely. Here and there, late afternoon sunlight peeked through the clouds, though the air still held a damp chill. The brief shower had been just enough to make everything slick and potentially treacherous.
‘Let’s go.’ Her father started down the hill, heading back through the same clearing, past the body of the feral.
This wasn’t the headlong sprint up the hill as before. He moved fast and quiet with Stace careful to follow his path exactly, knowing it would be the best balance between speed and careful footing. Below the clearing, the ground sloped at a steeper angle, but the game paths were easy to follow. In less than a
minute, they were at the base of the hill and jogging along what the old maps called State Forest Service Road 11. What had once been a gravel road was now just two parallel dirt tracks bracketed by stomach-high weeds and the odd sapling here and there. Flat and hard-packed through constant Ranger use, Road 11 allowed them to pick up their pace without the worry of slipping on wet terrain.
Stace ran abreast of her father, legs stretching to keep up with his longer strides. The world around her shrank down to breathing and running. She remembered what her father had taught her about running established paths in the forest: less attention to your footing, but your mind had better be on the route you planned to take and always keep a wary eye out for ‘Rauder mischief. Too many Rangers had been killed by deadfall traps or covered pits full of sharpened stakes.
The parallel dirt paths of Road 11 ran more or less straight southeast and, before long, Stace could see where it ended, intersecting with Shawnee Road. Paved way back Before, the flat, winding road served as the main trading route between Shawnee Lodge and towns to the north like Otway and McDermott, even all the way to the fortified farmsteads up in Wakefield. A squat wooden tower sat at the intersection, surrounded by a palisade of thick logs with shorter towers at the corners, enclosing roughly an acre of ground. The little fort represented the northern-most end of Shawnee Lodge’s defences, acting as both a militia outpost and checkpoint for merchant wagons going into town.
As Stace and her father approached, she could see sentries in the high tower gesturing hurriedly in their direction, only to settle down when it became obvious that the Ranger and his daughter weren’t fleeing attack. The sentries wore typical militia uniforms and armour: black cotton pants and long-sleeved shirt under leather armour that covered the arms, shoulders, chest and neck, the most likely places a feral would bite. A wide-brimmed metal helmet, what her father called a kettle hat, was worn against ‘Rauder arrows. It wouldn’t stop a bullet, but bullets were very rare these days.
