by John L. Monk
The girl survived by sheer luck, moving half a second before the blast. Not a complete waste—the bullet hit the boy behind her. The other kids ducked out of sight, howling in terror. Cassie dove for cover, and Lisa quickly found herself out of targets. She considered shooting out the tires but then thought better of it. If they got in their cars and left, maybe the lesson would sink in. Then she wouldn’t have to kill anyone.
“Or,” she mused, “I can have three more fuel cars and whatever’s inside them.”
One of the kids was shooting at the house for some reason. Lisa hadn’t fired any more rounds and strained to hear what they were saying over the ringing in her ears. She was pretty sure Cassie had said, Behind the car!
Lisa reassessed her position. If the kids rushed her at once, she’d likely get a few. But if they got behind her, she’d be dead. Rather than let that happen, she scooted quietly out from underneath and raised to a crouch.
Cassie’s voice cut through the ringing: “Is that you, you ugly slut? Thought me and you were done? Well, we’re not. First, I’m gonna let my friends take turns on you. After that, I’ll cut up your ugly face!” She barked out a series of loud, fake laughs. “You hear me, bitch?”
In case she hadn’t heard her, Cassie aimed and blew out Lisa’s back window.
Lisa risked a quick glance to see if they were rushing her. They should have but they weren’t. She did catch sight of a boy aiming a pistol her way. After a three count, she leaped up, fired, and was rewarded with shattered glass and shouts of fear. She’d missed again. She’d brought enough ammo to practice with over the coming months, but it was too late to get better now.
Cassie yelled at them to get in the cars and go, go, go. Lisa risked a glance and saw dome lights turning on and off as kids filed in. The cars rolled back toward the gate while stragglers banged frantically on the windows for them to stop.
Lisa considered shooting at them, but couldn’t be sure she’d hit anyone. She held off from a desire not to telegraph how horrible her aim was. Seconds later, the cars had backed onto the road, where they waited for their friends. When everyone was in, they sped away.
She made a quick sweep of the yard, looking for anyone who’d snuck off to catch her unawares. It would have been a good move, but they hadn’t taken it. Lucky for her, she figured. Five minutes later, she examined the corpse of the teenage boy now littering her driveway.
“What to do with you?” she said glumly.
The kid was a little on the tubby side, though not as big as Tony. Sort of remarkable, probably had a hoard of junk food. She’d caught him under the shoulder. He’d bled some, but not much, suggesting his heart had stopped fairly quickly. She’d seen the same thing with deer and cattle.
It was still cold out—at or a little above freezing—and sure to get colder that night. The invasion or whatever it was those kids intended had pushed back her schedule. She’d been about to check on the chickens, try out the space heaters, and then lock up for the night. Now she worried the gunfire had scared them all off. If they froze to death or got eaten, Jack would flip. He had chickens on the brain.
When Lisa entered the coop, to her surprise they were all sitting neatly in rows on their perches, where they growled at her in that weird, cautioning way they had.
“Sneaky little guys,” Lisa said, smiling fondly. She sort of liked them. Fried, usually.
She still hadn’t gotten the promised grain from Jack, so she used some of the farmers’ irreplaceable chicken feed to fill up the pan. After that, she started the generator and ran the extension cord to the space heaters inside. With all the excitement and the long, tiring day, she felt it prudent to test the built-in unit tomorrow—after she’d scrubbed that horrible room upstairs … and after she’d dealt with the body in the driveway.
Lisa had often heard the phrase, “Always something to be done on a farm.” Not having grown up on a farm, she’d never given it much thought. But she was thinking about it now. For the next few months, all she had ahead of her was work. She wondered if she was up to it and found herself smiling at the prospect of finding out.
She closed the coop and considered the open gate. Hopefully, Cassie and her friends wouldn’t return. As a precaution, Lisa drove down and blocked it. So far, she hadn’t been able to hotwire any cars newer than about the 90s, and her cute little car was pretty new. Anyone attacking would have to do so on foot. They’d focus on the house, and not the fuel car she was sleeping in.
And then she’d kill every one of them.
8
If Cassie and her friends wanted to try again, Lisa never found out. Mother Nature clobbered that part of Virginia in a terrific blizzard with no end in sight. Now she’d have to wait on her winter stores and grain.
She’d hoped to eat well during her stay, cooking dinners according to her taste and not in big pots for finicky children who preferred bland food. If the weather stayed cold, she could probably survive on eggs alone. Maybe. Jack said they didn’t lay all the time, and there was evidence they had been eating their own eggs.
I could always eat the chickens …
She pushed the thought away. If she ate even one of them—even to save her life—Jack would kill her.
Days passed and the snow kept coming, and soon it was five feet high. Easily the highest she’d ever seen. When it finally stopped, the temperature stayed well below freezing. Lisa berated herself once again for not thinking. Weather reports were a thing of the past.
The chickens didn’t care in the slightest about the snow. They loved the good treatment they were finally getting. When she fed them every morning, they hopped down the little plank onto the floor in anticipation. When she tried to touch them, the ungrateful critters would flap and jump away, clucking angrily as if insulted.
A week later, the weather peaked briefly above freezing, and Lisa got lucky and brought down a deer that had wandered into the furrow she’d dug between the barn, the house, and the chicken coop. The deer had literally gotten stuck there, bucking and panicking to get away as she stalked it. She felt bad killing animals, but feeling bad had never stopped her from doing what she needed to, and it wouldn’t now.
She still hadn’t built a smoker. The house had an old-fashioned wood stove, and she used that to dry out the meat and organs. With no salt handy and the weather unpredictable, she planned to eat her fill daily and save what beef she had for later. To keep the meat safe, she stored it in a trash bag and hung it in the barn from a length of rope. If any rats crawled down, she hoped the plastic would be slick enough that they’d fall off.
By now, she was almost out of chickenfeed. She hoped the weather would stay warm so Jack could get through, but it didn’t. The next storm hit almost as hard as the first, and for the first time since leaving Big Timber, she felt afraid.
Down to her last sack of chickenfeed, and unwilling to share from her own uncertain larder, Lisa knew she had to do something quickly if she wanted to keep the flock alive.
Growing up, Lisa hadn’t been the kind of girl to squeal at the sight of spiders and snakes or wrinkle her nose at the food on her plate. That was Greg’s way. At the sight of blood, his eyes would grow round and he’d start to sweat—because he was gentle and sweet and good. He could be loving where she couldn’t, and weak where she dared not. Muscles helped. A penis helped even more. Mrs. Ferris—Jack’s mom—had instilled in her a strong awareness of her own vulnerability in a world dominated by men.
“I’m not a feminist,” Mrs. Ferris had said. “Not in the academic sense. I don’t hate men for being strong and aggressive. I don’t hate women for having smaller muscles. But I can’t stand it when they’re meek and simpering, or willfully ignorant in a world with so much knowledge.”
They’d talked a lot like that over the years, and her counsel had changed Lisa on the inside as well as the outside. Right up until the Sickness, the two had worked out at the gym together several times a week. Frequently, Mrs. Ferris said Lisa was the daughter she’d ne
ver had.
Unfortunately, the mother Lisa did have was often fit to be tied by the sudden changes in her daughter’s personality.
Once, on Christmas, following a growth spurt, her mom had given her a new dress. After opening the package, Lisa said quite matter-of-factly that dresses were impractical for anything more than looking pretty. Her mom hadn’t liked that one bit. Pleading with her at first to wear it, then threatening her with lost privileges—including her weekly workouts with Mrs. Ferris—Lisa had worn it a few times and then stopped.
To be a girl, she’d learned, one had to be flexible on the inside. In her head. Not squeamish, like Greg, or lovestruck like Jack.
The chickens had survived this far, she decided, because those four human bodies had become a twenty-four-hour bug buffet. The bugs ate the bodies, the chickens ate the bugs, and one day people would eat the hens’ eggs. Circle of life stuff, like the Lion King. And so, by feeding Cassie’s dead friend directly to the chickens, she’d have cut out the middleman, creating an even tighter circle.
Lisa dragged the body from the woodshed, where she’d wrapped it in a dirty tarp so she wouldn’t have to look at it when getting wood. Cold as the days and nights had been, the body wasn’t a solid block of ice, as she’d feared.
Just be flexible, she told herself.
The barn had a pulley system for hauling bales of hay to the loft. Lisa looped one end around the kid’s feet and hoisted him up. Hard work, it turned out, even with the added leverage, and she could only do it by bracing her feet against the wall. When the body was high enough, she tied it off on a beam.
Even half-frozen, blood leaked from the bullet hole onto the concrete floor, and soon reached the size of a dinner plate. To keep the floor clean, she placed a bucket beneath it.
The barn and coop were on the same circuit coming from the house. To further soften the body, she fired up the generator, moved her space heaters to the barn, and then turned them on. In a few hours, she hoped, the body would get to where she could move the arms and legs around more easily.
By then, she might actually gather the nerve to do this.
Lisa had her very own butchering knives, saved and brought to the cabins with her when they’d fled Centreville months ago. She’d kept them sharp using the skills Jack taught her for his sharpening business.
Those had been good days. They’d sit in her parents’ garage grinding away all day and listening to music. The money had been pretty good, too, if not entirely needed. At least not for her. Greg was the one who always needed money. He’d borrow hers when she got paid and promise to pay her back. He never did, and she never reminded him. He was happy, and that’s what mattered.
“Quit stalling,” she said quietly. “Get it done and it’ll be done.”
Lisa stripped the much softer body and analyzed it. She’d seen naked bodies before on the Internet, even before Greg. Nothing new there. So long as she never looked at the face, it almost didn’t seem human. To maintain the illusion, she unscrewed all but one lightbulb in the farthest stall.
And pulled out her skinning knife.
And set to work.
She was in a hurry, so it didn’t take long. A half hour later and it was done.
Not so bad, really. Because she was definitely not squeamish. Not one little bit. Not like Greg and Jack. If they saw her, what she’d done, they’d think she was crazy. Maybe put her out of her misery like a rabid dog.
She stared at her handiwork, trying to get her head around it. The kid had been a little on the heavy side, but now he seemed much smaller. Terribly so. She’d brought two trash bags with her but he barely filled one of them halfway.
A shudder arced up her frame, dropping her to her knees, and a sob dropped out of her like a bomb. She struggled to her feet and crashed against the door to one of the empty stalls, then fell flat on her face. She didn’t get up. She curled over on her side and cried. Cried like a baby. Like a girl. Like those little kids all jammed together in their piss beds waiting for their parents to come home—like it was all a big vacation and not a catastrophe that took everything away and left nothing behind but death, blood, and shit. And those goddamned roaches.
She cried for a long time. When she finished, she got up and stared bleakly at the thing hanging in the middle of the barn. Didn’t look human at all now. More like something from a monster movie. Muscles missing. Ribs too. Skin heaped on the floor like dirty laundry …
Lisa turned off the heaters and killed the generator. She started a fire and boiled the meat in a large stock pot from the kitchen, then cut it up into small cubes. Now that she was cooking it and not cutting it, her horror diminished somewhat, but not completely. In a perverse twist she never saw coming, the smell wafting off the pot had her mouth watering. It smelled like pork! Not a human with parents who’d once loved him. She felt both repulsed and drawn to it, and her brain couldn’t figure out which was which.
No … she wasn’t about to eat any. She hadn’t fallen so far as that. But she didn’t think she could ever eat pork again. Not for the rest of her life.
When the meat had gone from red to whitish pink, she quickly cooled it in the snow, dumped out the water, and then scooped it all back into the pot. Then it went into the wood stove for drying, and from there, a trash bag for cold storage in the woodshed.
Lisa kept back a few pieces, which she brought to the coop and dropped into the feeder pan. The chickens loved it. They pecked and fought over the tiny cubes like they’d never had anything so tasty before in their dumb, chicken lives. Lisa scattered some of their feed in with it, but they didn’t bother with that until last.
Carnivorous chickens, she thought numbly. Who’da thought?
When the pan had been picked clean, Lisa shut the door and stumbled numbly back to the house.
9
The day before Jack’s delivery of grain and food, the region was hit with one of the heaviest snowstorms he’d ever seen. The one four years before had been pretty bad—over his head—but he’d been ten inches shorter then.
Heavy snow and gusting winds made travel to and from the chicken farms impossible. Naturally, the only one he hadn’t finished delivering to was Lisa’s. The others weren’t as capable as she was, so he’d figured she could wait. Now he berated himself for putting one of his best friends in danger.
He hoped she wouldn’t be forced to share what little food she had with the chickens. She could eat their eggs … but the birds would still need food for that to happen. Couldn’t make something out of nothing, after all. If they didn’t lay, then she’d have to eat them. At her size, she could eat a bird a week and still hold out.
Or maybe she’ll bag a deer.
Jack sighed. The only way Lisa Mitchel could do that is if she stood five feet away. And only if the deer grabbed the gun and shot itself.
A scavenging group had still been out when the storm hit. While driving one of their cool-but-impractical sports cars, they’d slipped off the road and gotten stuck. By the time they got free, the snow had piled up four inches, forcing them to trudge the last few miles on foot.
Jack alternated between highs of extreme confidence in some of the chicken sitters—Lisa, in particular, despite his worry for her—to dark, poisonous hopelessness when it came to the others.
Deep down, he knew he worried too much, and probably for no good reason. But his parents’ prejudice against public schoolers had infected him from an early age, and he still hadn’t completely shaken it. The Dragsters weren’t making it any easier. The boys roughhoused constantly and talked about stuff that didn’t much matter—sex, who was or wasn’t a dork, and how bored they all were. They also picked on each other and fought over girls.
The girls weren’t much better. They fought constantly with each other, cried a lot, and were difficult to lead without Larry’s ever-present threat of violence.
“I got no problem hitting girls,” Larry declared whenever the screaming got too loud or they started throwing things.
Jack did have a problem hitting girls, and hoped his second-in-command wasn’t serious. The girls, at least, seemed to think he was, and they’d quickly unite against him in spirit, their own differences suddenly forgotten.
Two days later and the snow finally stopped falling, revealing a world sealed in over five feet of snow. Jack and Larry made sure every able-bodied boy older than ten took turns with the snow shovels. With surprising speed, they cleared out the parking lot and much of the area in front of the cabins, but they simply couldn’t tackle the mile-long drive in. Which was fine. They couldn’t shovel the whole world.
Greg, limping on a crutch, goaded the children into coming outside for snowball fights. The teenagers were quick to join them. The snow was too cold for proper snowballs, so they sprinkled them with water and stacked them up like ammunition—and then proceeded to pelt each other as hard as they could.
Jack found it interesting that they wanted him to join in.
So as not to seem like a stick in the mud, he allowed a half hour for that, blasting Greg at every opportunity, before claiming he had too much work to do and going back inside.
Again, he was surprised—this time by the sounds of disappointment everyone made at his leaving. He wondered how they couldn’t see what a wreck he was. If he was outside throwing snowballs, he wasn’t worrying. And if he wasn’t worrying, how the hell was he supposed to figure out which detail he’d neglected that would ultimately get them all killed? Like this damned storm popping up.
After hanging his wet socks over the fire, Jack climbed to the loft where all the books were kept—and which nobody wanted to read except him and some of the other officers. Casually, he flipped through the mix: lots of stuff on farming, of course, as well as chemistry, math, and engineering … and physics, blacksmithing, and steam power … and horse riding, leatherworking, and beekeeping. Stuff he hoped would give them a life worth living, one day.