Everything That Isn't Winter

by Margaret Killjoy

  I’d learned every bit I knew about tactics the hard way. There were more bodies buried in our fields than there were people living in the lodge.

  But that night, while I clutched a radio in one hand and waited to hear from Bartley, they didn’t come for us from the trees. They didn’t come for us from the tracks, or over the Green River, or from the mountains or the roads. They came for us with artillery.

  It took three seconds for two shots to destroy the lodge. I saw them, those meteors, as they arced through the sky on a low trajectory and reduced my home to rubble. They were tracer shells, marked to help their gunner aim, and they burned phosphorous through the sky. They’d come from the east. They’d come from Stampede Pass.

  I’d leveled trees older than my grandparents to help build the lodge. I’d pedaled rebar eighty kilometers up the tracks from the ruins of Tacoma to re-enforce the stone and mortar construction, and I’d killed two people—a woman and a man—who’d tried to rob me on the way. I liked to think I knew the difference between the evil and the desperate, and those two had just been desperate. I’d left their bones in the forest.

  Three seconds, two shots, and all our work was gone.

  With adrenaline in me, I don’t consciously process sound or scent or touch. Everything is visual, everything is slow motion. I ran through the green fields toward the shattered lodge as people streamed out. People were shouting. I might have been shouting.

  I saw Khalil walk across the road, carrying someone toward the bomb shelter. That man existed to help people, to carry people, to nurse green shoots up out of the soil and into the light. I existed for other purposes. I gave up on returning to the lodge—they could rebuild without me, and Khalil was alive, and what good would I do, and I was their guard and I’d failed and I couldn’t face Khalil—and I ran for the gate.

  I set a rail cart onto the tracks, settled into the saddle, put my feet on the pedals, then gave a last look at the lodge. Khalil was watching me, hands on his hips. His chest heaved, he turned his head, and he walked away. His gait told me more than any words ever had. It was the gait of a man who’d given up.

  I pedaled east with my rifle held across my lap. I pedaled until the adrenaline cleared and the evening’s fog rose thicker and thicker and I had the chance to realize what a mess I’d just thrown myself into alone, which was better than acknowledging the mess from which I’d just fled.

  It didn’t make sense to destroy the lodge. It didn’t make sense to destroy the fields. It made sense to capture our holdings. Whomever I was running off to try to shoot, I didn’t understand them. If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear one hundred battles. If you know yourself and not your enemy, you will lose as often as you win. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will never know victory.

  * * *

  I’d pedaled those tracks hundreds of times. The Cascade Range was my home, I’d grown up in its shadow. But fear creeps into your system and renders the familiar into something alien. The fog was milk-thick, as thick as it had ever been. My eyes tracked movement I knew better than to register—the shifting of moonlight through wind-blown branches, the glint of light on the steel of the rails.

  I passed a rusted junction box, still painted with pre-collapse graffiti, which meant the tunnel was only a few hundred meters out. I stopped pedaling, set the brake so the cart wouldn’t roll back downhill, then dismounted as quietly as I could.

  It’s hard to disguise the sound of heels on gravel. I heard my own, but there was another footfall, fainter, right behind me. A hand clamped down on my shoulder. I whirled, went for the knife on my belt.

  Bartley.

  She had one finger to her lips, her eyes betraying sleepless exhaustion. We scrambled up the embankment, pausing where we could just see the tracks at the edge of our vision. My hands were on the bark of a poplar pine, its scent was in my head, and I was grounded.

  “They’re in the tunnel,” she said. She was murmuring low into my ear. “They’ve got military ordinance. Two big guns on two rail cars, plus a whole train of weaponry stretching into the tunnel.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve seen about twenty of them. Most of them are camped inside the tunnel, alongside the ordinance. Looks like they’ve been there a few days.”

  “Uniforms?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Motive?”

  “No idea,” Bartley said. “They fired a couple artillery shells. What’d they hit?”

  “They took out the lodge.”

  I’d never known Bartley to wear her heart on her sleeve, but she took a breath at that. Then another.

  “Casualties?” she asked.

  “I didn’t stop to count.”

  “We should kill them all.” She wasn’t judging their character, she was addressing a strategic concern.

  “How?”

  “I mined the tunnel, a couple of years back.”

  “What?” I asked that too loud, switching for a moment into whisper instead of murmur.

  “I didn’t tell anyone, because I thought people might get mad. And I figured our general assembly wouldn’t go for it.”

  “How close do you have to get to set it off?” I asked.

  “Close,” Bartley said. “Real close. Ten feet inside the front of the tunnel, against the south side wall, there’s a rotted hunk of plywood. Behind it, a cheap old breaker box I put in. Switch the first three and the last three breakers, then we’ve got two minutes to get clear.”

  “Will that set off the ordinance on the train?”

  “Probably not.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “I’m not going to like it, am I?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  * * *

  “I’m here to negotiate our surrender.”

  The words were foreign in my throat and hung strangely in the air. They weren’t my words. They weren’t words I really knew how to say, but I said them loud and attracted the ire of a number of armed women and men. Women and men I hoped wouldn’t object too immediately and violently to the rifle I still bore slung across my back.

  The fog was thinner at the base of the tunnel, and it calmed me down to see the silhouette spires of the trees and the faint glow of stars above me.

  Two flatbed rail cars extended out from the tunnel, each with an old-world gun larger than some houses. Inside the tunnel, a string of boxcars stretched farther than I could see.

  A half-dozen people approached me, most no older than the kid I’d shot on the cliffside. I liked to think I knew the difference between the evil and the desperate, and these people weren’t desperate, not on the face of things. Each had a rifle trained on me, each watched me with some mixture of indifference and malice. Evil isn’t something we do to one another, it’s the way in which we do it, it’s why we do it.

  There were two clear authorities—a man about ten years my senior, with gray flecked into his red hair, and a woman with at least twenty years on him. The two conversed briefly, and the man approached.

  “General Samuel John,” he said. He didn’t offer his hand.

  “Aiden Jackson,” I said. I didn’t offer my hand.

  “Our terms are simple,” the general said. “Anyone who leaves between now and noon tomorrow will not be hunted down and shot.”

  “Who are you?” I asked. “General of what army?”

  “The New Republic of Washington,” he said.

  Another warlord.

  “What’s your claim on our land?” I asked.

  I knew his answer before he said it. I grew more confident that I knew him, that I could outwit or outshoot him.

  “Small holdings like yours and the rest of the ‘new world’ are a relic of an era we aim to put behind us,” he said, on script. “Washington has suffered too long without central authority.”

  Lying to people is fun. It’s kind of dangerous how fun it is. “You’re right,” I
said.

  “We will drive this train to the end of the line, laying waste to everything in our path, and raise forth our savior from the coastal waters.”

  That was a pretty different script.

  “We’ll raise new cities,” the general said. His eyes rolled back, he held his palms face-up in front of him. “Pure cities, built of light and manna, and we will live in His grace.”

  “Until the zombies,” the older woman added.

  “Until the zombies come and devour those of us who remain in the cities.”

  I looked around, from bandit to bandit. Grins were painted on every face.

  “You’re screwing with me.”

  “Of course we’re screwing with you,” the general said. “We’re not on some moral or religious quest. We’ve got artillery and we want the pass so that we can tax caravans, and if you try to stop us we’ll kill you. That’s the world now, that’s always been the world. It’s a good world for people like me and mine, and that’s the only metric I judge by.”

  “We were going to just tax you, you know,” the woman said. “A little bit of fire, a little show of force, then we’d tax you. But I heard you shoot my grandson.”

  All eyes and all guns were on me, which I wanted—within a certain, very limited, understanding of the word “want.” I’d lured them away from the mouth of the tunnel. Behind the trumped-up highwaymen, in the thin fog, Bartley lizard-crawled toward the breaker box.

  I didn’t feel like lying anymore.

  “You’ll get yours,” I said. “There’ve always been those who want power over others, there’ve always been people who don’t. The whole of our history is the history of people like you killing people like me, of people like me killing people like you. You’ll live a miserable shit life, distrustful and afraid, and you’ll get yours. I’ll get mine in the end, the same as you, but I’ll have lived a life in a society of equals, among people I love. I’ll have loved them.”

  “Hey!” One of the bandits, a young man, turned in time to see Bartley crawling into the tunnel. He raised his rifle and fired at my friend.

  I turned and ran uphill, perpendicular to the mouth of the tunnel. Always run uphill—people don’t like chasing uphill.

  I made it behind a thick stump twenty meters up the embankment, and bullets lodged into the decades-dead tree flesh. I unslung and unsafetied my rifle, returning fire.

  Bartley made it to cover herself, on the far side of the train from the bandits.

  They could keep me pinned down and outflank me, put a bullet into me, then turn their attention to Bartley. I had two spare magazines, one friend, and no hope for backup. I had no hope at all.

  I shouldn’t have been cruel to Khalil. The man had left his family, left the safety and stability of Bainbridge Island, to follow me into the mountains and to the edge of the new world. He’d followed his dreams.

  We’d met in the winter. Every winter since the first one, we’d walked out along the Green River to its source. We made a week of it, sixty kilometers round trip, and we’d held hands and stared at the breadth of the sky and camped in the snow and walked out along the ice. We’d never get the chance again.

  He worried about me. He was right to worry. I was about to die.

  Bartley caught my attention, then started banging on the steel of the car with the butt of her rifle. This drew all eyes, and they were out from cover, moving to flank me. I squatted up, aimed, and picked off the general with a round through his cheek. His head spun, his neck snapped, and his legs gave out.

  The bandits turned away from Bartley, and she stood and shot the older woman—the second-in-command, perhaps, or maybe just the general’s mother. Either way, she collapsed with a hole in her sternum.

  A bullet grazed me then. It burned across my shoulder; blood welled up.

  “Stay and guard the train!” one of the remaining women shouted into the tunnel. The four remaining gunners returned to cover, crouching by the wheels of the train.

  Bartley ran, past the train and for the trees. She drew fire, but not from every rifle. I took two quick, deep breaths, let the oxygen fill me up, then rolled from cover. I’d learned long ago not to let myself listen for individual shots once I was committed. Fear is the antithesis of action.

  I heard a scream, a woman’s scream, and I ran down the embankment and into the dark of the tunnel. There was the plywood. Behind it, the breaker box. It was too dark to see, but I found the breakers by touch and tried not to focus on the muzzle flashes coming from outside and inside the tunnel alike.

  Bullets are dangerous. I know that intimately. But most bullets aren’t aimed, not really, and unaimed bullets are like lightning in a field. If you stay low, you’ll survive, more likely than not.

  I hit the six breakers.

  Two of the gunners from outside had crossed the tracks, and I saw their boots as they worked their way down the other side of the train. I’d be flanked.

  I rolled under the train and took shots at the boots. Hit one, was rewarded with a man falling prone, and I shot him in the temple.

  I crawled, my forearms on the ties and gravel, the wound in my shoulder beginning to protest.

  I shot another woman in the foot, and the remaining two bandits outside fell without me firing—Bartley was alive.

  I was almost to the mouth of the tunnel when the charges blew, and only the behemoth of steel above me saved me from the cascade of rock that followed. It was no good to think about the lives that were about to end, suffocating in the darkness behind me. It was no good to question whether or not I was evil.

  In the dust and fog, I crawled forward, toward the faint moonlight.

  * * *

  Bartley had a hole in her leg where muscle and fat and skin had been, and I got her onto the rail cart with a tourniquet on her thigh. People say you can’t use a tourniquet for more than a few minutes, but I’d learned the bloody way that you could get away with one longer if you needed.

  “Hey, do me a favor,” she said, as I started to pedal.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t let me die,” she said.

  “That’s all?” I asked.

  “That’s all. Don’t let me die.”

  “You’re not dying.”

  “Okay, I’ve got another favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t let me die. I really don’t want to die.”

  I pedaled harder. It was downhill, easy going, and we went in and out of fog banks, and Bartley went in and out of being in a mood to talk, went in and out of looking like she was going to make it. All I could think about was Khalil. About how sure I’d been I was going to die, about how sure I’d been I’d never see him again. It was a long half hour before we reached the ruins of the In-Between.

  Three people met us at the gate, including the woman who’d come for the harvest, the one who’d danced with Khalil. She helped me carry Bartley to the makeshift infirmary set up on the road, any awkwardness between us lost to more pressing matters. Doc told Bartley that she’d live.

  I gave a quick report, and that report spread quickly.

  Khalil wasn’t around, and a fear came over me, a fear worse than firefights. He was okay. I’d seen him escape the lodge, I knew he was okay. But he wasn’t okay with me.

  I first met him when we’d both been visiting Tacoma, during the death days, when neither of us thought we’d live to see twenty. I’d loved him half my life, the half that mattered.

  I went down the concrete steps into the bomb shelter. It was full of people, and they were hurt and scared and they wanted to talk to me but they all had the distinct disadvantage of not being Khalil.

  I went to the lodge, what remained of the hall we’d built. There were people who weren’t Khalil picking through the smoking rubble, shoring up the surviving walls, digging for survivors and corpses.

  I went to the remnants of the bridge that had once, in the old world, crossed the Green River. But there was no one there to kiss me in the shad
ows of the ruins, no one wading in the river with his hand on the small of my back, no one singing in sweet, low tones. I thought about walking into the river anyway, until the water took me. The river in spring is as cold as snow.

  I went to the fields, and I found him at the northeast corner—the corner we’d seen from our poster bed. His hands swept across leaves. He sang wordless serenades to the tea.

  “Khalil.”

  He heard me, because his body tensed and he paused his song, but he didn’t turn around.

  “Khalil, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” He was far enough away that I could scarcely hear his voice.

  “For a lot of things.”

  “You do what you do.”

  A breeze came across the fields from the river, whispering against the tears on my cheeks, and I fought harder to keep my voice level than I’d fought to stay alive an hour prior.

  “I don’t want to just do what I do,” I said.

  He turned toward me and he was crying harder than I was. He always cries harder than I did.

  “It’s okay if you worry about me,” I said.

  “You ran away tonight,” he said. He didn’t try to disguise the pain in his voice. “You went alone. Maybe it’s too much for me, that you’re not here when I need you, that you’re never safe. That you take stupid risks.”

  I halved the distance between us, and he was just out of arm’s reach.

  “I was going to die tonight,” I said. I sat down, hugged my knees. “I was going to die and I was never going to see you again, and now I’ve survived but what if I never get to be with you again?”

  He sat down across from me, mirrored my pose.

  “You never talk to me,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Why don’t you talk to me?”

  “I’m afraid,” I said. But I said it too quiet.

  “What?”

  “I’m afraid,” I said, louder. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid of you and I’m afraid of us and I’m afraid of this new world we’ve built, that one day soon it’ll be no place for me and everything I’ve done and everything I am. I’m afraid of everything that isn’t winter and I’m afraid of everything but dying.”