Journal

by Craig Buckhout

But of course, now what? I didn’t want to just shoot him. I’ve already explained how I felt after killing Harvey. Boy that sounds weird doesn’t it, calling him by his first name like that? Anyway, I didn’t want to have those same feelings all over again, but I also couldn’t let him hurt Gabriel and his mom. So I pushed off the safety, pointed my rifle and said, “Don’t turn around. I’ll kill you if I have to. Drop your rifle on the ground.” Again, or something like that.

  Well, as you can imagine he jumped about two feet. I was so nervous at that point I almost shot him right then and there, but he didn’t turn around, thank God. In that same position, we talked back and forth to one another for a few seconds, and I guess I was able to convince him that I was serious because he did eventually put his gun down. After that, I had him raise his hands up, walk to the center of the road, and sit down cross-legged style. I figured he’d have to unfold his legs if he was going to stand up and that would give me plenty of warning to do something about it.

  He was a short, barrel-chested man, with a full beard. He had on a pair of heavy canvas coveralls, glove 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;} @font-face {font-family: with t s, and a thick navy blue knit cap pulled down over his ears. More important, he had an “I’ll kill you and eat your liver” look in his eyes. He was caught but not defeated, that’s for sure.

  When I knew my rifle still had his attention, I called out to Gabriel and Anna, telling them that it was safe to come out. I still kept my eyes on the pilot, though. He could easily have had a pistol hidden on him. We’d get to that.

  Anna came out first. I saw her peer around the trunk of a large pine, probably making sure it wasn’t some sort of trick. She looked at me for a couple of beats without smiling, (of course she wouldn’t smile) and turned around to signal Gabriel to stay where he was. It was when she turned back around that I saw the pistol in her hand, which explained the two different shots I heard.

  As she approached, the pilot looked back over his shoulder at her. I told her that I hadn’t searched him yet. I figured that I would keep my gun on him while she checked him for another weapon. At that point, although we weren’t completely out of danger, my heart rate finally started to settle down, and the shaking of my knees diminished enough that nobody would notice how scared I had been.

  That’s when Anna shot him. She looked back once to make sure Gabriel wasn’t in view and shot him dead.

  There was an instant, I’ll bet not much more than a couple of seconds in time, when I thought nothing, felt nothing, and did nothing. My eyes just held onto the view of the red gunk shooting out the far side of his head, the blood spurting out the near side, and the pilot toppling over. After that, I guess my brain and body started working again.

  Fear, no doubt, fear I was maybe next on her hit list, caused me to swing my rifle up and finger the trigger. By that time, though, her hand and gun had dropped to her side, and for just a moment, one breath of life, she let me see inside her. Her shoulders rolled forward, her head dropped, her eyes closed tight, and the pain of what she’d done was there. Then it was gone. It was just that fast. She squared herself away and looked over at me with no residual of regret.

  “Relax,” she said. “It had to be that way. We couldn’t bring him with us, and he would have told the others which way we went. Besides, he would have done the exact same to you.” She turned and walked over to the rifle the pilot had dropped and picked it up.

  I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. That was a life she just took, a real live person. He wasn’t an immediate threat. It was done as casually as scraping your plate before washing it. Who can do that? What human being can snuff a man one second, suffer her act the next, and be back to business immediately after. Who was this woman?

  As I replay these events in my head, what, now two days later, I have the luxury of time and circumstance to interject something into this narrative that Claire Huston wrote in November 2050. She said, “It’s in our nature that we will suffer unless we receive our own approval.” It’s so typically simple of her, yet so ripe with meaning. My take not by a long shot. 6it on it is we are basically doomed to be our own worst critics. Or less handily, if for whatever reason, expediency, necessity, even self preservation, we do something that we know is wrong, we will greatly suffer from the disappointment in ourselves. I certainly have my own regrets about things I have done in life, but I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of pain Anna will suffer for murdering that pilot.

  Enough of that for now. I’m too exhausted from the day’s walk, and my brain won’t have any more of those sort of thoughts, so let me return to the events following the shooting. I don’t have to reason those out. I just have to recall them.

  I asked her, “Who the hell are you? Why do these people want you so bad?”

  Her response was a measured one, “There’s no time for that now. You heard him, others are coming. Search him for anything useful and hide his body.”

  Oh that made me mad, real mad, her talking to me that way. So I fired right back at her, “You killed him, so you get rid of him. I’ll take care of the plane.” After that, I turned and walked off, hoping she didn’t find my back another convenient target.

  I quickly searched the plane, finding an extra magazine for the rifle the pilot had dropped, and a canvas backpack stuffed under the seat. The bag contained a water bottle, a few more bullets, and a small amount of food. I also found something I couldn’t make sense of at first. It was three small, capped, clear plastic bottles, partly filled with gravel. Each of them had a two-foot long strip of red cloth tied to its neck. I also found a black marking pen.

  I held one of these bottles in my hand for a few seconds, looking at it, maybe even shaking it a time or two, before it came to me. It must have been how the pilot communicated with his confederates on the ground. He wrote notes on the outside of the bottles with the pen and threw them overboard. I wondered if, in this way, he’d already alerted those others he spoke of to the location of Gabriel and Anna. I had to assume he had, and they were headed our way.

  The plane was too big to have any hope of concealing it, so I pushed it off the side of the road and flipped it over. I then cut a large piece of fabric from each wing, not only to make the plane unserviceable, but to augment what we had for shelter building. Finally, I cut all the cables, punctured the gas tank, and broke one of the blades off the prop. That plane isn’t going anywhere after that.

  When I got back down the road, Anna and Gabriel were still dragging the body toward the trees. When she looked up at me, I tossed her the spare magazine, Gabriel the rucksack and wing fabric, and told her there was no point anymore to hiding the body. His friends were going to find the plane anyway, so our time would be better spent putting distance between them and us.

  After that, I just started walking north, pretending like I knew exactly which way to go. Believe me, it was all bluff …and maybe just a little bit of a need on my part to turn the tables on Anna. OK, maybe that had more than just a little bit to do with it. I wanted her to think 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;} @font-face {font-family: with t that if she wanted out of this mess, she better follow me.

  Anyway, as I progressed, trying to put some sort of a workable plan together, I figured the worst thing we could possibly do was keep to the roads. Even if they didn’t have any more airplanes up there snooping around, our enemies could easily set up checkpoints on Highway 20 and all the roads that intersect it and just pick us off. Also, my map said north was the Pasayten Wilderness. To me that meant plenty of concealment and hard walking, which would further improve our chance of evading our pursuers. Finally, because we had started out walking north from the farm and were now continuing that same way, they might think that was our true, intended direction of travel. They might also conclude we were trying to reach what used to be Canada. But well before that, I intended to first turn east and then south. It was basically the same plan as before.

  Practically from the first step off, it was a rotten climb. To make things worse and furth
er test my self-confidence, a cold relentless rain swept in on us from the west like a giant tsunami. I could actually hear it coming a hundred yards off and smell its musty breath before the first drops peppered the ground around me. I remember thinking this day was going to be ten kinds of miserable.

  For the first five minutes, I moved out smartly and resisted the urge to turn around to see if they were behind me. As juvenile as it sounds, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me check on them. I was pretty sure I heard them back there, but I wasn’t positive. After a while, though, I have to admit I couldn’t stand it any longer and just had to sneak a look. So I stopped and made a show of putting on my poncho and checking my map just to make sure they were following behind, and, if so, to let them catch-up.

  They were there all right, about thirty yards back and trudging along. Gabriel was huffing away from the climb, but when his eyes met mine, he managed a smile with those thin lips of his. Anna on the other hand, who was only a step or two behind him, looked straight ahead as if I wasn’t even there. Her dark brown hair was soaking wet. You’d think that it would straighten out because of that, but the damp only seemed to make it curl all the more.

  When Gabriel reached me, he handed off the journal you’re now reading and the one other. Anna, for her part, pretty much avoided eye contact and remained silent. It may be my imagination, but I sensed a bit of deference on her part, or maybe that was just what I wanted to feel. She’s a pretty tough character.

  We walked hard for the next three, maybe four hours. The way wasn’t always north either because this particular area was cut with ravines and valleys that were, for the most part, clear of any meaningful cover. So I stuck to the ridges with the trees, which sometimes veered east or west, and I had to constantly re-orient myself. The peaks in the distance kept me going the right way. They also worried me. Not quite mid-April, and there was still plenty of snow where we were headed.

  As soon as we stopped for a break, somewhat sheltered by a large pine, I asked Gabriel to climb a nearby tree to see if he could tell if we were being followed. As he left, Anna called out and urged him to be careful. the Author

  When he was out of earshot, I turned to her and said, “All right, let’s have it Anna. Why do those people want you so bad?”

  I clearly remember her reply because it pissed me off all over again. “I suppose you have a right to know.”

  I thought to myself, You suppose? You suppose I have a right to know? You’re damn right I have a right to know you loony…. I don’t want to spell out the word I was thinking at that exact moment, even though I didn’t say it. I imagine you can guess what it was anyway.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and turned those dark brown eyes of hers on me. Since we had stopped moving, we’d lost the protection of generated body heat, and the cold was starting to settle in.

  She said she lived in a small town of about two thousand people near the Washington /Oregon border. The town had been renamed to Woburn by one of the town leaders so that if the people who departed were ever to mention the name, it couldn’t be located by others on a map. She wouldn’t tell me what the real name was or be more specific on its location.

  When all the problems first started, the town leaders were sharp enough to foresee most of the consequences and started making plans to deal with them. For instance, when the power grid went down, some electrical engineers in town were able to create enough electricity, using a nearby river and a rigged generator, to power pumps for irrigation and drinking water and to facilitate local land wire communication. As the crisis progressed, they sectioned off a portion of the town, set up a defensible perimeter, and burned the rest so they would have a clear field of fire should people looking for food try to take it from them. They also had several machinists who were able to manufacture some basic firearms, mostly shotguns. To feed the town, she said they cultivated the area nearby, primarily growing potatoes, wheat, and beans. There were already some existing apple orchards that they picked over. For meat, they mostly raised pigs and chickens. Everything was carefully rationed by the governing council.

  I told her this was all real interesting, but I wanted to know why Mr. Ponytail was still after her.

  She looked to see if Gabriel was OK, dabbed her runny nose on her shirt cuff, sniffled, nodded her head, and said she was getting to that. It sure didn’t seem that way to me.

  She went on to explain that there were a number of very difficult problems they encountered. One of them was how to deal with the outsiders who happened by and saw that they had food and safety, and wanted to stay. They couldn’t just allow everyone to move-in. They didn’t have enough resources for that and soon everyone would be starving. Some of the people who happened upon their town were criminals, crazies, or just plain undesirables who couldn’t be counted on to pull their weight or respect others. They couldn’t allow that either. So they turned away all but a very few of the outsiders. She added that there were some days where the ones guarding the gates literally cried as they watched children walk off to an almost certain death in both directionstif. It was survival, though. They couldn’t save everyone.

  The people they did allow to stay were those who had skills that would be useful for the good of everyone. However, even the people they allowed in had to be sequestered for a time in a special area of town, where they could be evaluated before they joined the township. It was feared that spies and infiltrators would be among them. And in fact, some of those who were allowed in, had to be later sent away.

  There had since been several raids on their town by large groups of criminals who wanted to steal their food and weapons. These were all successfully repulsed but always at a loss of life to the defenders. Their weak point was the growing fields outside their perimeter. The town had to plant, care for, and harvest the crops, and that meant people going outside the protected town limits. Squads of armed residents had to accompany the workers.

  I must have again shown my frustration at this juncture with her not getting to the point because she held up her hand to indicate I should be patient.

  She said she was on one of those work details outside the fence when a scouting party of about ten or twelve people attacked. Some of the attackers were killed. The ones I saw at the farm were the survivors of the raiding party. Mr. Ponytail was their leader. But some of the townspeople were killed, too. Gabriel and Anna were taken captive along with another man from the town. They tortured this man for information about the town’s defenses. He couldn’t give it to them, though, because the crucial information, such as how much food they had stored, how many weapons, how much ammunition, the strategy for defense, the weak points, and so forth were only known to members of the governing council. But this man did tell them that Anna was on that council and before they killed him, he begged her to save him by telling them what they wanted to know.

  She checked again on Gabriel and saw that he was climbing down from the tree. I noticed that she was full out shivering at this point.

  They didn’t torture her, though. Instead, Eric, he’s the one I call Mr. Ponytail, decided to take the both of them to their main camp, where they would use Gabriel to make her tell them everything. She broke eye contact at this point and said, “I think Eric also had some special plans of his own for me.”

  I told her there had to be more. It didn’t make sense that they were going to all this trouble to get her back when all they would have to do is ambush some more townspeople and get the information they needed from someone else.

  She was shaking badly now and Gabriel was almost back to us.

  She said that there was more to it. During the course of her captivity, they got comfortable with her presence and slipped up and let her overhear not only where their main camp was, but also that they were planning an attack on Woburn with over a two hundred fighters for the middle of May. Several times they also mentioned having a canon of some sort that they planned to use to destroy the town’s defenses. Finally,
she told me that many of the fighters had gathered in the town near the fWhile so engagedwotarm where she and Gabriel had been held, in preparation for the trek to Woburn.

  Now it made sense. They had to recapture or kill her. They couldn’t allow her to carry that information back to the town. If the townspeople knew Ponytail was coming, they could prepare for the attack. They could also pre-empt the assault by attacking Ponytail first.

  At this point, Gabriel joined us and said that he didn’t see anyone but there were also large areas he couldn’t observe because of the trees. He, too, was shaking badly.

  I guess I was still feeling a little cranky about the way she had been treating me because I didn’t thank or acknowledge her in any way for telling me the story. Instead, I told Gabriel to give me one of the sections of wing fabric he was carrying.

  The piece was about three feet wide and sixteen feet long, so I folded it in half and cut it into two eight foot sections. I then took each of those sections and fashioned them into a poncho of sorts that they could put over their heads and cinch around their waist with a belt. I figured that would help with the cold, certainly the wet. After that I told them we better get moving again.

  After another hour on foot, we cut an old logging road and then a second one maybe half a mile beyond that. The terrain was brutal. I had scratches and bruises all up and down my shins from stepping over and through deadfalls. My hands were taking a hell of a beating as well. They were cut, and split, and swollen from much abuse. Because of that, the roads were tempting, even if for only a short distance. But as I mentioned, though they would have made our lives much easier, they could also offer a trap.

  Being all banged up like that wasn’t even the worst of it. The cold was relentless, digging its fingers deep inside, partly because I was so wet. For the most part the rain had stopped but by then it was too late. I was already soaked from the knees down and the water had managed to squeeze inside my poncho, down my neck, and dampen my shoulders, chest and back. I was just plain miserable, and I’m sure Anna and Gabriel were too. It raised some serious concerns about hypothermia.