by Jason Ross
Candice had learned how to minimize the pain and humiliation of his advances. She did what women in her circumstance had done for thousands of years. She complied with her body and pushed her mind far, far away.
Twenty minutes later, Candice ran down the middle of the street, the nighttime rain mingling with her tears. She often exercised at night. It was how she decompressed after being touched by him.
After a time together in her bedroom, Jim had left her for his lab. She had thrown on sweats and bolted from the house.
Only a few lights burned in the homes of McKenzie, mostly candles. Almost every night for the last week, it’d drizzled a cold, sallow rain, tainted by smoke from the big cities and the refugee camps that surrounded them.
She left her normal exercise loop and followed a series of turns that would lead her, inexorably, to the home of William and Mat.
She lived two lives: one of a girl and the other of a woman. She only, really belonged to one, but the flavor of smoke on the rain demanded she bow to the reality of this tortured world. Thirteen years old or not, they all lived in a time that ate young ladies for dessert. Gone were the lipgloss days when a newly-minted teenager was still years from womanhood.
Jim Jensen was indeed her lifeline, but to die an orphan might be better than to live like this. In the night rain, she ran toward the boy, and away from the secrets.
“Sergeant Best. May I have a word?” The sheriff waited for Mat in the foyer of the city building. Mat had just finished his nightly team leader meeting. He was bone-tired, but the sheriff never wasted his time. If he had waited around to talk, it must be important.
“Mrs. Morgan and I are leaving.” It was the last thing Mat expected to hear. “Now I can see that you’re upset, but hold on a moment.” Sheriff Morgan raised hands, palms out, urging Mat to calm.
Mat didn’t wait. “If you’re bailing on this town, what the fuck am I still doing here?” He bristled.
“No, no, no. It’s not like that. We’re not running out on the town...”
“...because I wouldn’t blame you if you bailed. We’re like those German towns near the death camps—those people who stood around while the SS genocided the Jews. Except we’re the ones with the poison gas this time.”
“It’s not necessarily about that,” the sheriff explained.
Mat exhaled his frustration. “If you leave, there’ll be no stopping Jensen.”
“Jensen’s poisons are part of a bigger dilemma; questions of survival and morality. For Beatrice and I the answer has become clear: we’re going out to help the refugees. We need to do all we can for those who suffer. It’s the oath we took when we chose to follow Christ. The collapse didn’t change that. This badge didn’t change that.”
“And the town? What’s the answer for the town? We can’t all follow you to join the fucking Peace Corps. They’ll overrun the town in a day.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Morgan agreed. “But when I ask God what I should do I hear the same answer again, and again. It’s the refugees, Mat. The people you call rats. That’s where God wants Beatrice and me. I don’t think he’s going to answer any of our other questions until we keep our word and obey His commands. You see what I’m saying, Mat? Bea and I aren’t abandoning the town. We’re keeping our word of honor. There’s no way we can stay here while the town poisons those who suffer. We can’t be party to it.”
“You’ll die out there,” Mat argued. “She will die. Your wife will die, probably while you watch.”
“I know that’s what it looks like. She knows too. But a promise is a promise. And our faith isn’t just for good times. We leave tonight. We’re all packed. We’re going out to look for Dr. Hauser’s group. I’ll keep my radio on me and, of course, my truck’s got the high power mobile transceiver.”
Mat surrendered to the inevitable, his hands on his hips. He seized the big man’s shoulder. “I’ll pray for you, I guess.”
“You will?” The sheriff grinned. “I didn’t peg you for a praying man.”
“I’m not. But I’ll make an exception for you.”
William’s world wobbled in a weird, drunken spin while Candice spoke. She said words like “touched me down there” and “made me promise not to tell” but he couldn’t put the words in an order that made any sense to his twelve-year-old mind. They struck him as gobble-de-gook; an acidic, word soup that burned a festering fissure across the face of William’s world. The words seared into one another, smoked and fumed, then poisoned all hope left in the world.
At first he felt confused, but the more she mumbled at him, in front of his pathetic fire as the rain pattered outside, the more his anger rose and clarified.
He’d been angry before. Heck, he’d been angry ever since Mat told him the plan to pawn him off on Gladys Carter. But this was a different color of anger. This was carbon, light-swallowing, voracious rage.
“Fuck all of them.” William fed the tempest in his belly. “I’m taking you away.”
The two sat next to the fireplace, drying her sweats and her waterlogged sneakers. Her sweet, feminine smell surrounded William. It overcame the smell of smoke from the fireplace. She was like cookie dough and fresh laundry. Her tears seasoned her breath with nutmeg. He would fight the world for her. He would die for her. He would kill for her.
She nodded and wiped her nose. William burned to get her a tissue, but they’d run out of tissues weeks before. He didn’t know how to touch her, now that she’d been touched by evil. He didn’t know how to love her, now that her love had been tainted with arsenic.
“Wait here,” William said, and went to gather supplies. He might not know yet how to fight for her, but he knew how to rescue her. They would run, tonight.
It was very late—well past midnight as Mat wandered the streets, alone in the rain. He told himself that he was running a one man, unscheduled night patrol. He wore his rifle and his plate carrier vest, of course. He never went anywhere without them, as was the rule for QRF fighters. He looked the part of the soldier and the town defender, but really he was just a wanderer—a gunfighter with no idea where to point his gun. If someone had leapt out in front of him, brandishing a weapon, he wouldn’t know whether to piss himself or dance the hula. He couldn’t identify tonight’s enemy on a bet.
Was it the committee? The mad scientist guy? The rats? The sheriff? Was Mat the enemy?
He found himself in front of the home of Gladys Carter, and lo and behold, she sat on her porch, in a wicker chair in the dark, enjoying the rain.
“Well I feel safer already.” She chuckled. “Patrolman Best walks the streets at night, soaking himself to the bone.”
He tipped his bump helmet like a top hat. “Good evening, Miss Carter.”
“Get over here and out of the rain,” she ordered. “You should be resting, not wandering like an alley cat.”
He plodded up the walk, up the steps and dropped into a chair beside her. His kit rattled and he adjusted the pockets on his belt so the various bits of metal didn’t stab him in the butt.
“Tell me why you’re walking the streets like a fool,” she said. “Then, I’ll get you a nice, hot tea. I already got water goin’ on the stove.”
Mat tried to gather his thoughts, but gave up. Instead, he blurted the first thing that bubbled to the surface. “There’s no way I’m ordering my men to deploy poisoned food outside the wall.”
“Mm-hm,” she agreed, though she clearly had no idea what he meant. Gladys wasn’t on the committees. She didn’t know about the bio-chem weapons. “You definitely should not do that.”
“You really think so?” Mat stared at her dark face across the pitch-dark porch.
“I don’t really know the ins-and-outs of what the hell you’re talking about, but I’m a reasonably-educated, sensible woman and I can say with total certainty that you should not put poisoned food where people will find it. That’s just crazy.”
“Yeah, but it might be the only way,” Mat said, airing the debate inside his skul
l.
Gladys chuckled again. “It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people abandon hope and focus on one bad option or another. It’s a big universe, with thousands of solutions to every problem. Scared people are stupid people.”
“When I’m a hammer, everything’s a nail,” Mat heard himself agree.
“Yessir. When you’re a hammer, every damned thing’s a nail. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
“You’re saying I should refuse the committee’s order to place poisoned food near the camps?”
“Of course you should.” Gladys laughed. “You were never going to do that anyhow.”
The tea kettle whistled. She raised herself out of her Adirondack chair and moseyed into the house. As she passed Mat, her hand touched his shoulder.
The screen door creaked open, then clacked shut. Mat was alone with the rain and the night, but her touch had landed on him like a blessing, and his shoulder buzzed with the ghost of her hand. The feeling spread, like a warm, summer wind in the face, fresh with the scent of lilac.
In that moment, Mat didn’t feel so alone.
19
Cameron Stewart
“. . . as a blacksmith plunges a glowing ax or adze
in an ice-cold bath and the metal screeches steam
and its temper hardens—that’s the iron’s strength—
so the eye of the Cyclops sizzled round that stake!”
Odysseus, The Odyssey
* * *
Grafton Ghost Town,
Southern Utah
* * *
Cameron and Julie hid, burrowed at the base of a knot of blackbrush. Ruth stood on the highway, beneath the speed limit sign, trading with Rockville for the third time. Cameron’s clan had enough guns and ammo to trade one more time after this. Isaiah insisted it was less risk to dribble out the trade goods in multiple deals, never giving any indication of when they’d run out. Once the other side knew the trade was over, they’d have no reason to cooperate. They could shoot Ruth and seize the final delivery. The only reason for Rockville to trade in good faith was to keep the trades coming. They had no way of knowing if the supply of guns would continue for a week, a month or a year, so fair dealing made sense—for now.
The swap had settled into a routine, with the short, fat man and one of his gunmen bringing four buckets of grain to each meeting; two fresh and two stale. Ruth checked the food for quality, walked two buckets into the tree line and returned with the guns, ammo and survival gear. Then, she’d return to the treeline with the final two buckets.
This time, Cameron asked Julie to sit with him in his blind rather than sitting in her own blind, fifty yards away. Originally, he’d thought it better to separate overwatch so that they’d have two angles on the target, but given two successful trades, he figured he could fudge security this time. He wanted a minute alone with his wife. They needed to talk. He needed to come clean with her about some things.
There’d been enough food at the homestead for once—boring food, to be sure—but enough food to ease them back from the edge of desperation and toward some form of normalcy. It was time to become a proper clan, and that couldn’t happen with unspoken schisms and broken loyalty.
Julie lurked behind a solid wall of depression since escaping the polygamist town over two months before. She spoke very little, and mostly just to the children. She did the minimum to survive, and often stared at the mountains of Zion for hours. It hadn’t seemed strange before, because they’d all been doing the minimum to conserve energy. They’d all done a lot of staring off into the distance, dozing in the daylight. But now, with food in their bellies and energy coursing through their veins, Julie was the only person still listless.
Cameron didn’t begrudge her depression. Julie’s world had gone from decorating turkey-themed cupcakes for the boys’ pilgrim festival to being shot at, forced into marriage and then starvation. She’d come face-to-face in the night with her husband screwing another woman. She hadn’t said a word about it—Julie hadn’t said anything about anything—but the time had come to make things right. Plus, there was the question of Ruth’s pregnancy to discuss, with both Julie and Isaiah. The clan would need to strike a new accommodation, if only to drag the truth into the light. At least Isaiah was a polygamist, and he’d been “eternally married” to Cameron’s wife in a weirdo ceremony back in the polygamist town. Isaiah would probably understand that relationships in the red desert wastelands weren’t always tidy.
Isaiah’s leg had responded well to the traction in-line. Coupled with a diet of carbohydrates, he was on-the-mend. He couldn’t stand on the leg yet, but the pain had backed off thirty percent, he said. The shin had gone from the dark red of simmering infection to the yellow and purple of a healthy bruise. With a crutch fashioned from barnwood and a tight splint, he could hobble to the privy under his own power.
The seedlings under the cold frames had exploded in green, and they now pressed against the glass in a profusion of growth. The new, daily challenge was to replace the covers each night without breaking stems or damaging leaves.
The Grafton clan, as they called themselves, was healing, and after a couple more trades, they’d be provisioned well enough to survive until the green grass of springtime.
Cameron’s attention snapped back to Ruth, on the highway with the traders from Rockville. She hovered over another bucket, checking the contents. There appeared to be no surprises. She lifted two buckets, climbed down the highway embankment and trudged across the field toward the big cottonwood where they’d stashed the guns. Everything was going according to pattern.
“Jules,” Cameron called his wife by her nickname. “I wanted to say: I’m sorry for all of this.”
“Huh?” she looked up from studying the grass.
“I’m sorry for how this turned out. I’ve been a shit husband, I know.”
Julie’s face turned in his direction, but he couldn’t read her expression.
“I mean,” he stammered, “I’m sorry about Ruth. I don’t know what happened. I don’t love her. The hunger had me in its grip, and I wasn’t myself. I’ve made some awful decisions.”
“Ruth?” the question floated in her eyes.
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m ending it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was never love. Just sex. And not really even sex, per se. There were no feelings, you know?” He was rambling.
She blinked three times. “Wait. Are you telling me that you had sex with Ruth? You cheated on me with a horse-face polygamist?” She went to stand up.
Cameron grabbed her belt and pulled her under cover. “Stay down, Julie. They’ll see you.” Apparently, she had not seen he and Ruth that night in the trees.“You don’t get to tell me what to do, you...pig.” Julie broke free and pushed her way up through the blackbrush. It was more words than she’d said to him in a long time, and he was astonished at the sudden intensity. He hadn’t thought she was capable of it anymore.
“You fucking asshole,” her voice launched into a high warble. “You screwed her in the same house with our sleeping children? Do they know?”
“No. I mean we never...did it in the house.”
“You cheated on me with her?” Julie shrieked.
“Lower your voice and get back down. They’re going to see you.”
“You don’t ever get to tell me what to do ever again.” Julie was on her feet now, and her rifle barrel drifted in his direction. He had bigger problems than screwing up the trade.
“Point that rifle away from me. Julie—stop and think.”
The corral that’d penned in her anxiety, terror and cataclysmic loss seemed to burst its fences all-at-once. The wild-eyed ponies of her ruined wonderworld caromed onto open ground, and bolted for the horizon. She arched her back and howled with rage.
Halfway across the clearing, carrying the last two buckets, Ruth froze. The fat cowboy and the men in the truck jolted toward the scream. Cameron sprang at Julie’s rifle barrel and
batted it aside.
BOOM!
The round from her rifle went into the ground. Cameron lunged at the barrel, yanked it out of her hand and stumbled into the clearing.
Boom, boom, boom. Zzzzt-crack.
The men in back of the truck from Rockville opened fire. Cameron’s own AR-15 jumped out of his hand like it’d been smacked with an aluminum baseball bat. He threw himself sideways into the blackbrush and scrambled to his knees.
An invisible golfer hit Julie in the head with a golf club. Her head cocked at an unnatural angle, like lifting her ear to the sky to identify a strange sound. A bloody divot of scalp chipped off her skull and cartwheeled into the underbrush. Her scream died instantly in the breeze. Her legs crumpled and she folded sideways to the ground. Slumped against the blackbrush, the fury in her face gave way to mute amazement. Her sightless eyebrows lifted as if to say, “What’s that you said, Cam?” She lay motionless, like a boneless puppet of herself.
Cameron’s brain ceased to function. He was buried in the blackbrush, ass-over-tea kettle. He was eye-to-eye with his dead wife. She didn’t blink, just stared, an eternal question setting in forever across her eyes.
What’s that you said? her face wondered.
Part of Cameron‘s brain wanted to continue the argument. It needed to explain. “I’m sorry for shtupping the horse-face polygamist. Don’t worry about that. It’s not like I got her pregnant or anything.”
Boom, boom, boom....Boom, boom.
Cameron’s fear dragged him back to the violent present. He scrambled to the edge of the briar and gazed at the highway. Bullets sizzled through the air, but they no longer seemed focused on his position. Julie—their primary target—had disappeared from view. Now their bullets hunted phantoms along the tree line.
Ruth low-crawled under the sage toward where she’d left her rifle. New waves of gunfire erupted from the hill on the opposite side of the road. Men scampered down the hillside, running from sagebrush to sagebrush, firing into the riverside bramble. Cameron counted the men as they rushed forward. He thought there were a dozen. It was an ambush, and it was probably always going to be an ambush. Rockville had been poised to screw them this morning. By freaking out, Julie sprung the trap early.
