by Jason Ross
They switched sides around the fire, which was a several-minute process of putting his boots back on, moving the backpack and then setting everything up again under the pine.
“What are you doing out here anyway? Why were you and your friends heading west?” Sage asked with accusation in his voice. There had been no need to kill those men; the father and the husband. He wanted someone or something to blame.
“They’re not really my friends. We got kicked out together, is all.”
“Kicked out from what?”
“Union County. Sheriff Chambers sent us packing. Told us to leave,” the talker suddenly ran out of things to say.
“Why?” Sage asked.
“They have a rule against entering empty homes. I knew the family—I taught their kid basketball at middle school. I was checking the house to make sure they didn’t have any pets that were starving or anything, you know?”
Sage nodded. It sounded like bullshit, but he didn’t really care. He preferred this version of the story; the one where the men he killed were exiled looters.
“A lot of people were out of town when the thing happened. My wife. Lots of families. The harvest was mostly in, and people had gone out of town. They left their places empty without making arrangements. Ya know? Because they thought they’d be right back.”
“Where are the women and children?” Sage lifted his chin toward the road.
The talker pointed. “We left them about a mile or two up.”
So, they’d passed Sage, then doubled back when they smelled the smoke from his campfire.
“Do they have food?” Sage hated asking the question. It would lead down paths he would rather avoid: guilt, responsibility, risk, entanglement.
The talker shook his head. “Man, we don’t have nothing.”
Sage studied his own feet. They didn’t look like they were frost-bitten. They were the normal color now that they were warmed up. His toes had been sloshing around so much in the snow they were whistle-clean for once. He had to ask. “Will the sheriff take them back without their husbands?”
The talker shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Joey’s wife is pretty hot and what’s-her-name, Tanya I mean, is young. Their families lived in town for a lot of years. The girls were locals. The sheriff will probably go for it. I mean, it’s not like the town doesn’t have enough food.”
“Food?” Sage asked.
“Like I said, they just got the harvest in. There’s a shit-ton of wheat and hay still in Grande Rhonde Valley. They’d just begun shipping it out when America went tits-up. There’s a lot of food, if you don’t mind eating animal feed,” he said with a laugh.
Grande Rhonda Valley sounded like civilization. Sage felt the crushing belt around his chest easing. If he could find a safe place to resupply and, please God, warm up—he could continue into the next leg of his journey without feeling so damned desperate; maybe he could find some traveling companions. Maybe even a dog. If they had plenty to eat in that valley, maybe they hadn’t eaten the dogs yet.
“Tell me more about this sheriff and the valley. What do they need? What can a newcomer offer them that they’ll want?”
The talker slapped his knee. “I can tell you this much—if you can kill two men with one shot, they will definitely want you in their militia.”
“Militia?”
“Yeah. That’s how they keep the valley bottled up. From North Powder in the south to Meachum in the north, they got the valley sealed up tighter than a frog’s hoochie-hole.”
“Why didn’t you join the militia then, instead of raiding farmhouses?” Sage pressed. It made him uncomfortable to talk to an adult like that. He was calling a grown man a liar, which he almost certainly was. It was the first time Sage had talked to another human being in a long time, and he felt like he might be doing it wrong.
“I did join,” the talker explained. “They didn’t want me. They said I was too fat and slow. I don’t know why that mattered. All I ever did was stand guard at the roadblock. Why does a man need to be skinny for that?”
Sage noticed the loose skin around the guy’s neck. He’d probably been fat, back before the collapse.
“And you think they’ll take me in the militia?” Sage confirmed.
“Yeah. You’re definitely skinny enough.”
6
Mat Best
Highway 79 Road Block,
McKenzie, Tennessee
* * *
“… Anything you say can and will be used against you…”
Mat looked down from atop the HESCO barrier at the two sheriff’s deputies. They twisted a long-haired, twenty-year-old man into handcuffs, and read the guy his rights.
“Sweet Jesus in a shopping cart,” Mat swore.
He scanned the crowd of 250 refugees pressed against the barricade. The town had built the hasty HESCO barrier across most of Highway 79 and out a hundred meters to each side. It was the start of what Mat hoped would be the final word in town defense: a fortification surrounding the majority of the small town’s homes and businesses.
This was exactly how the army did it in Afghanistan, in all the army’s rarefied wisdom. They set up forward operating bases surrounded by HESCO barriers, perimeter guards and heavily-guarded points of ingress.
They’d only completed a couple hundred meters of the barrier since Mat took the job. The mob of rats could go around the wall if they waded across the mucky fields, but it was a good start. They’d also cobbled together barriers across both sides of Highway 22 and Highway 79. All together, Mat figured the town had completed about 500 meters of HESCO barrier. There was a long, long way to go before the town was fully encircled. He sucked at geometry, so his mind left it at “a long, long way to go.” But the majority of town was surrounded by ankle-deep mud—the post-apocalyptic remnant of the hay fields that’d been plowed under for the winter; and it’d been a rainy fall for Tennessee, they told him. The mud and muck could be considered a half-assed moat of sorts. The rats stacked up at the highway gates and they avoided stepping off the roadway into the mud.
This barricade at the northwest corner of town got the most pressure. The refugees pressed against Mat and his erstwhile soldiers in hopes of a handout from the people of McKenzie. A handout wasn’t going to happen. The town couldn’t feed even a fraction of these refugees, even for a week, without killing itself. He sighed as he watched the cops arresting the long-haired guy.
“To a hammer, everything’s a nail,” his commanding officer in Iraq liked to say. Mat had been an Army Ranger—a death-dealer for the United States of America, and one hell of a hammer himself. But the country he defended no longer existed. His area of operation, these days, was the fields and bogs around McKenzie, Tennessee, chock-a-block full of the filthiest, most-desperate human beings he’d ever seen—and he had seen some real trash-lickers.
Fortunately, most of the refugees had wasted away during whatever hellish travail brought them to the outskirts of McKenzie. They’d exhausted themselves pursuing the ever-dwindling world of modern possibilities and landed in the mud, outside the small town. Exhausted was good, but even dull-eyed zombies were capable of superhuman acts of desperation, in Mat’s ample experience. They were the enemy, and while they weren’t Zulus, they could easily kill them all if they got the wrong idea.
“Hey, he didn’t do anything wrong!” some, filthy, city schmuck shouted from the crowd.
Mat didn’t like the look of the crowd gravitating toward the arresting deputies. He couldn’t allow this to become a pre-apocalypse “protest” with people bitching about police brutality. He had to nip that shit in the bud, right away. People hadn’t had entirely forgotten “their rights”—it’d only been a couple months since the nation vanished out from underneath them. The last really big race protest had been in Los Angeles, then Baltimore and Detroit, and that was right before the bomb turned everything ass-toward-the-sky. That’d been October and this was December. People still remembered how to demand shit from “the man,” even though the original copy of
the Constitution had probably been used to wipe some looter’s butt by now.
Mat climbed down off the tetanus-infested jumble they called a HESCO barrier and hurried to where the deputies were about to fold the unruly guy into a patrol car. The town’s eighteen cops, including six auxiliary officers, plus two dozen volunteers, were all Mat had to work with on the barricade. Half of those men and women were spread like wandering ants across the top of the HESCO. If this crowd got big ideas, and came at them like Mat had seen the Sudanese do, his guards wouldn’t even be a speed bump. They’d go right up and over the barricade and pour into town.
The wall was a HESCO in name only. In this section, they’d stacked hundreds of otherwise useless vehicles, three tall. The tires were removed on the bottom so there wasn’t space to crawl under. The top car was flipped over and mashed as flat as possible with the bucket of a backhoe; it gave the guards a flat surface for high-ground defense. Three cars, stacked and crushed, added up to nine feet of wall. They had welded sewer pipe to the outside of the cars and extended the height of the wall another six feet with chainlink fence. Near the highways, they added razor wire on top of that. It was the ugliest HESCO imaginable—uneven and full of holes, like a kids’ tree fort made out of pallets and trash cans.
Mat climbed down the HESCO and trotted toward the deputies. “Stop!” His voice was loud, firm, and calm. “We’re not arresting people today.” The portion of the crowd within earshot quieted. He could sense hope rise. They probably thought the police would back off, lay down and give the “protest” room to burn out like the old country used to do. But hope in this circumstance was bad for the town. Very bad.
The deputies hesitated. Town cops still answered to the sheriff, not necessarily to Mat.
“He refused to comply with a lawful order,” one of the officers argued. “Sheriff Morgan said we maintain the peace.”
Mat leaned into the man and lowered his voice. “Yes. But this is an indigenous population, not your normal arrest. Peace requires strength on this side of the wall.”
The cop looked confused at the word “indigenous,” but he stopped trying to cram the guy into the patrol car. Mat looked hard at the refugee. He was thin, filthy, and frightened, but in his eyes, resentment mingled with fear. Mat had seen the same steam coming off young, pissed-off Afghans. Resentment was the last thing Mat wanted to see in these people. Resentment meant they thought they were owed something. It was one thing for people to beg, it was another thing for people to act like they were being ripped off by someone. Old, bad habits still smoldered in tumbledown America. The collapse of everything was still not enough to stamp out victim culture.
Mat didn’t ask the guy’s name. He gave him a new name in his mind: “Mr. Example.”
He turned Mr. Example around and frog-marched him to the front of the crowd. Mat was exposed, but it wasn’t the first desperate throng he’d faced. The rats shouted and griped a blue streak, but they weren’t a mob yet. They hadn’t gone over the top of the emotional spillway. With luck, Mat’s gambit would settle the waters.
From behind Mr. Example, Mat raised his voice. Those in front could hear him. The back of the crowd muddled around with low energy typical of extreme hunger.
“We will not be arresting you today,” he called to the refugees within earshot. Mat felt hope rise like a sheet in the wind, as anticipated. He removed the deputy’s handcuffs from Mr. Example, stepped back and delivered a vicious side kick to man’s kidney.
Mister Example must’ve believed he’d won this round of “who’s entitled to what” because when Mat’s kick connected, he was as loose as a noodle. His back arched in an impossible S-curve and he snapped face-forward into the road.
Mat’s Glock sprang into his hands and he searched for targets in the first row of the crowd. Mister Example gasped like a fish out of water and twisted at Mat’s feet. Mat didn’t think he’d broken the dude’s back, but he would walk like an old man for a couple days.
“NOW! BACK THE FUCK UP!” Mat didn’t dare fire a warning shot. If he fired his gun at this point, it’d flip a switch—and maybe trigger a cascade. There were undoubtedly firearms in the crowd. His men were outnumbered, and they were not prepared for battle. In his peripheral vision he saw the security detail had drawn their weapons. “Hold!” he ordered his team.
The crowd couldn’t back away. They were hemmed in by other refugees on all sides. Mat backed up, finally with some breathing room. Without turning his back on the crowd, he led his team in an orderly retreat through the gate and behind the barricade. The big rig they used to block the entrance across Highway 79 rumbled forward, scraping the sides of its trailer along the HESCO. The local welder had added steel plates to the underside of the trailer so nothing bigger than a cat could slip beneath.
Mat’s security guys stepped through the gap before it closed, then ran up the ramps to the top of the HESCO.
The crowd roiled forward into the space Mat had made with his antics. Rats piled against the big rig and the HESCO, mashing their front row into the wall. Mat gave orders to employ the greased poles if anyone climbed.
The greased pole idea had come to Mat a few days before. He and Sheriff Morgan had been discussing the town’s major source of meat, the pig farms in Henry, five miles to the Northeast. The mental association of pigs led to greased pigs, like at the county fair, then to the greased pole the Army had Mat and his fellows attempt to climb in training. If a man couldn’t climb a greased pole, he sure as hell couldn’t rip one out of another man’s hands.
Mat issued the McKenzie defenders six-foot fence posts from the lumber yard and tipped them with half-spherical caps. An enterprising deputy filled the middle of the tube with concrete for weight. The top three feet of the blunt, heavy lance was smeared with axle grease to prevent attackers from yanking it out of a defender’s grasp. The post focused the punching power of a snap-thrust into a two-inch ball of regret.
Someone in the crowd shouted, “They got plenty to eat in there, while we’re starving out here,” and that was all the crowd required to go high-order. The throng surged up to the semi trailer, but they could get no purchase on the slick, metal-sided wall. They overflowed onto the fields on both sides of the road, and then scrambled up the stacked cars that served as walls.
There were plenty of footholds, but climbing the curved surfaces of car fenders and hoods proved tricky—as many rats fell away as made it to the chainlink topper. As they climbed, the fence wobbled and waved. The weird motion shucked off rats like sand off a shaken beach towel. They plummeted into the mass of people surging against the HESCO.
A female police offer punched her ramrod through the fence and took a jowly-looking man in the sternum. He toppled backward and bounced down the stack of cars. A woman rushed to him and went down to her knees. The crowd loosened around them.
Another guy flew away from the fence, probably gut-punched by Juan Cabrera’s ramrod. He fell all the way to the ground and lay there heaving, like trying to suck breath through a straw. Several others fell part way off the fence, bounced down the cars, and rolled into the mob.
On the opposite side of the gap across Highway 79, the crowd thickened and surged up the car-wall. Their chainlink waved rhythmically as six men climbed at once. A college-aged kid from town fought furiously with his ramrod, punching repeatedly through the fence without dislodging any of the climbers. The welds holding the corner fence pole cracked like a shotgun and a fifteen-foot section of fence gave way. The six men fell. One swung into a crushed Oldsmobile. The naked hood armature impaled him through the side of the gut. He slid off the metal stake, bounced once on the car below and fell to the ground. The mob swallowed him and his body disappeared as they flowed back away from the wall.
The attack on the wall waned. Hunger left the rats with short fuses and even shorter endurance. Mat nodded satisfaction. The ramrods were working for now. The refugees backed up and took to yelling insults.
“What the heck was that you did down the
re?” a civilian volunteer asked Mat. He was pretty sure her last name was Carter. Gladys Carter. She’d been the high school basketball coach before the shit hit the fan. Before that, she’d played in the WNBA, which is why Mat remembered her name—that and the fact that she towered over his six-foot frame. Now, she looked pissed, her fists on her hips. Mat felt like a schoolboy being called to task by his mother.
“Are we beating people up now?” she pressed. The whites of her eyes swam beneath her knotted brows. “I don’t think they would’ve attacked the wall had you not kicked that guy’s ass.” She was referring to Mr. Example. That was minutes ago, practically forever in battle time. “Now some dude has an Oldsmobile ornament up his ass. That was unnecessary,” she said.
“We’re saving lives, ours and theirs,” Mat argued. “You mind if I keep at it?” Her fierce eyes relented and she tilted her head to the side as if to say “Go ahead, mister, but this conversation isn’t over.”
Mat smiled as he climbed up a ladder at the back of the semi trailer. He enjoyed having someone around with the guts to call him on stuff. He’d always liked having a second set of eyes—someone to tell him the scuttlebutt on any team he led. He decided that he’d ask the WNBA player to train with the quick reaction force. She could end up being a decent 2IC—second in command—if she could learn to keep her mouth shut until after an operation was in the bag.
From on top of the semi trailer, Mat could survey the bulk of the crowd. He was exposed to gunfire, but this next part couldn’t be done from behind the barrier. He wanted the rats to see him. He knew how he looked to them: dark haired, muscular, tattooed, bearded and well-armed. To the starving hundreds of barbarians at the gate, he must come off like Zeus, fresh down from Olympus.
The frothing sea of humanity had become a stagnant pond of just a few, focused acts of violence. He patted himself on the back for his judgment. It’d played out more-or-less as he’d hoped.
