by Jason Ross
The sheriff sighed. “No matter what happens, we’ll get through it together. We bear the sin together. You. Me. Everyone in Brashear wood. This isn’t on you, Sergeant. We chose to hit that camp together.”
“You think that kumbaya shit is going to save us? Because it didn’t save Parker, and it didn’t save Perez.”
“No. It didn’t save Parker,” the sheriff admitted. “This is death by a thousand cuts. You’re right about that. We have to find a better way.”
16
Cameron Stewart
“Ah how shameless—the way these mortals blame the gods.
From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.”
Zeus, The Odyssey
* * *
Grafton Ghost Town,
Southern Utah
* * *
Two weeks after being shot, Isaiah hadn’t yet died. Miraculously, Cameron didn’t regret bringing him back to the homestead. Maybe it’d been the warm spell in the weather, or maybe it was the restorative power of calories, but Cameron felt almost cheerful.
The last of the raiders’ food had been eaten—shared equally among the group—and they’d resumed their desperate rationing of the last scrim of red winter wheat in the five gallon bucket. But the captured, nutrient-dense calories had served them well. The children even played a little in the dirt outside the house.
Isaiah’s boy, baby girl and Cameron’s boys acted out a Bible skit with figures made of sticks. From what Cameron could gather, it was a conflation of Daniel in the Lion’s den and John the Baptist. He assumed the polygamist kids had come up with the plot because his boys sure-as-hell didn’t know the Bible.
Beside their “lion’s den” carved in the earth, the cold frame grow-beds had finally sprouted, and all manner of tender greenling peeked through the ocher soil. There was nothing yet to eat, but the little shoots had survived more than a dozen frosty nights beneath the plastic enclosures.
While studying the sprouts, Ruth devised a sprouting tray for the wheat berries that, hopefully, would add a bit of the sun’s energy to the wheat’s calories. With a little water and a couple days’ sun, the wheat kernels shot up grassy tentacles and reached out with twisting roots. She didn’t know if there was any increase in nutrition, but the matted mass of the sprout tray certainly satisfied the stomach more than wheat alone. They’d grown utterly weary with the starchy flavor and gummy consistency of raw, boiled wheat. Any variety dazzled the palate.
The grandest ray of hope came in the form of a note tied to a road sign on the highway across the river. From his sickbed, Isaiah had suggested they make careful contact with the town of Rockville, and even writhing in pain, he devised a clever plan to trade with the besieged town.
Rockville’s reply on the road sign read, “Let’s meet up. Tuesday. 10am. This location. —Rockville P.D.”
It’d been posted in response to a note scrawled on the back of a porno mag page from the marauders’ packs, written in coal by Isaiah. His invitation offered, “Mesquite, Nevada militia with handguns and ammunition to trade for bulk food. Interested? Leave reply here.” Isaiah hoped that the porno page would convince the stodgy people of Rockville that they really were dealing with bad guys from Nevada, instead of a hapless family from Southern Utah.
Rockville P.D. had written their reply on a torn-out page from a Mormon hymnal. It was clearly a moral rebuke, so they had likely bought the ruse.
The song was “Reverently and Meekly Now” and the lyrics made no sense to Cameron. He couldn’t tell if it was a funeral dirge or meant to scare the hell out of kids. If there was a message in the gruesome description of crucifixion, Cameron didn’t understand it. When he’d asked Isaiah, he'd shrugged. Apparently, “regular” Mormons were just as strange to Isaiah as they were to Cameron.
The Rockville reply launched a debate about the day of the week that never reached a satisfactory conclusion. No one had kept track of how many days they’d lived in the Grafton ghost town. It might’ve been a hundred days or more. The day of the week was a complete mystery.
After the Rockville reply appeared on the “Speed Limit 55” sign, Isaiah and Cameron stayed awake into the night discussing the trade meeting and the myriad of risks involved. If Rockville figured out who they were and what they had, nothing would stop them from taking all the guns and ammo by force. They were too weak and too close. After watching the town do battle with the town of Hurricane for months, the clan couldn’t assume civility.
Undoubtedly, the town knew that a family occupied the Grafton homestead. They were too close to town for their presence to have gone unnoticed. Rockville might’ve discovered the stripped-down bodies of the raiders they’d killed. Cameron had done nothing to move or bury them. Rockville might even suspect that they were involved in the killing.
Or, Rockville might conclude there was another militia roaming the countryside—it was a reasonable possibility since people with guns could be expected to range out in search of resources, and Southern Utah had historically been littered with polygamist clans and survivalist retreats. Claiming that they were the “Mesquite, Nevada Militia” would generate doubt. Just over the mountains, Mesquite, Nevada was thirty times the size of Rockville.
Rockville might also suspect a trap set by the town of Hurricane. The fighting had drawn down between the towns in the last couple weeks, but bad blood could still run hot. Rockville would suspect subterfuge. They might not even want guns. It might be a trap inside a trap.
No matter the truth, they would have to be extremely careful. The more Isaiah and Cam thought about it, the more they wished they could lay low and skip out on the whole thing. Trading was perilous business, but starvation again lurked in the shadows of their homestead.
Isaiah was laid up in his sickbed, his belly healing but his shattered leg wracked with pain. It was decided that Ruth would make the trade and Cameron and Julie would cover her with rifles. From the dead marauders, they’d scavenged six handguns—four automatics and two small revolvers. The men had carried only nine millimeter ammunition; 157 rounds, both loose and packed in nine handgun magazines. Cameron and Isaiah decided to keep all four AR-15 rifles, magazines and ammunition, and trade all the rest, including the Mosin-Nagant and the pump-action twenty gauge shotgun.
Isaiah came up with the plan and Cameron found himself again grateful he’d brought the man back from the cusp of death in the wilderness. The big nerd had a penchant for meticulous forethought.
Cameron had seen plenty of action in the apocalypse. He knew he was better for devil-may-care fighting than careful planning.
When it came to the upcoming trade with Rockville, everything looked like a possible trap. They had to assume a town that’d been fighting for its life would take advantage where they could find it. They couldn’t afford to run-and-gun on this one. Isaiah’s mind, even laid up in bed, served them as a weapon.
Completing a trade was a chess game—survival wizardry that depended on moves and counter-moves to defeat the nuclear option of stealing all goods and murdering all players. The only thing keeping the trade from going off the rails in a storm of gunfire was the promise of future trade, and of course, the mutual risk of getting shot.
As per Isaiah’s instructions, they set the meeting place on the highway with open ground all around. It’d make life hard on the snipers that’d undoubtedly be placed on overwatch around the site.
If Cameron had been in charge, he would’ve carried all their trade goods to the meeting, haggled over a price, then took the payment or not. If the Rockville militia tried a double-cross, then so be it. There would be blood.
But Isaiah insisted they not expose the totality of their trade goods in one trade, but settle into a string of smaller trades. Instead of one, hell-bent-for-leather swap, they’d dole out the marauder’s supplies in four or five installments.
Cameron would’ve sent everyone who could sh
oot into the trade with an AR-15 as a show of force: Julie, Ruth and himself. Isaiah suggested they send only Ruth, and send her in unarmed. Cameron and Julie would hide in the tree line and provide rifle cover. If they sent Ruth to trade with a gun, it might be tempting to kill her and add the gun to the booty. If she carried an AR-15, killing her would be even more tempting. If she carried the Mosin-Nagant or the shotgun, it’d make them appear weak and maybe encourage the traders to welch on the deal. Better to carry no firearm at all. It sent the message: we have enough guns to trade them and enough riflemen covering our negotiator that we don’t need to arm her.
Cameron would’ve carried the trade goods to the spot, but Isaiah counseled him to send Ruth with a written list instead. They’d hide the booty at the edge of the river, and Ruth could retrieve it if they reached terms.
Cameron had reservations about allowing Ruth to conduct the negotiation. She’d grown up in Colorado City, and to say she was naive to the ways of the world would be an understatement. Isaiah countered that nobody in their group knew the value of raw foodstuffs better than Ruth. She’d been born and bred into mastery of the kitchen. She’d know good food from bad, and there were strong odds that Rockville would try and deal in bad food. Isaiah’s wife was the obvious, best choice.
In Cameron’s mind, the notion of “wife” had fogged over, like the memory of a Pink Floyd concert he’d gone to in high school after his first run in with a bong. He remembered marrying Julie—the white dress, tuxedoes and the cake with two tiny figures that looked nothing like he and Julie—but he couldn’t put his finger on why marriage had been such a big deal.
In the now-and-foreseeable reality, there were two basic functions of adults: surviving and rutting, and the second one only rose to consideration when the harsh edges of hunger had been knocked off by a bite or two of food.
He and Ruth were still fucking, but Cameron was no longer sure why anyone would care. Isaiah couldn’t even get out of bed lest his leg crumble, and Julie had become an apparition who did little more than make sure the kids’ food made it to their faces. He still humped his wife on occasion, but it was a joyless, perfunctory affair, and he told himself she needed it as a link to the old life—an artifact to give her hope. She consented to sex without the slightest moan or sway from her hips, and every time Cameron came away telling himself it would be the last time with her. Any fool could see the signs; his “former wife” was sinking away in an ocean of depression. But who wouldn’t? Their life sucked.
One night, Julie stumbled upon he and Ruth screwing on the edge of the tree line. Julie had been collecting tinder to restart the fire. It was dark, but without batteries or candles, they’d learned to get by without light. Everyone went half-speed at night to avoid bumps and bruises that would take weeks to heal, given their malnourishment.
When Julie came upon them screwing, Cameron held Ruth’s skirt up over her shoulders while he massaged her breasts and entered her from behind. Ruth’s mouse-like moans squeaked to a stop, and Cameron looked up to see Julie staring straight at them. She paused for a moment, then turned and moved off into the night, plucking up twigs from the forest floor.
He finished with Ruth, then went back to the homestead to face Julie’s wrath. But Julie never even brought it up. She went about her slack-faced duties like ever before. If there was now more distance between he and Julie, he could barely perceive it.
And that was pretty much the long and the short of how Cameron became a polygamist. There might’ve been some odorless contagion in the sand and the red rocks of Southern Utah, or perhaps the rudimentary addition and subtraction of survival in a clan led to one man and several wives. If another wife or two added themselves to Cameron’s family unit, he could envision that working out too. The women did most of the work, now that the irrigation pipe was built, and Cameron’s job—standing ready to protect them—arose only on rare occasion. By killing the troop of marauders and a half-dozen snakes, he’d done almost everything expected of him by the clan. He roamed the pasture, repaired the impoundment dam and cured leaks along the corrugated pipe. Otherwise, he ate and screwed.
Since the captured food from the marauders had run out, they were being forced to take risks by trading and he would, once again, be called upon to work a gun. He couldn’t help feeling more god-like behind the bright, red-dot scope of the AR-15 rifle. He didn’t know much about the range or accuracy of the black, metal gun, but it was certainly much deadlier than his Mosin-Nagant.
The next morning, he went with Ruth and Julie for the first face-to-face trade meeting, but Rockville didn’t show. Someone must’ve gotten the day of the week wrong. It could easily have been them.
The morning after, they tried it again. Ruth carried a note with a list of offerings: one Glock 17, the Mosin-Nagant, a gun cleaning kit, twenty rounds of nine millimeter and a bowie knife. They hoped to score at least two week’s food in exchange.
Rockville showed up at ten a.m. sharp. A pickup truck rambled down the road and stopped three hundred yards from the speed limit sign where they’d exchanged notes. Ruth stood beside the sign and Cameron and Julie waited in the trees. Cameron felt like he could hit the man walking up to Ruth if he had to, but the truck seemed awfully far. Three Rockville men held back at the truck—the driver and two with hunting rifles aiming over the cab to cover their negotiator.
Ruth and the man, a small, pot-bellied yokel under a huge cowboy hat, talked for a few minutes. Ruth handed him the note, they exchanged a few more words and the man walked back to the truck. He climbed into the passenger seat, the truck did a three-point turn, and drove back to Rockville. Five minutes later, Ruth stepped under the cover of the tree line along the river.
Cameron slid through the brambles over to the trail and caught up with Ruth. “What happened?” he asked.
“They said they’d bring some food tomorrow at the same time to trade for the guns and stuff.”
Ruth wasn’t always the sharpest beak in the chicken coop. She hadn’t provided any interesting details.
“What exactly did he say?” Cameron made his question more specific.
“He wanted to know who we were and where we were from. I told him that I wouldn’t discuss that. He said that not telling them who we were gave us an unfair advantage in the trade since we already knew that they were from Rockville. I said nothing, so then he asked what we wanted to trade. I gave him the list. He said ‘Okay. We’ll come back tomorrow with some food.’”
“He didn’t say what guns they wanted from the list?” Cameron asked.
She shrugged. “That was everything he said.”
“What was your impression? Will they give us a lot of food for the guns?”
Ruth shoulders hunched. “I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about how much food they had.”
Dealing with Ruth in the light of day was infuriating. Cameron should’ve done the negotiating himself, but then who would cover him? Neither of the women could shoot, and he didn’t want to waste the ammo to train them, if training them was even possible.
The three trudged silently back to the homestead. As per Isaiah’s instructions, Cameron stopped at the halfway point and doubled back, quietly, all the way to the edge of the trees until he saw the speed limit sign again. They were alone. Nobody had followed them.
The next morning, they left an hour early for the trade. Isaiah insisted they watch the road for a long time before the meeting, keeping an eye out for Rockville spies or snipers who might come before the meeting to ambush them or follow them home. Cameron and the two women waited for an hour in the bushes and saw nothing.
Right before 10 a.m., the pickup truck shimmered into view on the gray ribbon of highway. Ruth stood under the speed limit sign. The clouds sulked across the sky, maybe a rainstorm in the making. At his feet, Cameron kept the guns, ammo, knife and cleaning kit wrapped in a plastic sheet. If the deal went through, Ruth would come for them.
The truck stopped, three hundred yards out and the short
, portly guy stepped down, walked around the truck bed, and retrieved a pair of white buckets from the riflemen in the back. He lumbered over to Ruth under the weight of his cargo and plunked the buckets onto the pavement with a thud that carried across the sage flats.
Ruth struggled with the lids on the buckets. The man pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket and pried both the lids off. She stabbed her hands into the buckets and let the grain run through her fingers. She held something up to her nose. Inaudible to Cameron, they spoke for several minutes, with the man gesticulating ever more emphatically with his hands, and Ruth keeping her hands folded neatly in the fabric of her voluminous dress. At last, Ruth said something, turned and walked off the road. She stopped and glanced back. The man was already returning to the truck with the buckets.
“Fuck,” Cameron swore under his breath. No deal.
Ruth stopped in the middle of the clearing and waited for the truck to disappear over the horizon before resuming her walk to the tree line.
“What the hell happened?” Cameron whispered when she reached him in the brambles.
“It wasn’t enough grain, and it smelled stale to me,” Ruth held out her hands in supplication. “You and Isaiah said at least two weeks of fresh food. That wasn’t two weeks and it wasn’t fresh. The wheat was stale and the oats smelled like cardboard—not sweet like they should.”
“Oats?” Cameron repeated. “They had oats?”
“Yes, but I think they were at least thirty years old. There’s lots of old food storage like that floating around Mormon Country. The Mormons started stocking up for the apocalypse sixty years ago. The old stuff has a smell to it, and it’s lost most of its nutritional value. That’s what they tried to give us—somebody’s old stuff from the 1970s. Isaiah said that if we take a bad deal the first time, we’ll never get a good deal from them, ever again. He said we should probably turn down this first trade—no matter what they offered.”
