Stray Magic

by Jenny Schwartz

  Digger halted before we entered the forest. His rule was simple. Once the forest started, so did our patrol, and then, we had to be silent. “No one’s reported anything unusual and we’re a negligible target.” He studied the forest. “The biggest threat we face is other people. Not the Faerene. That’s what I think about. How to keep us safe from humanity with the brakes off.”

  He walked into the forest. He never chose the same path twice, but whatever route we walked, we’d take in the checkpoint on Miller Road that blocked the western entrance into town.

  We circled the back of Angus’s poultry farm and the land newly ploughed for a garden and feed crops. He needed grain for his birds to overwinter and couldn’t count on a supply from elsewhere.

  A forest is a noisy place, especially when I’m hiking through it.

  Digger moved silently. Without even looking, he placed his feet to avoid dead branches that might snap.

  I carried the newer of Bud’s two hunting rifles, both of significant vintage, and if I wasn’t careful, the dense undergrowth snared it.

  In short, Digger was the threat, and I was an awkward recruit. I had, however, a decent sense of direction. I recognized when we neared Miller Road where the forest crept close. In fact, so close was the forest that someone could shoot at the checkpoint guards from the woods. Consequently, the guards occupied a bunker.

  While I’d been concentrating on the homestead and introducing myself to Dr. Fayed so that he could assess my first aid skills and add me to the list of medical support volunteers, others had focused on the town’s defenses. A mid-twentieth century front-end loader had been liberated from the local museum’s outside display and used to excavate the bunkers and scrape dirt into mounds to block the roads either side of the sawhorses.

  “Vehicles,” Digger said.

  It wasn’t as if the world had stopped, yet. People still drove when they could, especially carting supplies. Still, my gut tightened with his implicit order for caution. He quickened to a jog, and I kept pace with him, but stayed behind.

  I’d learned the basic hand signals. His raised hand halted me instantly.

  He’d gained a line of sight to the checkpoint. He beckoned me forward.

  I moved as quietly as I could.

  Three utility vehicles lined up on the far side of the sawhorses. The cars were battered and mud-splashed.

  The bunker was situated far enough back from the dirt mounds to view the checkpoint and down the road. The guards had a bullhorn. “Put down your weapons. Everyone is to approach with their hands in the air. Hands on barricade, then we talk. If you don’t want to talk, turn and leave.”

  The car engines revved.

  Digger thumbed on the radio. “Patrol West. Digger reporting. Twelve men at Miller Road. Amy and me in the trees.”

  The lead car drove at the barricade. Four men leapt from the second car, dashing for the woods to go around the dirt mounds rather than jump into the ditch in front of them and try to scramble up the loose earth.

  The lead car kept rolling forward despite the nails that were driven through the sawhorses puncturing its tires. The men in the car opened fire at the bunker. Their strategy was obvious. They’d take out the guards in the bunker, move the sawhorses, and regroup in the two undamaged vehicles.

  Digger’s semiautomatic split the air near me. The two gunmen running toward us to get around the mound died. Digger added his firepower to that of the guards stuck in the bunker. We would have reinforcements in just a few minutes.

  Not soon enough.

  The third utility vehicle veered off the road, heading toward where Digger and I lay prone in the dirt. Those in the car sprayed bullets at the trees. Woodchips and dirt stung us.

  The guards in the bunker needed Digger’s back-up.

  “Car’s mine.” I aimed for the driver and squeezed the trigger. The windscreen exploded. My second bullet followed the first.

  The vehicle veered toward the ditch even as it slowed. The men inside jumped out.

  I reloaded, fired. A miss and a hit.

  Reload, fire.

  I kept the men hiding behind their vehicle. For now. I hadn’t brought enough cartridges for a prolonged gunfight.

  Digger turned his assault rifle on the nearest threats. He’d be out of ammo shortly, too.

  Return fire from those at the third vehicle ceased. Were they dead, injured, or playing possum?

  The gunfire at the bunker stopped.

  For a second I held my breath. My ears rang, but I thought I heard cars. I risked a glance back toward town.

  Two vehicles sped toward us. I recognized Craig’s truck in the lead.

  “Cover me,” Digger said.

  I strained my eyes, trying to see the slightest twitch from our fallen enemies.

  Digger’s pistol echoed twice. “Clear!”

  It felt as if I breathed for the first time in hours. My lungs burned.

  A minute later the cry of “Clear!” was echoed at the bunker. The occupants of the first and second cars were down.

  “Call Doc. Ivan’s hit.”

  I flicked the safety on my rifle and ran. For the first few steps my legs wobbled with adrenaline, but the thought of someone needing healing steadied me. I dropped the rifle as I jumped into the bunker.

  A gut wound was bad.

  Digger pulled off his shirt and threw it to me.

  I wadded it up and put pressure on the wound. I didn’t know Ivan, but I knew two things were vital: we had to get him to Dr. Fayed fast, and the more we minimized his body’s shock response, the better his chance of survival. Shock could kill, and bullet wounds were major trauma.

  “Doc’s on his way, so this is only a two minute cuddle.” I lay down against him, substituting body heat for the emergency blanket we lacked. I was going to raise hell later about a bunker lacking a basic first aid kit. “I can’t do anything about the lack of sterile surfaces here. Doc’s going to have to boil you to kill all the germs.” Blood seeped through Digger’s shirt and coated my hand. Warm blood like I’d imagined in the woods. “You’re going to live, Ivan. No infection, no relapse. Back on duty in two weeks. Digger doesn’t tolerate layabouts.”

  Ivan’s mouth twitched in what could have been a smile or an attempt to bite back a moan.

  “Stretcher.”

  We rolled him onto it. I had no idea how much time had passed while I did the little I could by providing body heat, reassurance—“stay awake, Ivan”—and pressure on the wound. The bullet or bullets were lodged in there.

  Dr. Fayed and a nurse knelt by Ivan in the back of a truck, while it drove carefully back to town and the doctor’s surgery. Ivan needed a hospital and a fully equipped surgical theatre, but there was simply no way to get him to one. The nearest hospital was at the county seat and it was overrun and failing. That message had gone out via the local grapevine and the radio. Dr. Fayed was Ivan’s best chance.

  “Wash your hands.” Craig poured water from a bottle while I rinsed the worst of Ivan’s blood from my hands.

  I dried them on the grass. Crouching there as I scrubbed my palms along the rough grass, I saw the bodies.

  Earlier, Digger had counted twelve intruders. Now, there were twelve bodies. Either the four of us had killed them all, or lives had been ended in cold blood.

  Apfall Hill lacked a jail and the sheriff wasn’t responding to calls outside of the county seat. The choice was kill them or set them free. We couldn’t waste resources on guarding prisoners, and we certainly couldn’t afford to use our limited medical supplies on people who’d come here to… “Why?” I asked Craig or anyone. “Why did they attack us?”

  I didn’t recognize the man who answered me, not by name. But he’d been the other guard at the bunker. His face had blood splatter on it near the left ear.

  “We have a pharmacy,” he said. “They were after drugs. One of them lived long enough to answer a couple of questions.”

  “They’ve done this in other towns,” Digger said. “Don�
�t carry any guilt for ending them, honey. They’ve killed and raped and tortured.”

  Don’t carry any guilt for ending them…

  My mind flashed back to the shattered windscreen and the blood-soaked driver’s seat with the slumped body. I hadn’t had time in the middle of the fight to process what I’d seen. What I’d done. My first kill.

  Suddenly, Craig’s arm was a muscular bar around my waist. “Let’s get you home. Jarod’s having to stand guard and he’ll be climbing the walls to know you’re okay.”

  Where was Mike, their dad? I looked around and saw him standing over a body, talking with one of his friends from the garage. With the memory of thieves killing Ryan, Mike wouldn’t have shown these any mercy.

  “Home,” I agreed, and allowed Craig to guide me to his truck.

  Jarod greeted me with the fiercest hug, disregarding the blood on my clothes.

  The dogs sniffed and circled me, agitated.

  Stella patted my back. “I’ll run you a hot bath.”

  “No.” The thought of sitting in blood-stained water made me sick. “I’ll have a quick shower.” And the hot water would hide my tears, even from me.

  Good news arrived with the evening’s shadows. Ivan had survived surgery by a general practitioner rather than a surgeon. He was hooked up to IV antibiotics and morphine, both of which might soon be a wistful memory. Dr. Fayed was confident Ivan would recover. His constitution was strong.

  A few of the men and women from the patrols dropped in and ended up staying for dinner. They were checking on me, which I both appreciated and flinched from. They were veterans of either the military or police. I had a feeling I’d been inducted into the club of people who’ve killed other people. There was sympathy, painful sympathy, in their eyes. I saw myself in them. I would survive, but I’d be forever changed by the choice I’d made. I knew now that I would kill to protect my own.

  In the morning, the twelve bodies left at the checkpoint were gone, as the dragon had promised they would be.

  Digger and I patrolled in that direction. We hadn’t been scheduled for a morning patrol, but I guessed that he believed in me getting back on the horse. I couldn’t afford to be scared of the choices I’d made and the world we lived in.

  Someone had driven the first utility vehicle, the one with the punctured tires, back up the road on its wheel rims and parked it off to the side. Then it had been torched. In the early morning light it was a scorched warning to any outsiders thinking of bringing trouble to our town.

  Not that we were monsters.

  People who were willing to talk, to approach as instructed with their hands in the air, and to list their skills and their needs, were often welcomed. Being off the main routes, it was the determined and resourceful folk who reached us, and Mike had argued a new mentality into us.

  We were taking the Red Drake’s speech as gospel in terms of losing modern conveniences. We had to also believe the terrible death toll he predicted. The town would need people to work in the fields and bring in the harvest in a few months’ time. So newcomers were allocated to existing townsfolk. They had to take on a dependent, most often an elderly town resident who needed help. Then they could stay.

  Our household gained another member. Niamh Shannon was a thirty one year old firefighter from Pittsburgh. She’d been hiking in the forest when the Faerene appeared and hadn’t heard about them initially. When she did, and when she learned of the chaos between her and her home city, she’d searched instead for a safe place to ride out the changes. Her thinking was a lot like mine.

  The attic had been cleaned out, and Craig and Niamh got rooms up there. Mike stayed in what had initially been intended to be Jarod’s room. Jarod stayed with me. Without him, some nights the desolation of what we faced might have crushed me, but I listened to his breathing and it helped that I wasn’t alone.

  Unfortunately, in accepting refugees, we also got their diseases. When typhoid hit us, it hit hard.

  Dr. Fayed lost his two nurses. This was typhoid beyond a nightmare, and the town’s supply of antibiotics was soon exhausted. Complications killed people. Existing medical conditions flared up, couldn’t be adequately treated, and stole lives. Doc divided up the town. Ramona, Patti and the group at the camp took responsibility for the east end of town. Doc held the center and took any major injuries. I got the western end of town which wasn’t as populated, but still had enough people to stretch me thin.

  Gas was rationed, for as long as it would last. I pedaled everywhere on a bike Mike had restored. It had not an inch of plastic on it, but did have a hook to link a two-wheel trailer to it. In a pinch, I could transport supplies or a person in the trailer.

  I lived on the edge of exhaustion. In the early mornings I worked in the garden. Through the middle of the day I saw people, my patients. There was so little I could do for them. “Keep them warm, clean and hydrated” was my mantra. In the evenings I tried to catch up on my chores which had expanded to include collecting herbal supplies like willow bark. The herbal teas that Stella had bought weeks ago in Appletonia were long gone, distributed to try and alleviate my patients’ suffering.

  Then the electricity went out. People lost their minds. The dragon had warned us, but an astounding number of folks hadn’t believed that the ordinary conveniences of life would go.

  Things like running water became history since it had been pumped through the town’s system via electric pumps. The town’s central well had been restored. It had been a tourist attraction previously, a pretty wishing well. Now it would supply water for people willing to wind a bucket up and down.

  Mike and others had also dug a second well and connected a windmill to it, modelled on the one at the homestead. People would still have to carry water from it to their homes, but they wouldn’t have to draw the water themselves.

  But the Faerene seemed determined to hit us with everything at once. As the electricity went out, all petroleum-derived products also vanished. That meant that vehicles ceased to run and plastics disappeared.

  The lack of effortless transportation would be felt, but the catastrophe was in people’s lack of preparation for the loss of plastic. True, most didn’t have Bud’s lifetime collection of tins of all sizes to help them or two centuries of people never throwing away a jar or bottle—at least, that was what it had felt like as we’d cleared the attic and cellar at the homestead. Nonetheless, they’d been warned. Yet when the plastic disappeared, food spilled in houses across town.

  Within a few days, vermin populations exploded. Rats, mice, cockroaches and flies swarmed. The rodents carried fleas. The fleas carried typhus. What had been bad before got exponentially worse.

  Stella, Digger and Mike sat me down and insisted that I stop trying to contribute to running the homestead. The rest of them could manage it, but the town needed me.

  At the camp, Ramona and half the residents had died. Doc was managing a slightly better survival rate. In the western section of town, my sector, we’d only lost a quarter of residents. Only.

  “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working,” Stella said.

  “I yell at them to wash their hands,” I said tiredly.

  Digger held his hands out, turned them over. “We listened to you, and all of us are still here.”

  Mike, Craig, Niamh and Stella had all gone down with what had likely been typhoid, but their bouts had been short and not devastating. It helped that we had running water and functioning toilets.

  So many fevers ran through town that I couldn’t be sure what they were any more. Typhoid, typhus, something else? By the survival rates, at least it wasn’t cholera.

  In the Pattersons’ house I repeated my mantra to her husband. “Keep her warm, clean and hydrated.”

  By the smell, he obviously wasn’t.

  “How the hell do I do that? You save her. You have to save her!” He charged at me, a big bull of a man carrying flab around his middle despite the food situation.

  I reacted instinctively. I’d been d
rilled in self-defense. The wooden floor of the house shook as he landed badly after I’d thrown him. He stayed down, stunned.

  “He’s not a bad man,” Alice said. “He’s worried about me. He needs me.”

  He wasn’t worried enough about his wife to actually tend her.

  Exhaustion dragged at me, emotional as well as physical, and I had other patients to see, but I couldn’t in all conscience leave her in the state she was in. I’d brought water to the house in three buckets in the trailer on my bike. Patterson had followed my instructions enough that a pot of it was boiling on his fire pit outside. That would serve as drinking water. I used the other two buckets to wash Alice quickly. I simply didn’t have time to give her a full bed bath. I stripped the soiled sheets away. Found the mattress soiled, too, which wasn’t unexpected, and dragged a twin bed mattress in from their guest room to settle her on.

  While I worked, Patterson picked himself up and stumbled away.

  I left Alice with a jug of water and asked next door if someone could check on her in a few hours.

  The neighbor agreed, after stating her opinion of Patterson. She wasn’t wrong. Patterson was a worthless lump.

  There was no fairness in the apocalypse. Good people died and lazy bullies survived.

  At least the dragon hadn’t lied about bodies vanishing in the night, otherwise we’d have had the gruesome task of collecting corpses to bury in mass graves.

  As it was, the security patrols had expanded to include salvage teams. It wasn’t just about ensuring the equitable distribution of resources for survival now. We had to ensure that the seeds for the future were protected as well.

  The homestead gained a couple of horses and two dairy cows. A cat adopted us, feasting on mice and rats and establishing himself as the most skilled hunter of the household. Jarod convinced one of the horses to pull a cart. Niamh took responsibility for milking the cows and storing the milk as cheese. We had fresh butter.