by J. J. Holden
“Anything new?” Ethan asked. His voice sounded strained and thin in his own ears.
“No,” Amber replied without looking over. Her voice was flat, emotionless. She must still be in shock, too. “Cassy’s chained to the basketball hoop out in the hot sun, just like before. I don’t think that’s her own blood, though, she’s moving around just fine. When she moves at all. Frank has spent most of the day giving Peter the Great a guided tour, or in the house talking with Peter, I guess. The audio is partly out in the house, though, so we can’t hear very well unless they raise their voices. They’ve been speaking quietly…”
“Super. Single men still in the livestock pen? Single women still in the second house? Families still working the fields under guard?” Ethan knew the answers, of course, but he had to ask. It was maybe the tenth time in the last two hours. He kept hoping for a crack in Peter’s control. The situation was too unstable to stay as-is for too long. But when it broke, it might break in any direction, and that had him sweating.
“Yes.” Amber’s reply broke through his tension and she continued, “Michael’s fine, but Sturm and Mueller are both in the singles groups. I hope they don’t get singled out for their experience, but at least they were in civilian clothes. All of the kids are okay. Thank God for Grandma Mandy—she’s been looking after them for the most part. Just knowing that is helping me not go crazy. And I haven’t seen a visual on Choony yet, so that’s promising.”
“I hope he got out,” Ethan said. “If he did, and if we can get some sort of communications to him, then we have an unknown X-factor to work with us in freeing our people. Too bad he won’t kill these shitheads.”
Ethan glanced down at the paper between his elbows. It was a list of the Clan dead, so far as he could tell, and his best guess at a tally of Stag dead. He was trying to get a force count, or whatever Michael had called it. It seemed the Clan had lost ten adults, but he couldn’t be positive. Some might only be wounded, though he doubted it. His best estimate was that the Stag force lost at least twice that many. Good, the bastards deserved that and worse.
The problem, however, was that it left the Clan with maybe twenty adults, while the Stag people still numbered about twice that. No doubt about it, the battle had been bloody on both sides. But in the end, Peter had the numbers to throw warm bodies at the Clan knowing someone would get through somewhere, eventually. He didn’t seem to care about his own dead. How could his control not be tenuous? The Stag people’s fear must be pretty powerful.
Another thing Ethan had noticed was that the attackers had clearly known where the kids were, but he didn’t want to think Jaz would have revealed that. Peter could just as easily have gotten that intel from a scout with binoculars. Hard to know. But Jaz was solid, she acted like someone who had finally found her family after a long search, and he decided to believe the scout theory.
Amber continued, “They’ve been bringing Clanners into the main house one at a time. I think they’re questioning everyone. Only a few people even know there’s a bunker here at all, so we should be safe in that regard. He’s going to wonder what happened to all the stored food, I bet. Most of it’s in here with us.”
Ethan asked, “When the Clan people come out, do they look like they’ve been beaten up or anything?” Frikkin totalitarian governments everywhere, even now at the end of the USA…
“No. He’ll probably get around to that, if we’re right about the kind of person he is, but Peter’s people haven’t tortured anyone but Jaz so far, that I can see.”
Yeah, Jaz. The first time Ethan had seen her on the cameras, he cringed. Not just because she looked so terrible, what with blood and scabs and bruises everywhere, but her body language. She had looked broken. Given what she’d been through before she came upon Frank’s group when Zero Day came, it would take a lot to break such a resilient woman. But now Jaz kept her eyes downcast, her shoulders slumped, and from what Ethan saw she didn’t bother moving at all unless someone prodded her or led her somewhere. And yet, when no one was looking, the camera caught her staring at the Stag people with a gaze that creeped Ethan out. It was cold, and deadly, and if there was any mercy in that stare, Ethan couldn’t see it. That look should never have been forced onto Jaz, of all people. Good thing she was being careful not to get noticed when she did that.
“Okay,” Ethan said. “Keep an eye out for Choony. If he lives, we’ll need his help. He’ll be a wild card—think a bit about how he can help. I’m going to go check my email and do a HAMnet broadcast. At least Peter’s attack didn’t take that away. As far as I can tell, the whole country’s future has a lot to do with what I’m rebroadcasting.”
Amber said nothing in reply. Ethan nodded, then turned and walked away. Yeah, she was in as much shock as he was and neither had spare emotional energy to give one another just yet. At least they still reached out for each other.
* * *
Steven Wallace sat in a cramped office at a desk that was too big for the space. There was little room to move around. But it didn’t matter. His family was well-fed now by the ’vaders. He looked out the tiny, dirt-covered window and thought about the others like him, the ones who’d traded their freedom for slavery, to get food for their families. By the seventh day since the lights went out, only ten of Steven’s original group of fellow slaves had survived. Steven shuddered as he remembered his old foreman blowing Mark’s brains out for being too exhausted to work. It was a lesson Steven never forgot. He’d begun to take food from the other weary slaves that very day, so he could eat more. Keep his strength up.
And thinking of those other ten slaves, his companions, a chill ran up his spine. He quickly stuffed the feelings it brought up deep down inside. They’d all died by now, of course, those other ten. Without enough food, it had taken only a few days to burn through them. But then more had come, prisoners of war or criminals or volunteers. As more people ran out of food, there was no shortage of people looking to trade work for food. And the foreman had eventually put him, Steven, in charge. Steven Wallace, the accomplice. Steven the traitor. He hated himself for it, at least as much as the other slaves hated him. But their hatred made it easy to do what the foreman asked. Whip this one, work that one to death.
Eventually he’d been ordered to beat someone to death with a rock, and he’d done as he was told. No way was he going to be the one taking blows from a rock, which was all that would have happened if he refused. The ’vaders rewarded him for that with a desk job.
Now Steven spent his days serving the needs of his old foreman’s boss. Filing paperwork or running errands. Passing messages that meant death for someone, but Steven was long past the point where he considered doing anything about it. His fate was sealed. He was a quisling in everything but name.
The only bright side was that he had been able to quietly let the foreman’s boss know about all the theft of “People’s goods”—with a capital “P”—which the foreman had been managing to do for weeks. Yesterday was a good day. Seeing the foreman’s boss—Lt. Chin or some such—get red-in-the-face pissed off, yeah, that was worth it. Screw the foreman. That one was for Mark. Because Steven had done nothing as the foreman murdered the young man, and that guilt had burned into his soul. Dropping the hammer on the foreman did a lot to heal that particular mental wound.
And then the door flew open. Steven looked up in surprise, only to see several soldiers with guns at the ready. One had kicked in the door, but they didn’t even wait for the door to stop moving before the next guy in line had darted in. The soldiers aimed their rifles at him. Steven tried to speak, but his throat closed up with fear and no sound came out.
“You betray foreman,” said a young soldier in broken English. “You say for good of People’s Army, but foreman your leader. Not the lieutenant. Foreman. Weak American mind, you don’t know honor. Foreman is good… Sergeant. Good leader. He want us to tell you, before you die, you family. They now work for him, for your foreman. They good workers, not to be poison by you false loy
alty. Goodbye, Steven.”
Well, he’d known this day had to come sooner or later. You couldn’t be an American and go up in rank without pissing off a Korean, and that rarely worked out. “It seems his boss doesn’t know what my foreman’s doing, yeah? Just get this shit over with, asshole. Someday your little cocksucker leader is going to take an American bullet right up his ass.”
Yeah, saying that felt good. Real good. Might as well go out on a high note. He didn’t have long to wait for their response.
- 12 -
1800 HOURS - ZERO DAY +29
CASSY SAT CHAINED all day to the post of the basketball hoop. Dinner had finished up, but from what she could see the Clanners hadn’t been given much more to eat than she had—bread and a little bowl of stew—while the White Stag goons ate everything in sight, laughing and joking. It had been a rough day to be stuck there, people-watching.
The single women of the Clan had been paired off to men in Peter’s group “for their own safety,” which didn’t bode well. The Clan’s single men, meanwhile, were being kept in the incomplete house for now. They’d been brought food, but hadn’t been allowed out, and Cassy was worried about their fate. Peter was the kind of guy who would have little patience for a group of hostile men with no kids to leverage. Meanwhile, the children were locked into the unused horse barn. It was visible but out of the way, and guarded at all times. Their parents would definitely give in to whatever Peter demanded of them. Right now that included serving all those new arrivals who came with Peter.
Cassy heard a noise behind her, footsteps, and she shimmied around to get a look. There stood Jaz, and Cassy nearly wept to see her again. Jaz had several bruises on her face, a torn lip, and a distinct limp. And yet, Jaz smiled when Cassy made eye contact. That poor, poor girl…
“I didn’t see you at dinner,” Cassy said simply.
“Your friend, Jim, was questioning me again,” Jaz replied, and Cassy cried inside to see the traumatized, far-away look in Jaz’s beautiful eyes.
“I stabbed him once. If only I’d finished the job. I just couldn’t murder him in cold blood. Not back then. Different time, different world. How are you holding up, Jaz?”
Jaz slid with a grunt to the ground next to Cassy, wincing from pain. “It ranks right up there with the day I decided to leave home. I’ll live, if they let any of us live. Don’t beat yourself up about Jim. All of us have changed a lot since the lights went out. All your friend keeps asking about is where our stockpile of food is. They figured out we don’t have enough out here to survive the winter, not with all these people. But don’t worry, I didn’t tell the bastard about your bunker—I figured Ethan was down there, like, doing something with his radios or whatever.”
Well that was a bit of good news. The damn bunker might hold the key to winning the war, if what Ethan had told her was right. “Listen, Jaz, you mustn’t tell them about it. You’re one of only a few people who actually know where it is. And speaking of Ethan’s obsession with those old HAM radios, he’s a spy or something, working with some secretive group that’s trying to beat back the invaders. What he’s doing, it’s probably more important than all of us put together. He doesn’t talk about it much, but please promise you’ll listen to me on this one.”
Jaz leaned her head back against the pole. “I promise. Shoot, I wouldn’t tell anyway. Screw them. I wouldn’t roll on Ethan, either. I doubt Jim will stop if he gets what he wants, anyway. I’m ‘too much fun,’ as he puts it. Also, Choony’s missing. Never found him or his body, Frank said. But I have some bad news for you.”
Just great. What could be worse than that? After a long moment of silence, Cassy said, “So what is it, this terrible news?”
“I’m getting to it. It’s not easy. They’re asking about your kids, Cassy.”
A jolt of fear and rage shot through Cassy. What would they want her kids for? Only one reason that she could think of, and that was to punish her. Steely-voiced, she said, “What are they asking?”
“Their scouts saw you and your kids together. They know you have two kids, but they don’t know which ones are yours. I guess that scout didn’t make it through the last battle, and I hope he burns in Hell. When they were asking about your kids, Brianna was about to step forward, but Gary’s wife stepped up to them and put her arms around them, told them to shut up. I forget her name.”
“Marla,” Cassy said.
“Yeah. Well, she claimed them as her own children,” Jaz said. “Frank told them your kids were in the house when the fighting started, and that they must have run off when it began. But Cassy, they’re going to grill everyone about their kids, and then grill the kids. It might take a few days, but they’re going to figure it out eventually.” Jaz paused, her beautiful face stiff from Jim’s brutal fun. “I’m sorry, Cassy.”
“So Choony was right,” Cassy muttered. To Jaz’s confused look she replied, “When we wanted to exile Gary for hurting his wife, that one night. Choony was against it. He said it was bad karma, and we should give the man the chance to atone. Boy did he. I was there when Gary died—the first shot of the battle took him out. It’s his blood all over me.”
Jaz let out a low whistle. “If you’d exiled him or worse, your kids would be in their hands now. Karma’s something else, isn’t it.”
Cassy nodded. “Karma, or God. Mom says God doesn’t control us because of free will, but that He puts bad actions to good purpose. If the incident with Gary hadn’t occurred and we didn’t face the problem head on, Marla might not have been so brave when my kids were at risk. It seems that since we had the chance to show Gary the mercy Choony wanted, she trusts us.”
Jaz was silent a moment, and then said, “I never much believed in God, but after listening to your mom all this time and seeing all these stupid little things that have such a totally big effect on everything… You know? I mean, it can’t be all chance. Like, too many bad odds turned into good endings for that.”
Cassy chuckled, but then the memory of Gary’s blank, dead stare flashed through her mind, and guilt washed over her. If only it had been her that died, instead of him. Why did she deserve to live and he didn’t? She forced the image from her mind. “Well, Jaz, if that’s how you feel then do me a favor. Say a few prayers for my kids, okay? And don’t forget a couple prayers for yourself, too. You’ve turned out to be a lot stronger and smarter than I ever gave you credit for, back when you stole my granola bars. Things were so very different then…”
A sudden, barking laughter made Cassy jump, startled. She turned and saw Jim there and visualized choking the shit out of him. She realized she was flexing her hands like claws and forced herself to stop. “What are you laughing at, you deviant shit? If my knife had been another inch over, your days of fun in the sun with your ‘little tiny buddy’ would be over for good.”
Jim smirked and replied, “All I heard was that she stole granola bars. The idea of someone getting over on you like that amuses me. Me and my ‘little buddy.’ And yeah, you did almost kill me. First you fuck me over and then you try to kill me when I figure out what you were up to? Man, I hope Peter treats you the same way you treated our scout. You know, the one you left out to rot. After what you all did to that poor guy, you call me a deviant?”
A little of the fire left Cassy’s belly. She looked away, no longer able to match Jim’s hate-filled gaze. “We were here first. Your people came to take it from us. Bad things happen in war, they say. But I know you don’t give half a damn about that scout or what happened to him. You’re using a terrible event to manipulate others. It’s what you do. It’s just your nature. I only have one good memory of you—it’s you lying on the road, begging for my help.” She tried to imitate his cruel, lazy smile and added dreamily, “Begging.”
Jim curled up one side of his mouth in a snarl. “You think you know everything. Well, you don’t. Everything I do is for a reason. Peter understands that. It’s why he instructed me to handle Jaz personally. To make an example of her, and to pay her ba
ck for—”
“For what?” snapped Cassy, interrupting him. “She never did anything to you. You kidnapped her and did what you wanted, not what you had to.”
“Of course you feel that way, bitch. Just like a woman to twist everything up. My wife used to do that, you know. You should shut the hell up now, Cassy. Be smarter than she was.”
Then Jim turned on his heels to leave, but stopped. He looked over his shoulder at Jaz. “Don’t think I’m done questioning you, miss thang. Tonight’s gonna be a long, hard night for you. Maybe I’ll even enjoy you for once.” He walked away without another look back.
Jaz began to cry softly and put her head in Cassy’s lap. The poor girl… Cassy wished for nothing more at that moment than a knife and ten seconds alone with Jim. God willing, she’d get a chance to correct the mistake she’d made on the road when she left Jim alive. Next time, she’d make sure he went down. Hard.
* * *
2300 HOURS - ZERO DAY +29
Choony stretched his legs and wished for the tenth time that night that his parents had sent him into the Boy Scouts when he was young. As it was, he’d made a wholly inadequate shelter that was based on something he half-remembered seeing on YouTube—a branch stretching unevenly between two trees, with numerous smaller branches set to lean against that cross-post. On top of this he’d added dirt, leaves, and even a few fresh branches that were still green enough to hopefully provide some camouflage. It looked terrible, and he was glad Michael wasn’t there to see the dismal structure.
Still, it would provide some warmth and shelter when he returned. If he returned, he amended. Tonight he intended to raid the Clan’s homestead for a few key supplies. Well, now it was in the White Stag’s hands, but that didn’t make it their homestead. Anger boiled up, and Choony spent a couple minutes looking into the night sky calming himself, praying for balance and wisdom. There was no use being angry at the world or the people in it. He could only control himself. Anger came when one resisted the world. Peace came with acceptance. But acceptance was harder when people did such evil things. He couldn’t merely think “Accept it” and make it so—these were people he’d grown to care about, deeply. Good people, doing the best they could. The homestead was practically a monument to Buddhist philosophy in the face of chaos and collapse, and the Clan didn’t even know it.