Strikers

by Ann Christy

  He draws the line at lighting a fire, even though we need one for boiling the water. Even if we decided to risk drinking it without boiling it first, it would be foolish to use it on Maddix’s leg, which needs tending.

  The night is a restless one, punctuated by one or another of us jerking up from our sleep at every noise, half expecting to be pounced on by pursuers. It’s not a really reasonable expectation and I think most of us realize that. At least I do. We didn’t have a fire because Jovan said—and I believed him because it’s what I would do—that he thought they would try to gain a vantage point to look for the light of a fire.

  Other than that, the night is not a time to worry about them tracking us. They have horses and horses need rest. Horses also make noise and don’t do well in heavy brush like the kind we’ve made a point of traveling through. And this wilderness is far larger than anything I could ever have imagined.

  I know, or at least my mind knows, that far south of Bailar the lands of Texas are green and lush, but it’s one thing to know it or see a photo and another thing entirely to be immersed in it. The perspective changes when you’re pushing away reaching branches and dealing with thorny vines that seem intent on snagging clothing and skin with every step you take.

  Creedy will be no different from us in that regard if what Jovan says is true. He’s from the flat and open lands we call home, so that’s what he’ll be used to. Plus, he works as a foreman for a rich rancher and is used to seeing the world from the top of a horse.

  The wild-card is the man he’s with. When he was able to, Jovan pulled up next to me for a quiet talk while we walked. He told me that he thought the men who had found us, and the one remaining with Creedy, were local “talent,” probably motor mules, hired specifically because they are familiar with this territory.

  It was true that the ones who found us spoke in a strange accent and the man speaking with Creedy spoke the same way according to Jovan. That’s bad, but now he’s just as encumbered with horses as Creedy is. In the end, what does it matter who Creedy is with so long as we stay well off their path and do nothing to draw them to us?

  I wake up for watch confused and in a foul mood from my poor sleep, but Jovan raises my spirits immediately by presenting an unlit, but perfectly constructed, fire pit. Somehow he’s managed to find enough big stones in this wild area to create a tall enough light break. When I look up, I see the moon is gone and the sky is deep black. A flashlight buried under a burlap sack gives out a weak light.

  It’s enough light to see my grin, apparently. His white teeth flash right back at me and he hands me a flint so I can do the honors. Without the waxing moon to highlight the rising smoke and a tall ring of rock to block the light, we have a small window of relative safety.

  “We call this the dead time,” he says as we watch the small fire take hold, our eyes drawn to the glow.

  “Why?” I ask. It’s sort of a ghoulish name and I shiver, not entirely from the chill in the air.

  “Because in the couple of hours before dawn, even animals go to sleep. It’s the quietest time of the night. Creedy knows that, too,” he says quietly.

  “So he won’t be looking for us?”

  He breathes a quiet laugh and sets our pot on the tripod, his face turning a golden color by the small light of the fire. “I didn’t say that, but he’s more likely to sleep now thinking this is about the time of night we’d let a fire go out. It’s a risk, but a lesser one.”

  The fire feels so good on my night chilled skin that I’d like to curl up against the rocks surrounding it and just absorb what I can, but I’m awake because I’m supposed to be on watch and the firelight, even as small as it is, is ruining my night vision. Jovan has a good handle on the water situation, so I empty the canteen closest to me in a few loud gulps. When I toss it to him, he gives me a look and says, “Greedy.” The smile lets me know he doesn’t mean it.

  “I’m going to head out a little, get up one of those trees if I can,” I say and stand up. Even just standing up and putting those few feet of distance between my hands and the fire lets the chill back in.

  Jovan turns a little to the side, showing me scuffs and dirt-darkened pant legs. “Be careful. They aren’t easy to climb.”

  I can’t tell Jovan it’s because he’s just too tall, but it’s true. Cassi, Connor and I practiced on them while at the building and found it easier than climbing fences or the sides of buildings. On those we’ve got only chipped concrete and windowsills for hand and foot holds. The trees offer more paths up.

  “I’ll be careful,” I say. He hands me the flashlight and I make my way a little south of our resting place. Creedy is still southwest of us if we’re estimating correctly, but we have no way of knowing how much of the night they may use to try to catch up with us, horses or no horses.

  Personally, I doubt they’ve stirred if they’ve got a lame horse. And there’s no way they would give up their horses and be stuck walking. Still, better safe than sorry.

  The trees are huge and getting even bigger the further east we go. And they get more wild looking, too. Branches spread so far out that I’m amazed the trees can hold them up. A good many of them bend low as they stretch further from the trunk. They make handy climbing points for those of us light or nimble enough to take advantage of them.

  One of the trees looms out of the darkness. It’s so high it blots out the stars along a ragged section of sky. I don’t dare shine my light up there—it would be like a beacon—but I see enough through the finger-covered lens to know it’s a live tree with excellent footholds.

  I’m not confident in this so I go slow, using more caution than I need, until I have a nice view around us. A rustling in the leaves tells me I’m not the only inhabitant of this tree. The shine of reflected eyes and the chittering from some animal puts me in my place.

  It seems like mere moments before purple begins to stain the horizon and a hiss greets me from below. It’s just light enough for me to see something of the world around me and what I see is Cassi, grinning up at me.

  “Your turn already?” I ask in a loud whisper.

  She nods and motions for me to come down. Getting down is harder than getting up, even with the improving light, and I earn myself a few scrapes before I hop down. The thud is a faint one, but I feel exposed now that dawn is breaking and can’t stop the wince.

  Cassi looks up at the tree and asks, “Comfy up there?”

  “Yeah, but there’s something living up there, so don’t go much higher than I went.”

  “Maybe it’s a squirrel,” she muses. “I could go for some more of them.”

  “I could too, if truth be told, but we’re about to move on and we’ll have no way to cook it for a while. And it sounded heavier than that when it moved. I think it might be a raccoon,” I say.

  Raccoons aren’t common where we live, but no one seems to be able to get rid of them entirely. There are too many empty houses in the allotment area where we live and they always seem to find a way inside them. And they’re a menace at the composting station, but never when anyone is there to do anything about it. But one thing everyone in Bailar knows is that raccoons carry rabies and other diseases we can do nothing to cure, so we keep clear.

  I take my leave once she’s up the tree and in a good perch, dragging my weary self back to the camp. The fire is long out but the stones are warm so I lay down next to them to nap for as long as I’m able. Everyone’s asleep and their quiet breathing sounds nice. The sky is going from purple to pink and I feel like maybe this time, I’ll be able to sleep without dreams.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Days and nights pass in ceaseless, but never monotonous, travel east. Ever on edge, ears perked for the sound of horses, we stay inside the forest even though it’s far slower than the road. So far, we remain undiscovered as far as we can tell. With each day that passes, I feel that much safer. That worries me because that’s usually when something bad happens.

  Twice we saw inhabited places, bo
th times because water stood in our way. The first was a permanent settlement clearly built around a ferry system going across a river. Sizable flat barges were lined up neatly along a pier with a matching set on the other side of the river.

  We came upon it at night, having seen the many columns of smoke from fires during the day, and merely watched. The smells of food wafted out even as far as the tree line where we hid and I think all of us were tempted to go knock on a door and work out some sort of trade—or just beg—for a bowl and a warm place to sleep. Temptation or no, we didn’t. Jovan dashed cold water on my dreams of a belly full of whatever I was smelling by reminding me that Creedy had almost certainly promised rewards for us. On top of that, he’d probably spread the word far and wide using motor mules.

  And now we’re seeing our second group. This time we purposefully observe them during the day, when they’re active. A darkened village and a bit of firelight brightening a window doesn’t say much about what sort of people might be living there. And we need to know as much as we can about what kind of people are in these new territories.

  According to Maddix, we’re in the Riverlands territory. Lying between the Southeast Territory and the Texas Republic, the Riverlands stretch over a wide swath but are further sandwiched between the Valley Lands to the north and the Gulf Cooperative to the south. He says it used to be called Arkansas and still is by the people who live there.

  A small territory it may be, but they control passage over the big rivers, both for people and supplies, and are supposedly fierce when threatened. That gives them power. I, along with everyone else, want to see them. More importantly, we want to see them when they don’t know they are being watched.

  A large lake spreads out from the river. The borders of it are so regular it seems almost artificial. Ruins are visible on the far shore but from our lookout on a small rise covered in brush and trees, we can see the neatly tended huts on the near shore. The huts—because they’re certainly not houses as I understand them—could contain no more than one large room or perhaps two very small ones. There are a couple of dozen of them, and a circle of small conical structures stands in a clearing at their center. Little streams of smoke waft up from the conical structures and dissipate almost immediately in the breeze.

  All of the structures seem to be most accessible from the water, where at least a dozen strange boats are being paddled about. Long poles equipped with round paddles at either end are being dipped into the water by those inside the boats. The people look incredibly agile and at ease inside the boats, like the paddles are extensions of their bodies.

  They’re fascinating boats. Long and curved up at either end, they are also quite narrow—not much wider than the people seated inside them—but wider near the middle where some of the people are dumping what can only be fish.

  They don’t seem to be catching them so much as harvesting them, dipping a basket on a pole into the water and pulling it back out full of wriggling silver forms. For all the people we see, what strikes me most is that they’re harvesting far more fish than they need.

  “Fish!” Cassi hisses. “I haven’t had fish since I was little!”

  Connor and I look at each other and roll our eyes. Neither one of us has ever had fish, and it has been a topic of conversation more than once when we’ve heard others speak of the experience. To my surprise, both Maddix and Jovan nod, eyes on the boats with a certain greed. I might have expected Jovan to have eaten fish, given the wealth of his family, but Maddix?

  At our collective stares, he flushes and says, “They eat it a lot in the Riverlands. It’s not like where we live. Here, getting beef is what’s hard. No matter how much money you have, you’d be lucky to get any jerky, let alone fresh beef. Fish is almost the cheapest thing to eat.”

  Now I know I want some fish. And those people seem to have a lot of it.

  Strains of laughter reach us from below, the sound of it light, carefree and genuine. When one of the skinny boats scuffs ashore, a few children dash out with empty baskets and fill them from the catch inside. I can’t see where they take them, because the view is blocked by the huts. When the breeze shifts, I get a whiff of something rotten, something like meat, but also different.

  After a while, Jovan motions us back and we wriggle on our knees and elbows until we’re below the rise and well out of sight. Once we’re all seated in a hollow in the underbrush, he says, “That’s a farm of some sort, I think.”

  He looks to Maddix for confirmation and he nods absently while he pokes at the flesh around his healing wound. His pants are still ripped there, making access easy, and he doesn’t seem to be able to stop messing with it whenever we stop. We’re all waiting for him to go on and he looks up when the silence continues. He stuffs his hands underneath his legs at my look.

  “I don’t know about this place specifically, but we passed a few others closer to the Mighty Miss and it looks the same. If it is, then they live there during the harvest season and then just have a few people to tend the fish the rest of the time,” he explains. His forehead wrinkles in uncertainty and he adds, “But I’m no expert.”

  “Mighty Miss?” asks Jovan.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s the big river Jordan was talking about, the one that has the border to the Southeast on the other side of it,” he explains. Mighty Miss sounds like it might be a big girl rather than a river, but I’m more concerned with the water in front of us.

  We consider our options. We have to get past that water. So far, we’ve had to go further north than we wanted to because we’ve seen no decent crossings along the river, not even a broken bridge. North of the lake is our best bet.

  “I vote we move back further, maybe try to work our way north a bit, and then go past at night. There are just too many of them about,” Jovan suggests.

  I agree with him. There are too many of them for comfort and they’re all moving around too much. There’s no telling if one or more of them might not come our way.

  Connor stays to keep watch while we move back deeper into the woods. The break is nice. While I lazily doze, the low murmur of Jovan and Maddix talking while they sketch out something in the dirt is a distant background hum. I’m starving, as we all are, but I got three squirrels while on my last watch and Cassi got two more on hers. Just knowing they are there and waiting for our next fire makes it easier to forget the gnawing of my empty belly.

  I’m actually a little regretful at taking the squirrels now that I’ve had a chance to watch them while alive. They have such energy and seem so playful. And then I come along with a stone or steel ball and end their fun for good. I can’t bear to clean them now that I’ve seen them alive and Connor has to do the dirty work for me.

  *****

  Connor rushes back through the undergrowth like a confused calf. His frantic motion jars me from my lethargy in an instant. He’s in a panic and gulps down some air as he smacks Maddix awake and the rest of us gather.

  “Two men, four horses. They just rode right up the river and into that fishing camp or whatever. All very friendly,” he gasps in short bursts of speech.

  Jovan hits the ground with his fist, anger sketched across his features. “We just can’t get a stinking break,” he growls, punctuating his words with another punch into the ground.

  “Wait,” I say. “Who took the lead going into the camp? Which man?”

  That gets Jovan’s attention. Connor’s face screws up in thought for a moment then he says, “The scraggly one. He’s younger. The older one with short hair followed behind.”

  Jovan and I look at each other in mutual understanding. Those mules may have worked—and one still is working—for Creedy, but this isn’t his world or his territory. He’ll have to tread lightly.

  “Well, what happened?” Cassi asks impatiently.

  “I don’t know,” Connor shrugs. “They all greeted each other, shook hands and stuff. Normal, friendly stuff.”

  I’m enormously relieved that we haven’t given into the temptation to
reveal ourselves and very glad the sight of laughing fishermen didn’t lure me down. This bit of information also tells me a lot about how Creedy is looking for us. We’ve been on the move for days, barely stopping and moving quickly. They have horses, but even with horses they can’t be spending much time actually looking.

  It seems to me they are going settlement to settlement, relying on us eventually needing something or simply getting careless and being seen. They are relying on the less interested eyes of strangers rather than their own.

  That’s good to know. We won’t get careless and no matter what we need, we won’t contact people. It seems relatively simple, yet simple is generally something I mistrust. There’s nothing more to do for the moment. We can’t risk a daylight trek into the open with the number of people out and about. We’d need to melt far back into the forest before turning north again to be sure we don’t get seen, and that would take just as much time as waiting here for dark. So we settle in and try to rest.

  I’m not much in the mood for resting anymore. Maybe I slept more deeply than I thought during the day and I’m just no longer tired, but I think it’s more likely agitation. The sighing of the trees annoys instead of lulls me because it might cover the noise of someone approaching. The sound of the birds is equally loud and abrasive, their numbers such that even if one area quieted because of a person walking this way, the rest are simply too loud for me to notice. After a while, I kick off the sack I’m using to keep the bugs off my skin and go join Jovan on watch.

  He starts when he hears my footsteps, his hand going for the gun far too quickly for my liking. He motions me down when I get close. Crawling quietly on all the old leaves is difficult. It seems to take forever to reach the place where he’s lying prone and peering over the rise through some obscuring plants.

  When I get near, he points at something down below and I don’t need to look hard to know what he’s worried about. The two men are there with their four horses. One of the horses has a red streak along its neck and its mane is nothing more than a line of bristly fuzz.