by Jason Ross
Cameron quietly cursed himself. If I had looked for gas in the burned-out towns.
Without Isaiah, he felt like a hammer without a hand.
The engine sputtered, then cut. The silence of night enveloped the truck. Ruth and the children slept with quiet murmurs and troubled dreams. The tires hummed against the roadway. The headlights pierced the fog, but it was a sham. The light would only last as long as the battery, now. They rolled downslope by gravity for the moment, but hundreds of bearings, gears and shafts bled momentum away into a stubborn universe that preferred stillness to life.
Ahead in the distance, the fog glowed. The apparition of headlights pinpricked the haze and lit the fog banks. Cameron strained to see what lay ahead, but it was pointless. Six pairs of lights—probably the same marauders who’d burned the towns—waited up ahead. He groped the dashboard for the switch and killed the truck lights in a desperate, if too-late attempt to save his family from the hell that would soon eat them alive. The truck rolled to a stop with the squeal of brakes. The clan was doomed. Cameron sighed. His instinct to give up rose on a ground-glass bed of frustration.
Ruth woke up, rubbed her eyes and craned her neck forward to stare into the impenetrable fog.
“What’re those lights?” she asked.
“They’ve seen us. We’re out of gas,” Cameron explained. Ruth was usually content to leave decisions in the hands of others. It was a nice quality: being a good follower. That quality alone should’ve guaranteed her survival, but she’d hitched her wagon to the wrong star. Cameron had been the wrong man to award sex. He was no husband—no sheepdog at the gate. He ran like an aimless mongrel, snapping at flying birds and chasing jackrabbits he would never catch. Without the steadiness of Isaiah, Cameron couldn’t shepherd a family. He had no business leading a clan.
The mongrel knew what to do, now. Run.
The marauders would want Ruth, and maybe they’d want the little girl, Leah. They might not kill Ruth’s other kids to keep her from going insane. The killers up ahead would want the two women for sex, of course, but that was better than death, wasn’t it...was it?
Either way, Cameron and his two boys were dead. The marauders would cut their throats on this very spot and leave their bodies for the turkey vultures. But they could run, and leave Ruth behind to occupy the horde. Maybe that’d satisfy them. Maybe they wouldn’t see the need to chase after three tracks in the snow. If Cameron and his boys didn’t run, the killers would surround the truck in two minutes, and after that, he’d be a trussed hog. A leashed cur. A dead man.
Cameron jumped out of the truck and snatched the backpack of ammo from the truck bed. He flung open the rear door of the crew cab and woke his son.
“Come on, Denny, we gotta run,” he said to the boy. “We need to go. Ruth, give me Paulie. Give me my son.”
Ruth opened the passenger door and hurried around, the four-year-old boy in her arms. Cameron slung his rifle around to his back and scooped up the child.
“What’re we doing?” she asked. Her own rifle dangled from its sling.
“You’re better off with them. You’ll be okay with them,” he said, flicking his head toward the lights.
But her eyes reflected the withering truth: she and the girls would not be okay. They would be better off dead. They needed a family in order to survive. Her hand gripped the front of Cameron’s shirt and wouldn’t let go. When he went to pull away, she pulled the handful of cloth and buttons back toward her.
“We are a family,” she hissed.
Cameron closed his eyes and exhaled. His resolve evaporated. The headlights in the fog rolled forward, slowly. The rumble of engines and men carried on the fog. The truck would soon be surrounded. Cameron shucked off his backpack and let it fall to the pavement. A new, cleaner resolve formed within him, a dogged resolve in the face of futility. Ruth was right. They were a family, and they could still die like a family.
“Leah, take a gun,” he said. “You too Denny. Get in the bed of the truck and get ready to shoot anyone who isn’t us.” Cameron wrapped a free arm around Denny and hefted him over the side of the truck bed.
Denny began to cry. “I don’t know how to shoot.”
“I know. I know, Denny. It’s okay. Just do your best. Here, take your brother.” He passed the child to Denny and gathered an extra rifle from the truck. He ran the slide on an AR-15 and passed it to Leah, then lifted her into the truck bed too. Denny sobbed quietly. The fog around them carried a timeless truth, plain to all, young and old—this was where everything ended. This is where their light would finally bleed away into the mist.
“You get in too.” Cameron pointed Ruth into the truck bed. “I’ll be over here, to get an angle on them. Don’t shoot until you see the men. Don’t shoot at the lights.”
Ruth stepped onto the bumper, swung her skirt over the tailgate and settled in for the fight. They were all crying now. Cameron too.
The headlights were no more than a hundred feet out now, and Cameron heard the rumble of heavy equipment. Tanks, maybe.
Before his last stand, he held Denny’s chin in his hand, leaned over the wall of the truck and looked him eye-to-eye in the dim. “I love you Den-ster. You’re a man now. This is what men do. No matter what happens, we protect them. Okay?”
The boy sniffed back his tears and nodded in the dark. “No matter what,” Cam repeated.
I guess this is what we have left, Cameron thought. We keep our word to the dead.
“Occupants of the truck, come out with your hands where we can see them,” a bullhorn blared out of the mist. “We will open fire if you do not.” The vehicles crunched forward on the pavement. The shapes of men passed in front of the headlights, like a pack of wolves circling.
“This is your last warning. Surrender your arms and step out in front of your headlights.”
Cameron stepped to the hood of the truck, leaned over and took aim at the shadows. With everything he had left, he bellowed, “Let’s dance, motherfuckers.”
One last jackrabbit to chase. One last bar brawl. This was something Cameron knew how to do.
The bullhorn crackled. Another voice took over.
“Who is that? Tell me your name or we shoot.”
Some faint hope rattled in Cameron’s head, like a memory of a dream of a time that existed before memory.
“I’m Cameron Stewart and I’m about to kill a stack of you assholes, so shuttup and fight,” he yelled.
“No shit?” the bullhorn answered. “I’ll be da—“ the bullhorn cut out. Another man’s voice continued without the bullhorn. “Don’t shoot.” It shouted. “Cameron. Don’t shoot. It’s Tommy. It’s me, Tommy.”
Cameron’s mind stutter-stepped. A shadow grew before the headlights; bigger than a man, monstrous in the fog. The towering shadow threw off spectral rays of light around it. “Don’t shoot me, Shithead. It’s your brother, Tommy.”
Cameron clicked his gun to safe and fell back to the truck bed. “Put down your guns. Denny, put it down. Carefully. Leah, Ruth. Put your guns down. Lay them down.” The truck bed clattered with rifles. The sobbing and muttered questions continued. Cameron ignored them.
“Don’t shoot. It’s me, Tommy.” Cameron’s brother materialized from the fog and into the thin light around the truck. He wore military camouflage and had a big rifle slung across his back. He held his hands up. “Is that really you, Cam? I’ll be dipped in shit. We found you. Out here in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
Cameron had been lost, but now he was found. The brothers hugged; their own, lost clan restored.
20
Sage Ross
Chambers Ranch
La Grande, Oregon
* * *
Captain Chambers tasked Sage to work with the ‘arrest team’ on combat training. That’s what he called the ten high-school-aged boys chosen to slip into Wallowa County with Sage and Captain Chambers. The plan was to arrest Commissioner Pete off his porch in the dead of night—when he went out to pee.
“This county leaks gossip like a rusty bucket,” he told Sage. “Nobody can know what we’re doing until it’s over.”
They’d been at it for two weeks, and the boys were probably as solid as they were going to get. If Sage had been the golden child of the La Grande P.D. before, after his last mission into Wallowa, he was their patron saint. The captain treated him like the son-he-never-had.
Sage had traversed twenty-five miles of wilderness and infiltrated to the Commissioner’s doorstep, even checking the gas levels and keys on the snow machines. It didn’t seem like a big deal to Sage at the time, but the captain talked about it as though he’d crept into Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and secretly impregnated the tyrant’s girlfriend.
Armed with Sage’s intelligence, they had a clear plan to infiltrate and exfiltrate, and they knew when the Commissioner got up to take a piss. From that point, things moved down the tracks like a locomotive with a drunk conductor and a tender full of dry coal.
“Old men are like clockwork,” the captain explained. “If he got up at 3:30 a.m. one night, he’ll get up at 3:30 a.m. every night. If he pissed off his porch once, he’ll piss off his porch always.”
It made sense, but Sage disliked it—arresting a man outside his home while he peed. But the die was cast. Sage consoled himself with the knowledge that he would be asked to make peace with many evils in this new world.
He’d shot men before. Their faces had filled his scope and their guts had blown onto the snow, red as Christmas. Someday, he hoped to stop having nightmares about those men. He would welcome the day when he didn’t wake up in the witching hour and see their slack faces against the snow.
Snatching up a county politico and throwing him in jail shouldn’t be a big deal after the killing he’d done; it would be just another burr under his saddle.
He was tempted to join the high school boys in their five mile afternoon run, but with the mission coming, he opted to conserve his energy. Captain Chambers called it “tapering,” which had something to do with storing up glycogen in the muscles prior to a triathlon. Sage wondered how many years it would be until the world hosted another triathlon, or the Olympics.
It wasn’t like the world was starved for exercise. People hadn’t been in better shape in a hundred years. Everyone worked, all day, with their bodies and hands. Nobody worked strictly with their mind anymore.
He and the high school boys were the same age, but running laps with them felt like child’s play. The boys left from the bunkhouse, and the same daily competition heated up: some boys lit out like they were running the quarter mile, going balls-out to be first. Those same guys would be dragging ass by Mile Two and would barely make the finish line at Mile Five. Even after weeks of running five miles, they couldn’t help themselves. They sprinted and then paid the price. Everything was a competition for these numb nuts high schoolers, but Sage knew better than to get sucked in. Even around other seventeen year-olds, he’d seen too much bad shit in the world to squander his energy on gamesmanship.
He’d been seeing a lot of Aimee Butterton. The captain didn’t ask him to sleep over on the ranch with the high school boys, so he drove out to Elgin every evening, curled up in Aimee’s lap and let the stress of the coming mission bleed away into her sweet smell.
Union County had a lot of gasoline from a storage facility Sage had never seen, and no one seemed to be conserving fuel. The unleaded would go bad in another eight or ten months. So, they didn’t begrudge him the gas to drive thirty miles to see his girlfriend.
Sage had begun to wonder if Aimee might be too old for him, but that didn’t stop him from gravitating to her like a puppy to its mother. Sometimes, as she swept back his hair and rubbed his neck, she felt more like a big sister than a lover.
Once, he picked her pants off the floor when he reached for his own, and based on the feel of them, he guessed hers might be an inch bigger around the waist. She was no bikini model. She looked great naked, but she was twenty-two years old, and while he’d seen the dark side of the world, she was the adult in the relationship. She was wiser in the ways of north-eastern Oregon, and she corrected his mistaken assumptions about town and county. If she came off as a little motherly, that could be forgiven. Sage needed a mother, he supposed.
He’d never been with a more physically affectionate woman. She rarely stopped rubbing his shoulders, scratching his back and straightening his hair.
His nightly appearance at the Butterton home became routine. He got to know the older sisters, and even kissed Mrs. Butterton on the cheek when he came through the door. The smell of comfort food usually swirled around him when he stepped over the threshold, redolent of potatoes, casserole, cheese and cabbage. The captain kept the Buttertons in food and drink, and their home welcomed Sage, every evening, like the prodigal son. After he got over the newness of sex with Aimee, he couldn’t tell if he was going every night to see his girlfriend, or just going home.
Captain Chambers never spoke of Aimee Butterton to Sage. He and the captain spent most of their days together at the Chambers’ ranch, around the captain’s wife and children. It was the wrong place to mention the Buttertons. He took his cue from the captain and kept his mouth shut.
Sage spent less and less time in his hotel room in La Grande. He’d found a home with the Butterton ladies and they treated him like a beloved pet—five pretty girls and their smoking hot mom. After two weeks, he settled in as a member of the family. Occasionally, one sister or another would breeze through the living room in panties, or with her breasts out, while Sage ate leftovers or enjoyed a cup of coffee with Mrs. Butterton at the kitchen counter.
The more comfortable he grew with his new, all-girl family, the more he regretted ever thinking of the place as a whorehouse. That’d been his first impression, but he’d judged them unfairly for “entertaining” The Five. The longer he stayed, the more he understood: they were guilty only of coming to terms with the new world faster than others. Trading companionship and sexual congress for food and protection had always been the way. Modern society briefly interrupted fifty thousand years of sexual transaction, only for it to come rushing back. It wasn’t as simple as prostitution, and it probably never was.
Aimee told him that her mom and Captain Chambers had been a thing before the apocalypse—even before their father died. Mrs. Butterton had been unfaithful to the girls’ dad, and he’d died, leaving the breach unresolved. It was a sullen cloud that drifted over the house from time to time; a rare bit of enmity between mother and daughters.
The high school boys were returning from their run, much reduced in piss and vinegar. Sage snapped out of his daydreaming and pointed them back to the bunkhouse to get their guns. They returned at a sloppy jog and Sage ordered them to set up and resolve Type One, Type Two and Type Three malfunctions on their ARs. They were blown out from the run, and Sage walked up and down the firing line cajoling their messy performance.
The captain cut a beeline across the pasture from the house.
Sage smiled. “Good afternoon, Sir.”
The captain pointed at the boys. “Are they ready?”
Sage shrugged. “When I can get them to stop playing grab ass, they do okay.”
“We rounded up snowshoes for everyone. If you think their snow boots are adequate, then I think we’re set to go. We’ve got a small storm tonight. There’ll be a window of good weather after that.”
“How do you know the forecast?” Sage asked.
The captain pointed at the building clouds atop the Blue Mountains. “Your best weatherman is what your eyes tell you. That one’s a small storm. It’s not dark and tower
ing like the heavy ones. But a big one will come soon. After that, even the snow machines will have trouble bogging down in the canyon bottoms. This is our window. We go tomorrow, weather permitting.”
Sage had been secretly harboring hope that the weather would stop the mission. The ranch was tucked so far back in the valley that it’d soon become difficult to reach, even on snowmobiles. Unless Union County plowed the main road right up to the Wallowa roadblock, the smaller county could soon lock itself in a snow fortress for the duration of the winter.
Sage turned to the high school boys and shouted like an angry drill sergeant, “Pack it in. Head to the bunkhouse, get a meal and prep your packs to head out tomorrow. Open chambers on those rifles while you’re in the bunkhouse! I want to see nothing but air in there. No brass. If you shoot a hole in the captain’s place, we shoot a hole in you. That’s the deal.”
But he was no drill sergeant, Sage knew. He was just a boy like them. He’d gone to one, two-day training on the AR-15, and that made him the most-expert guy on the force when it came to running gun drills.
Sage would be late to the Buttertons’ tonight. He’d need to drive by his hotel and pack up his own kit so he’d be ready the next morning. The extra drive time would chew into his sleep, but he needed the smell of Aimee. He needed her assurance that he was doing the right thing.
Packing wouldn’t be a problem. Every item in his winter survival pack had proven itself useful or been discarded. After crossing the Blue Mountains and conducting two recon missions into Wallowa, Sage knew exactly what to expect. His gear was like a second skin, and it was all dried out, which felt like a new lease on life.
