by Jason Ross
Cameron loud-whispered, “Don’t shoot Isaiah. I’m coming to you. Cover me.”
He army-crawled into a dried-out side stream of the river, carved in the sand and lately filled with Indiangrass. He slid through a wet patch, reached for the edge of the depression and touched cloth. The gun scrabbled into his hands and he shoved at the body with the flash suppressor at the end of the barrel. The corpse budged, then rolled back to its resting position. Cameron exhaled and wiped his forehead with his arm. It was the third guy, dead.
“Isaiah, I’m right here. Don’t shoot.”
“Okay. I got two of ‘em,” Isaiah yelled back.
Encouraged, Cameron climbed up into a crouch, then onto his feet. His head spun round-and-round as blood rushed to his legs and away from brain. He staggered up, focused his eyes with effort, and took in the thicket.
The rifle flew to his shoulder even before he knew why.
Another raider.
This man, in camouflage like the others, sprawled backward over a huge, fallen log. Some greedy monster had taken an immense bite out of his neck. Wet blood coated the cottonwood log. He lay back over the log an impossible, gymnastic contortion.
The adrenaline receded and left behind a fierce ringing in Cameron’s ears.
There’d been four raiders, not three. There must’ve been a man hanging back, shadowing his friends. Searching for followers. Covering their movement. It explained why they’d been so cavalier about making noise.
Fear induced vertigo struck Cameron and somewhere his body found reserves for yet another adrenaline dump. By some miracle the marauder following the group last night had not detected him and blown out his brain stem. His scheme to push the risk onto Isaiah had been a joke. He was alive by sheer, dumb, luck. He grabbed at a tree trunk to keep his feet under him.
“Cameron, I’m hurt.” Isaiah’s voice shook him out of his terror. He’d come very close to dying in the last twelve hours. He’d never been safe. Not for a second.
“They shot me. Twice, I think. Where’s Leah?”
Cameron slung the rifle across his back and looked Isaiah over. He was sitting up in a slump, against a dead log that smelled of mildew. There was a hand-size blood patch above his hip and blood dripping down his left pant leg. The gray tint to his face made his blond hair seem almost orange. He’d lost a lot of blood, probably out the back of the gut wound.
“Find Leah, now, please,” Isaiah plead. “We’ll take care of this later.” He waved the back of his hand across his belly and leg.
Cameron didn’t want to look for the girl. He was frankly afraid of what he might find. He shook his head, brought the gun around, and began to search the copse of trees in a more-or-less systematic fashion.
What if there were five of them?
He shook away the worry. A fifth guy would’ve fled.
What if Rockville heard the shots and sent a posse? Shots were common along the highway, and they were at least a half-mile from the town.
He couldn’t let minor threats paralyze him. He needed to get food in his gut before someone else came. He could accomplish anything with a little food in his belly.
Each raider had slept beside a rucksack loaded with food and critical gear—an inconceivable treasure. The packs had the look of well-oiled systems, perfected over the course of many raids, dozens of gunfights and lots of killing. These guys were all about “speed over security” as he’d once heard a Navy SEAL say in an action show. Cameron had won this conflict through sheer luck.
“And your luck tapped out, buddy,” he mumbled to the dead mens’ gear.
He consolidated the packs in the center of the sleeping area, not wanting to get the bounty too close to Isaiah. He tore into a package of fancy, health-nut fig bars and folded one into his mouth. Blueberry-flavored. The sugars and carbs caused a pain storm on his teeth and tongue. He swallowed. The pilot wave of energy traveled down his esophagus and hit his stomach like fireworks. He could feel calories pulsing into his bloodstream. Moments later, the tiny packets of energy set his cells on fire. Arms, legs, chest. His head buzzed with ragged power. Calories! His body trembled.
“Did you find her?” Isaiah’s shout broke with a cry.
“I’m still looking,” Cameron answered. Searching for gear was the best way to search for the girl, too.
“Daddy?” the girl’s voice called out.
“I’m here, darling,” Isaiah shouted with relief. “Come to my voice. Hurry.”
Cameron unslung his rifle and moved to intercept her. Maybe she was being followed. He paused, turned back to the pile of packs and grabbed two more fig bars and stuffed them in his pocket with the energy bar from earlier.
The girl thrashed through the underbrush. Cameron crouched and listened. No one followed.
He found her at her father, fretting over his wounds. Isaiah lifted his shirt and she stared at the small hole, pulsing slightly in a fleshy pool of watery blood.
“I think it’ll be all right. It barely hurts,” Isaiah comforted his daughter.
“Eat these. Both of you.” Cameron handed a fig bar to Leah, then one to Isaiah. Leah took hers and held it in front of her with stunned confusion in her eyes. Isaiah didn’t reach out for his. He regarded Cameron with sadness.
“I’m afraid I’ll throw up if I eat anything right now,” he explained.
“No. You both need to eat. Right now.” Cameron didn’t know if he spoke from wisdom or shame. “Your bodies can’t recover, heal or...anything without some energy. Force yourself to eat.” Cameron unwrapped the fig bar for Isaiah. Leah tore into hers and ate in great, greedy swallows, barely chewing. Isaiah took his in a bloody hand and nibbled, chewed, then swallowed.
“You were right. That hit the spot,” Isaiah muttered around bites. It was a discordantly-cheerful thing for a gut-shot man to say. Cameron grimaced. He truly wanted to hate Isaiah because he would not be carrying him back to the homestead.
Cameron decided when he heard the wounded man call out: Isaiah was a played-out hand of cards. He’d drawn twenty-two in the blackjack game of life and death. Dragging his gut-shot ass back to the homestead would wipe out any survival advantages from the little pile of food and the big pile of guns. Cameron was the sole survivor of this battle. This was his stuff. The spoils of war go to the victor, not the casualties. Survival went to the hard case, not the sob story. He’d not allow the group to waste focus and calories tending to Isaiah. They must prepare themselves for the next band of marauders.
“Cam…” Isaiah must’ve sensed the internal monologue. “I know it looks bad but I’ve got to get back to the homestead and heal up.” The poor bastard actual managed a smile as he said, “Ruth Is pregnant: we’re having another baby. She’s going to need me.”
Cameron looked away to hide the crush of feelings. “Well, congratulations,” he mumbled, looking off into the forest.
“Thanks. And, thank you, Brother Cameron, for getting her back.”
It took Cameron a second to realize that Isaiah meant the daughter.
As soon as he could, he escaped them and returned to the pile of gear. Even with fresh calories pumping him full of life, he couldn’t sort the feelings. He retreated to the granular arithmetic of survival: four AR-15 rifles, fifteen magazines, a hundred and ninety-six rounds of rifle ammunition. Four handguns, two revolvers, nine magazines, two pipe bombs. Knives, paracord, fire-starters. Two pump-style water filters and one gravity-style filter. Very little in the way of medicine or first aid supplies.
There wasn’t as much food as he’d hoped. The raiders traveled light: Top Ramen, backpacker meals, survival rations, processed foods and cereals. It might be enough to get the clan healthy for a couple weeks, but not enough to get them to Spring. Not even close.
The guns and supplies would be game-changers, though. No longer would they be helpless mice, victims to passing hawks. Cameron would’ve traded all the water filters for a battery-powered DeWalt drill and a solar panel, and he’d definitely swap the handgu
ns for food—which might be a possibility if Rockville had any food left.
They’d been so helpless, these past two months, that they’d been forced to maintain a no-contact rule with the warring towns. Better to keep their heads down than stick them up and get them shot off. Maybe with this level of firepower, they could trade even-Steven with Rockville or Hurricane.
He glanced over at Isaiah and his daughter. She nursed him with a water bottle. Cameron came over and made a show of checking out the gunshot wounds.
The gut wound had entered Isaiah’s belly near the belly button, but had exited out the side. There was a chance it hadn’t ripped a hole in his actual guts, but Cameron had no way of knowing. He knew enough to know that infection was likely in any case. It’d be certain death if the contents of the intestine blew into the body cavity. He’d watched enough Western movies to know a gut-shot wound was a slow, but inevitable death.
The calf wound hadn’t bled very much, but might’ve been the worst of the two. The bullet went in-and-out, but the exit wound had chips of bone sticking out. The bullet had struck one of the lower leg bones. Cameron couldn’t imagine how a blown-apart leg bone would be set, even in the best of times.
He needed time to think. The adrenaline rush had gone fetid and rank in his stomach, and the dry Top Ramen he’d wolfed down felt like it’d expanded to the size of a beach ball in his belly. The girl would be mewling over her doomed father until he died, so Cameron was on his own, schlepping newly-acquired gear back to the clan. He could use that time to plan.
Instead, he used the time to worry, and twist himself up in guilt, like a panicked rat in a beach towel.
There was no way Isaiah was the father of the baby. Cameron had been screwing Ruth for two months. That baby had to be his.
Ruth hadn’t said anything to Cameron about being pregnant, but that didn’t surprise him. He and Ruth never talked and they certainly hadn’t discussed what their coupling meant. He assumed it meant nothing, which suited him fine.
Now there was a baby. Didn’t these polygamists understand birth control?
Cameron hadn’t thought about the women getting pregnant until this very moment. It wasn’t something grown adults worried about in the modern world. It was something the women handled, medically, and needn’t be discussed until someone wanted to have a child. This was fucking ridiculous.
Tough decisions needed to be made, and this time, Cameron would make them alone. First, he would get the supplies completely under his control. With Isaiah dying and the girl—possibly—lost to her family, he could return home and tell whatever story he chose, but he needed to cache the supplies in a secret spot, half-way home and well-concealed.
He knew of a jumble of logs, far enough from the homestead that Isaiah’s other kids wouldn’t happen upon them. Cameron shrugged into the straps of two, consolidated backpacks—both packed with food—picked up one of the AR-15s, and trudged toward his hiding spot.
He’d always imagined that survival would be a ruthless, dog-eat-dog affair and that he’d do whatever he must to safeguard his family, like all the apocalypse shows he’d watched: Mad Max, the Postman, The Road, The Walking Dead. He’d shout at the TV screen when they put emotion ahead of brute survival.
“Comeon Rick! Why’d you tell those sonsabitches where you hid the cans of beans!” He’d yell with the fourth Michelob Ultra in his hand. “Lettum starve, you sappy idiot. They’re gonna die anyway!”
Yet when faced with a zombie apocalypse of his own, at every turn, Cameron had played it like one big, happy family. A hundred times he could’ve screwed the polygamists but he shared instead. He’d done, for the most part, his half of the work despite knowing damn well he shouldn’t.
But that ends now, he scolded himself as he reached the log pile. The polygamist was not going to survive his wounds. Without iodine, antibiotics and a surgical team, Isaiah would never be anything more than a black hole where they sent calories to die.
Cameron cleared out the river sand and tumbleweeds from the stack of logs. He set the tumbleweeds aside to serve as camouflage later. He slid the backpacks into the cavity, then moved a log over the gap. Then he shoved tumbleweeds into the cracks.
“Are we going for help?” the little girls voice shattered the silence.
Cameron startled and dropped the tumbleweeds. The rifle sling slid off his shoulder and into the crook of his arm. “What?” he said like a fool.
“Are we getting help for my dad?”
She’d followed him halfway back to the house. She looked at him with big, green eyes, like she could hear his thoughts.
Maybe kids always knew. Maybe they just didn’t know how to say what they knew.
As a boy, Cameron had always known his dad was a prick—at least that’s how he remembered it now. “Never a borrower, nor a lender be,” his dad always said, as though it was in the Bible. When Cameron or his brother asked to stay the night at a friend’s house, that’s how his dad always said no—as if they’d be in debt to little Jimmy Whatshisface’s mom if Cameron ate her ketchup meatloaf.
But kids always knew. Cameron had known, even back then. When you’re a real prick there’s no hiding it from the kids.
The girl stood still and watched as Cameron finished the camouflage job. He hadn’t answered her question. Instead, he worked on his supply cache, despite the fact that it was no longer a secret.
He’d avoided thinking about his own dad these months of apocalypse. Cameron left Southern California in a mad rush on the precipice of chaos. He hadn’t spared a worry for his dad. His old man didn’t hit his mental radar until he and Julie reached Las Vegas. Cameron assumed he died in his carbon-copy bungalow in Pasadena, California, on his half-collapsed couch, surrounded by Louis L’amour books and cheap scotch.
His brother, Tommy, lived in Phoenix and the last time they spoke, while the world crumbled, Tommy was high-tailing it to their sister’s survivalist compound in Utah. As far as Cameron knew, their dad died alone.
“But doesn’t everyone die alone?” he thought he heard the little girl say.
“Huh?” Cameron pivoted back to her. Had she read his mind again?
“Are their kids alone? Where are they?”
“What kids?” Cameron asked. He suddenly remembered why this little girl struck him as being so creepy. She was like the little blond in the movie Poltergeist who showed up silently behind her mom and stared, then said the damndest things.
“Their kids,” Isaiah’s daughter replied, pointing back to the thicket at the dead marauders.
At first, he chalked it up to her Quaker worldview. Every man she’d ever met over twenty-five years old had at least one wife and children. But then again, where were their children? Other than the redhead, all the marauders had been in their thirties or forties. Cameron had gone through their gear, so he knew them from the inside out. Porno mags, jewelry, booze, playing cards—he had a window into their cauterized souls and there hadn’t been a single family picture.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
As he recalled the dead men’s faces, he formed first an idea, and then a certainty: every one of the dead men had children, once upon a dream. When faced with the choice, when the shit hit the fan, they’d packed up and struck out on their own. Their kids had probably been at the ex-wife’s place, doing small time in juvenile detention or running amok with the rioting masses when time came to pull stakes and make their way in this fucked up world. They’d left their kids behind. That’s what a piece of shit does.
That’s what his own dad had done. Sometime in the 1990s, his mom had gotten a little thick around the middle. Her womanly curves settled into Russian blockiness, as was the way with her people. She always came home smelling like Mexican food after shifts at the restaurant. Even as a boy, Cameron found that smell off-putting. His dad must’ve found it downright disgusting. Fajita-fucking, every night. Take it or leave it.
Family life in a three-bedroom in a cookie-cutter neighborhood in Ana
heim must’ve caught up with the old man. He bailed.
There were other women, but probably no one specific. He’d thrown in the towel. He packed up his shit and moved to a one-bedroom in Pasadena where he didn’t have to smell stale Mexican food in his bed.
Cameron finished hiding the cache, stopped and stared at her. She was a pretty little girl; green doe eyes, a pleasant face, glowing, ruby-tinted hair. He wondered if she had any Russian blood. Maybe she had the expanding-hip thing in her future like a genetic time-bomb. More likely she was English. Most of these religious nutjobbers got their crazy from Puritan ancestors, at least that’s what he’d seen on the History Channel.
“I think those men ditched their kids, sweetheart.”
The girl—Leah—shuffled her feet. “A family stays together forever, unless someone commits a sin against the Holy Ghost. Committing a sin against the Holy Ghost is like spitting on God’s wife. That person goes to Outer Darkness. Are we going back to get my dad?”
Cameron thought about his dad. Dead, on his precious couch, decomposing in the California heat, his cells collapsing one-by-one, dripping into that unsightly swale in the collapsing middle. His dad and that couch would be together forever, now, until Judgement Day, sins against the Holy Ghost or not.
Cameron’s mom had inherited an expanding waistline from “her people.” He wondered what he’d inherited from his dad. A lonely, meaningless death, most likely.
He reached out, put his hand on the girl’s head and smiled. The calories had kicked in and he felt better than he had in weeks. She wasn’t his daughter, but she felt like family anyway. Like a niece or a cousin’s kid.
“Let’s go get him,” Cameron said. It sounded galactically stupid, but it felt like Christmas morning.
He slung his rifle and followed her back to the thicket.
14
Sage Ross
Donna Butterton Residence
Elgin, Oregon
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