by Jason Ross
“This town is closed!” Mat bellowed. “There’s nothing for you here! There is only death. Move on. We do not want to hurt you, but we will. Old Paris Road will take you south. This town is closed.”
Mat repeated the message three times and then thumbed his radio. “Highway seventy-nine detail this is Best, repeat my last, tell the refugees they must move south on Old Paris Road.”
Mat waved the basketball pro up to take over shouting the message. She shook her head, but did it anyway. She shouted a lot louder than Mat. It only bothered him a little.
Fifty people detached from the back of the crowd and drifted toward Old Paris Road. Mat mentally urged more to leave. The remaining six hundred or so ignored the commands.
In the distance, down Highway 79, a thin, staggering mass of refugees trickled in to replace the few that had left. They’d be at 700 in the next half hour, and then maybe 900 by nightfall. They’d start the day tomorrow at well over a thousand. Mat’s showmanship had bought them just thirty minutes of reprieve.
Mat turned and found Deputy Rickers crossing behind the semi trailer. He called down to the Deputy.
“Yo, Rickers. Go get the dry food wagon. Let’s offer the food-for-guns trade while they’re tuckered out.” Rickers saluted and hustled off down the highway toward his cruiser.
Every little bit counts, Mat tried to make himself feel better. If he was being honest, this was like fighting forest fire with coffee piss. He didn’t need a new plan, he needed a whole, new playbook.
He contemplated the enemy arrayed before him on the roadway. Nearly all of them had run out of gas driving through snarled traffic between the big cities and McKenzie. There were 700 here, but at least ten times that number squatted in make-shift camps in the woods, surrounding the town, like an invading army preparing for siege. Mat had no idea what led some people to gather in one camp as opposed to another, but smoke columns rose from at least thirty clusters of trees, mostly toward the north and the east in the direction of Louisville, St. Louis and Nashville. The refugees had overrun the farmlands around McKenzie and chased almost all the farm families into town.
The rats were “just people,” a never-ending sea of accountants, receptionists, day care workers, cab drivers, parking lot attendants and paralegals. They weren’t gangbangers, mostly, and they weren’t militia combatants. They were very hungry, regular folks.
Mat remembered the old movie with Kevin Costner—The Postman. The bad guys had been a militant gang of preppers with a megalomaniac tyrant for a leader. What Mat wouldn’t give for such an enemy. At this moment, staring down at the mulling, sulking crowd of discontents at the foot of the wall, clear battle lines and black-and-white evil would come as welcome relief. At least he could fit that situation into his wheelhouse of past experience.
“The food-for-guns wagon’s here,” Gladys Carter had climbed up the semi trailer to tell him. She could’ve yelled from the ground, but she hadn’t. “Sorry for getting in your face earlier. It probably could’ve waited.”
“Yep,” Mat agreed. “But I appreciate your candor.”
“The food wagon’s here,” she repeated. “Do you want me to crack the gate and let the refugees know we’re open for business?”
“Yeah. Thanks. That’d be great. Every little bit counts,” Mat said. On some level, they probably both knew it was B.S.. Sometimes, “every little bit” didn’t add up to diddlysquat.
7
Cameron Stewart
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”
Achilles, The Odyssey
* * *
Grafton Ghost Town,
Southern Utah
* * *
It took two men to carry an eight-foot section of twelve inch, corrugated pipe, or Cameron would’ve made Isaiah move two pipes to his one. Cameron reminded himself throughout the day: if he wanted to survive, he must do less and eat more. It was the only way to make it to spring. If he burned fewer calories than the polygamist, he would come out on top.
But if Cameron did no work whatsoever, Isaiah would balk and the water project would grind to a halt. Isaiah would never quite tell Cameron “no,” but he had his own way of slowing down and playing dumb when he felt jerked around.
Cameron could point his rifle at the man and order him to work as a proper slave, but then the polygamist would dig in his heels and his ideas for food would cease. So far, the weirdo had a lot of ideas, and some of those ideas held promise. Even starving, the polygamist chatted incessantly while they carried pipe—reciting endless factoids of local history, picking them apart for some survival advantage. If Isaiah had spent half as much time reading about Native Americans in the area, they wouldn’t be so focused on cultivation. They might find a natural food source that they could eat now, without having to work so hard. Even by Isaiah’s accounting, the first Mormon settlers in the area struggled to feed themselves by planting the soil. The Indians had done it for eons by wandering around. Cameron would give anything to know what they knew.
But the clan’s best idea so far was to grow crops. They’d have to divert water from the Virgin River, a hundred yards above the homestead, and channel it to the rusty stock watering tank at the high end of their pasture. While they worked on the big pipes, the women and children dug out the foundations of the farmhouse for the cold frame greenhouses. Isaiah swore the ground heat would keep the plants warm enough to survive overnight.
Like everything else in their red rock prison, the crop project was subject to survival math: calories in and calories out. They’d run their food pantry down to a single bucket-and-a-half of raw wheat, six cans of beans, and a half bottle of peaches. A mouse had chewed through the sidewall of the wheat bucket, eaten its fill and pooped in the bucket. Cameron’s boys sorted through the wheat kernels one-at-a-time and picked out the mouse poop. Cameron found where the mouse hid in the floor, ripped up the planking, and caught an adult and three baby mice. They ate them all for breakfast.
Two hundred calories were burned lifting the floor. Fifty calories were gained eating the mice. That was mostly how it worked. They burned twice what they reaped. Every calorie in the natural world, it seemed, had evolved an infuriating system for protecting itself from consumption.
Cameron killed two more snakes while they moved pipe—another rattler and a gopher snake. A mouthful of snake possessed a slight greasiness that landed in the stomach more solidly than starches. Cameron couldn’t fathom why meat would be better than wheat. In any case, they steadily starved notwithstanding; no matter what they picked off the ground, dug out of a rotted log or smashed with a rock.
Cameron and Isaiah were forced to search for irrigation pipe farther downriver, where the willows and cottonwoods shaded the black soil and riverside grasses. For once, they found calories free-for-the-taking: bugs. Lots of bugs. They sent for Isaiah’s ten year-old daughter, Leah. She came with a sleeping bag stuff sack to collect the bounty.
Under every fourth or fifth pipe they lifted from the wet ground, they found seething, green masses of stink bugs—sometimes two or three pounds under a single pipe. Like everything else on the ground, they were both somewhat nutritious and somewhat disgusting. Stink bugs tasted like green apples sprayed by a skunk. They choked them down anyway.
Under the canopy of the cottonwoods, they overturned white grubs, cockroaches, earthworms and assorted insect larvae, all of which went into the fry pan. No matter how much nastiness he swallowed, Cameron felt no difference in his predatory hunger. Even when they had bugs and worms, the level of wheat in the bucket continued to drop, because without the grain every day, he and Isaiah would not be able to work. There simply wouldn’t be enough calories in their bodies.
Under the trees, with young Leah present, Cameron found himself doing his share of the work, despite his strategy to work less an
d eat more. If he stopped to let Isaiah wrestle pipe on his own, the girl stopped and stared at him watching her father. Her brown eyes framed no malice, but they tracked him with an unblinking judgment that gave Cameron the heebie-jeebies.
“What do you and my first-mom do down by the river? Are you looking for bugs?” Leah asked as Cameron caught his breath in the shade of a cottonwood.
It was an unusual question, made more unusual by the fact that nobody in the group, except Isaiah, spoke unless it was a necessity. Thinking burned calories. Talking burned more. Cameron reminded himself that taking a long time to answer didn’t make him look guilty. Everyone took a long time to answer now.
“We’re looking for frogs,” he lied.
Her eyes betrayed neither suspicion nor doubt. “Did you get some?”
For a moment, he wasn’t sure what she meant. He was definitely getting some, but that couldn’t have been what she meant. She was a naive polygamist kid.
“No. We can hear them, but we haven’t found where they’re hiding.”
She seemed to accept the explanation. “Are you the prophet here?” she asked.
“I’m not a prophet,” he replied without really considering what the word “prophet” meant to her. He chuckled. “I don’t think God throws in with guys like me.”
She cocked her head and watched as her father dragged a section of pipe, then dropped it in exhaustion. “We’re proud to labor for the prophet,” she said with a question hanging in her voice.
Cameron walked to the pipe, bent over and lifted his end. Isaiah followed suit and they duck-walked it toward the old canal bed.
They’d decided to place all the pipe first, then dam the river later. There was no sense building a dam if the salvaged pipe wouldn’t reach the stock tank, but it looked like there would be enough. They were half-way, and dozens of lengths of pipe still littered the property.
Neither of them had ever built an irrigation system before, and a solemn terror stalked Cameron—some unknown gremlin would skulk in the rudimentary mechanics of their plan. It always did, for Cameron. He hadn’t ever done a project that spanned a football field like this one, but drawing upon his one, disastrous attempt to repair his own broken sprinkler system back home, he knew how insidiously uncooperative water could be.
Six years after discovering that his lawn in Anaheim was dying, he still watered it by hand. He tried at least half-a-dozen times to find the problem with the sprinklers only to give up after hours of digging. He refused to call a landscaper, mostly because he couldn’t stand the idea of his wife seeing an immigrant yard worker succeed where Cameron had failed.
Worries about this jumbo-sized irrigation system sprouted like weeds in his mind. For one thing, there were no fasteners to lock the pipes together. Someone had come along before the apocalypse, unbolted the couplers, took them away and left the pipe corroding in the sand. Cameron found a few rusty nuts and half-moon brackets hidden in the weeds, so he knew that’s how the pipes were supposed to be connected. Without couplers, they just nested each ten-foot section of pipe, precariously, inside the other. He hoped water would rush down the bottom of the pipes and only splash out a little at every seam. He figured it’d be less water loss than just letting it go down the dirt canal, but he had no way of judging how much of the water they’d lose before it reached the pasture. He supposed they could build a bigger dam if the water petered out too soon.
There was a stack of old, three-quarter inch PVC tubing on the edge of the pasture, and every plastic section came with a one-to-one straight connector. He didn’t think they’d have a problem getting the water from the stock tank to the trenches with that tubing, but he had no idea how they were going to attach the PVC to the drain spigot at the rusty tank.
They had a single envelope of turnip seeds from the “survival seed bank”—maybe two hundred of them—but he didn’t know what percentage of those seeds could be expected to sprout. The seed bank looked to be at least five years old. Would seeds last that long in a can?
Then there were questions about winter. It seemed like greenhouses should work in Southern Utah—it mostly only froze at night. The days were moderately warm, even as Christmas approached. But what about the daylight hours and the angle of the sun? Cameron could swear that the days were shorter and the light was a little more autumn-like than summer. Did vegetables mind less sun? Did the angle of the sun matter?
The irrigation plan could be a catastrophe—tens of thousands of calories sweated away for nothing, or it could be their salvation. His worry soured his stomach.
“If you’re not the prophet, then why does my father do most of the work?” the little girl’s voice yanked him out of his whirlpool of worries.
He’d dropped his end of the pipe, but Isaiah continued yanking on it like a stubborn dog with a rope. He tugged the pipe three inches, rested, tugged the pipe three more inches, rested again. The man wasn’t much of a physical specimen, but he was no quitter. Cameron’s old man would’ve admired the kooky dipshit. He had spent half his childhood getting reamed out by his dad for running lackluster Little League laps, hating his math homework or slacking off on make-work chores his dad gave him at home. “Stewarts never quit!” his old man would scream from the bleachers while little Cam pumped out sluggish, floppy burpees. Little Cameron seethed against his dad when he did that. He wanted to smash his fucking face.
Someday, Cameron had promised himself. Someday he would be big enough to shut that mouth with his fist. One-two punch combination. Blood jetting from the lips of his old man. The nose too. He pictured his pops toppling to the side, surprise in his eyes.
“Brother Cameron,” she repeated. “Are you quitting? Should I tell my dad it’s time to quit?”
Had she read his mind? She turned and watched her father yank at the pipe, worry in her brows. She walked toward him, as if to pick up the end of the pipe.
“I’m not quitting.” Cameron lurched away from the cottonwood that’d been holding him up. “I needed to catch my breath, is all.” He stepped past her and resumed carrying his end of the pipe.
“Cameron,” a woman’s voice floated from the distance. It was Julie. “Cameron. Come quick.” She burst through a stand of reeds. “Denny’s sick. He’s in a lot of pain.”
Cameron and Isaiah dropped the pipe at the same time, and it clattered to the ground. They rushed to the farmhouse.
This is where it begins, Cameron fretted as he broke into a run. This is where the dying starts. Not Denny. Anyone but Denny.
Cameron burst into the dim cabin and the dust motes swirled in the shafts of light from the door. Denny was on the floor, twisted in a sleeping bag.
“Ow, ow, ow,” he moaned. “It hurts.”
“What hurts, little man?” Cameron dropped to the floor beside him. “Tell me what hurts.”
“It’s my stomach. It hurts so bad.”
“Is anyone else sick?” Cameron asked the gathering.
Julie and Ruth shook their heads.
“Everyone else seems fine,” Ruth answered. “But come look.” She waved them outside.
The farmhouse had been a restored structure—an artifact from when the Grafton ghost town had been part of the Mormon cotton mission. The outhouse had been restored too, but not to any useable standard. When they arrived, Isaiah had made a half-hearted attempt to carve the pit toilet a bit deeper, and that’d been the extent of their effort toward proper sanitation. The outhouse smelled like raw, human sewage, freezing and reheating with each night and day. At least the cold at night killed off all the flies.
Ruth had apparently climbed down into the shallow pit and displayed a scoop of the sewage on the chunk of wood she’d used as a shovel.
“Look close.” She pointed at the watery slop, her finger trembling.
White worms threaded through the turd like maggots in the compost.
“Roundworm,” Isaiah said, and Ruth nodded. They’d obviously seen it before.
“Is that bad?” Cameron’s t
hroat tightened like a noose.
“We don’t know if this is his poop,” Ruth said. “This could be from one of the others. We might all have it. It’s not a big deal, usually. The infirmary back home would give the kids Vermox for it. They’d sometimes get the white worm from playing in the fertilizer or swimming in the canal. But we don’t have Vermox here. We don’t have any medicine.”
“We can go to Rockville and ask,” Julie blurted. “If Hildale had it, then Rockville will have it.” Her eyes stood out like the ragged eyes of leg-broke cat.
“Slow down,” Isaiah urged. “We need to think. Balance risks against benefit. Rockville does have a dispensary, but they’re probably not going to share with us. We could get shot for even asking.”
Cameron knew he should take control of the situation. He was the father, but his hunger coupled with his terror left him mute.
“I’ll go,” he blurted out. Cameron grabbed the Mosin-Nagant from against the wall.
“No, wait a second.” Isaiah urged with his hands. “They always had roundworm here. I think the Mormon settlers had a remedy from the Indians.” His eyes went vacant and he rubbed his chin for a moment, deep in thought. Then he was back. “I think I remember. Give me an hour before you do anything, okay? I need to check on something. Promise me you’ll wait an hour before you go into Rockville, Cameron.”
Cameron nodded, then stormed back to the homestead, to suffer with his son.
Isaiah returned with Leah, both bent over under bulging cloth wraps.
“We need help,” Isaiah blurted as he dumped his pack on the table. He pulled open the knots in the cloth and shook out over a hundred dried gourds, like mottled-yellow racquetballs onto the tabletop. Leah did the same. Dozens overflowed onto the floor and rolled around the cabin.
“Crack these open and separate the seeds from the duff,” Isaiah urged.
