by Travis Hill
No matter how much we threatened him, even after Tony punched him in the nose hard enough to make it bleed for an hour, nothing would get him to admit he’d told anyone but Hardaway. That he’d told Hardaway while they were still at Crater Lake was a bad sign. A good commander makes sure that kind of information finds its way to the proper channels. We had to assume there was a list somewhere down at Crater Lake with all of our details on it.
The interesting parts were what Hardaway had told him. Which was almost nothing except that the Crater Lake base was still running on a skeleton crew while they sent recruiters out to the safest areas first to entice survivors to enjoy the comforts of the old modern life while defeating the great enemy. We mapped out the eight underground floors that he’d been on and could remember. He didn’t know all of the operational details of the base, but he had a good idea of sentries, schedules, and the technology they possessed.
He confirmed the complex had clean, heated, running water, a working sewer, electricity, and some computer equipment. He said that the Colonel had exaggerated on their ability to feed themselves with hydroponics, and that what he’d seen of the methane projectile bomb hadn’t been that promising. He did say the methane coated knives, syringes, and even projectiles were definitely real and definitely working as intended.
*****
We relayed all of this to Mom and the council at lunch the next day.
“He didn’t say anything about a contingency plan to wipe us out if we didn’t go along with his little speech?” Walter asked.
“No,” Tony answered, “but Hamida is a little fish, low rank stuff. Hardaway is a smart guy. He’s pumped David for all the information he can get out of him and would likely give very little in return to him.
“Couldn’t we just uh… interrogate the Colonel or his sidekick?” Heika asked, and all of us were surprised. She never advocated for violence openly, though she’d voted her share of banishments.
“We could,” I said, “but he’s not going to break. He’d just laugh at us until he was screaming in pain, then he’d probably just will himself to die.”
“Every man has his limit,” Thad said.
“Maybe,” Tony told him, “but a guy like Hardaway knows we are going to kill him anyway, so he’ll spout lies, nonsense, whatever he can make up until the pain is too much, and then we’ll get babblings and ramblings.”
“We should at least try!” Thad said angrily, and Walter put a hand on his shoulder.
“Okay then, Sport,” I said, getting angry myself, “is it going to be you that does the deed, hurts him until he starts talking?”
“You two seemed to do a pretty good job of it last night,” Thad fired back. He was almost shouting, and only Walter’s hand kept him glued to the chair.
But I was on my feet and leaning over him. “Yeah, we did. And we didn’t have to hit him but one time. Hamida’s a baby. He broke at the first sign of implied violence. So as glamorous as it might have seemed that we extracted the secrets from Agent 007 down in our basement, why don’t you take a minute to think about the shit you’ll have to do to even make Hardaway flinch in pain? Do you want to watch while I smash his balls with a brick? Do you want to stand there and hold his eyelids open while I insert a hot fucking needle into one of his eyes?” I yelled, fists clenched at my side.
“ENOUGH!” Mom said. It wasn’t a shout, but it was a command that made us all stop, sit down, and cool off a bit.
Thad looked a bit pale after I made him visualize crushed testicles. Whenever a description like that is heard, the first thing we men think of is how awful it would feel if it happened to us. The thought of a red hot needle piercing through the eye is absolutely terrifying. Thad apparently didn’t like the self-reflection of being blinded in that manner.
Heika reached out and grabbed my hand. She always sat next to me, and she always smelled like lavender. Her hands were soft, not at all like the rough, wrinkled alligator skin that I imagined they’d feel like. I thought I knew why Benny was into her. I almost tried to imagine what her hands would feel like running down my back. Instead, I wondered what Mom’s hands would feel like.
“I think we’ll at least attempt to talk to the Colonel and his Sergeant,” Mom said, interrupting my curiosity about her touch and my skin. “We have to be prepared to take care of both of them, though.” There was no question as to what she meant.
CHAPTER 13 - Into the Present
“You fucking people,” Colonel Hardaway snarled at us. “Peace-loving traitorous cowards. You’ve let the bulls win! This compound alone has the manpower and the firepower to take over anything you could want, and instead you sit here farming between lakes, trading with scavs across the range and up in Redding.”
“Are you done, Colonel?” Mom asked him. He spit in her direction, missing her face but getting some of it on her pants. “Very well. You must know that we are going to have to dispose of you and your young friend. How you exit this life will be determined by whether or not you help us.”
“You expect me tell you what?” he growled.
“Tell us about your base down at Crater Lake. Tell us about what kind of weapons you have been building. Defenses. Tell us how many soldiers are there.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Hardaway laughed. “You think you are going to march down there and assault our base? First of all, good luck with that. We’ve got about ten thousand troops, and enough firepower to level this little shitspot to the ground in seconds. Second of all, you are really, really sick. Traitorous fucking sickos that you’d even think about helping your bull friends by trying to destroy us.”
I didn’t even think about it, I just slugged him in the gut as hard as I could. Since he was handcuffed to a metal chair, he could do nothing except exhale loudly, painfully, cough and gag a bit, then give me a look that promised a slow, painful death if he ever got out of the handcuffs. Mom clucked at me, though I could see approval in her eyes. She was an even harder woman on the inside than I’d realized.
“It’s funny that you should mention your troop and weapon strength, Colonel. Two of your men have told us that you have less than five hundred in the complex at any given time, and right now less than half of that as you’ve sent out recruiters.”
Mom got a dose of hateful stare from him.
“They’ve also told us that while you posses a good amount of weaponry, almost all of it revolves around ways to kill bulls, not humans. I’m sure you know that stabbing or injecting a human with methane will probably be quite painful, and might even be fatal in some circumstances, but for the most part, knives and darts aren’t really much of a match against four thousand humans armed with assault rifles, shotguns, and hunting rifles. Especially since to live here, you have to be trained to use them. From what we understand about your little base, you park your recruits in front of a computer monitor and show them videos of how to stab bulls in the legs between the gaps in their armor.”
“Fucking Hamida,” the Colonel cursed. “I knew he was weak.”
“Actually,” Tony said to him, “your pal Waters told us all of that. You trained him well, but the red-hot needle piercing his left eye pretty much breaks anyone.”
Hardaway spat at Tony, catching him in the face with a good one. Tony simply wiped it away with a sleeve. We stood around looking at him handcuffed to the chair. It dawned on him that we were serious in our questions.
“You bastards,” he breathed. “Traitorous bastards. You’ll doom the whole human race.”
“I don’t think so, Colonel Hardaway,” Mom said, caressing his stubbled cheek. “The bulls don’t bother us. We don’t bother them. We don’t let crazies set roots down anywhere near us just to ensure that the bulls don’t come looking for gun-toting crazies and mistake us for them. Your kind of human… almost went extinct on the day of the invasion. Like roaches though, you men hang on, hoping for power, glory, to rid the world of the evil invaders, who, as far as all of us have been able to tell, have actu
ally helped humanity more than they’ve harmed it.
“Sure, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions have died over the last twenty-odd years, but we are partial to the belief that there were far too many of us anyway. And you… your kind wasn’t doing enough to kill them off fast enough because no one would let you use nukes and ruin the planet for the rest of us. And these evil aliens, they didn’t use nukes either. They even did something to all of the nuclear power plants across the globe instead of letting them all go into meltdown when no humans were around to run them safely. They’ve cleaned the methane out of our air, and by destroying our industrial capacity, they’ve eliminated air, water, and soil pollution.
“They’ve done their best to help rid humanity of the last of your kind, the kind that runs around with their gun in one hand, their prick in the other, looking for someone else to order around, to send to their death while you reap the benefits, the glory. Hell, they are even eating up our cities with their machines. Wiping out every trace of us having an advanced civilization. Except we know what we had. We saved books that tell us what we are missing. We saved people who lived before and tell us what we are missing. What have you done to help your fellow human lately, Colonel Hardaway?”
She walked over to the shelf and pulled something down from a hook. Hardaway was about to answer, probably a vulgar-laden, scathing response to her ‘hippie bullshit’, but the words died in his throat. Mom was holding two pieces of wood that resembled two thick but short broom handles. Tied to the top of each was what looked like string. As she approached the Colonel, he saw, the same as the rest of us, that it was actually some kind of metal wire. It looked like bailing wire to me, but I couldn’t be sure.
“What’s the matter, Colonel? I thought you had a reply for me. Maybe some more accusations of being a traitor?” Mom said as she caressed the wooden handles, slowly walking around the Colonel’s chair, reaching out with one hand to lightly touch his neck.
“You don’t have the guts,” he growled as he tightened all of his muscles at once. He must have thought he could break out of his cuffs and somehow overpower us. He thought wrong. No one took a breath for almost a minute as Mom wrapped the wire around his neck and pulled on the handles hard enough to eventually cut into the skin of his throat.
*****
Sergeant Waters we simply poisoned with cyanide. He took it like a man, and died within twelve seconds. He asked what had happened to his commanding officer. Deena described it to him without emotion. Waters got a frightened look in his eyes. I told him he didn’t have to go out that way. He could go out with a bullet, or with some cyanide, or however he wanted. He chose the quick, painless way. I was left feeling a bit mixed about Waters. He didn’t beg, cry, threaten, or insult. He was a true soldier, the kind that knew defeat and accepted it without any drama.
David Hamida paid the ultimate price for betraying the confidence of The Farm. I held Ellie in my arms, Branda hanging back, hurt because I’d told her it was over between us, as we watched Tony announce David’s sentence in front of the thousand or so that had gathered. David shivered, naked, hands tied in front of him, while Tony read off the judgment. Most of the thousand of us that had come out to witness it followed the guards as they escorted David a mile down the road.
We’d already sent word up and down the network for twenty miles or more around The Farm that a banishment would be performed. Everyone knew that a naked man or woman was to not be harmed, but especially not be helped. Anyone caught helping a banished was treated like a murderer and put in The Cage.
David fell to his knees after being pushed away by Kenny and Arn. He wailed, cried, and cursed all of us. I guess to him it seemed as if we were having a party, celebrating his inevitable death. A strong scout might have made it somewhere safe, killed or robbed for some clothes and food, maybe even a weapon, and made it safely out of the central wastes where The Farm had no influence. David Hamida was not a strong scout anymore. The crowd milled about until David finally wandered off down the road. I hugged Ellie tight as we turned and headed the mile back to the main gate. It was getting colder outside, the sun going down sooner as the season crept its way into winter.
I stopped in to the gardener’s dorm after dropping Ellie off at my unit. She wanted to come with me, but I made her promise to go to her mother. When I entered the dorm, more than a few heads turned my way. Everyone knew I was a councilor now, and some rumors even suggested I was shagging Mom on the side. I wouldn’t deny that one bit unless Branda was around, and maybe even not then. I found the one I was looking for sitting on his bunk, reading a book. I sat on the bunk opposite him and leaned my head down a little to see the title of the book in his hands. It was “Great Expectations”. Good man.
“How’s life today, Charlie?” I asked the former Corporal Hackett.
“My knees are killing me, and I ripped a fingernail off,” he said, putting the book down.
“Sounds like a normal day in the gardens,” I laughed.
“It’s better than being strangled to death,” he said, causing me to look at him sharply. He shrugged and said, “Well, it is.”
“What’s wrong, Charlie?” I asked him.
“My name is Charles,” he replied. “And I just told you. My knees hurt and my fingernail is torn off.”
I smiled at him and stood up. “Just another day in the gardens, Charles,” I said, giving his shoulder a squeeze and finding my way through the dorm maze and back outside. He’d be okay in another month or so.
*****
“Are you sure this is still the best plan?” Mom asks me as I strap on the survival pack.
“It’s really the only plan. They’ll send someone looking for Hardaway and his crew soon enough when he doesn’t come back. Better that we show up pretending to be a big group of recruits and gut the place from the inside than test whether or not everything we were told was true about their defenses,” I reassure her.
“How come you have to go?” she asks, adjusting the straps on my pack.
“Because it’s my plan? I don’t know. I just do.”
“You still think you’ll find her, don’t you?” she asks in a low voice.
“Look, Mom—”
“My God, Evan, please stop calling me that if you’re going to share my bed. It’s just creepy.”
“Look, Jenna,” I say, emphasizing that I know her birth name just fine.
I decide to not attempt again to explain to her that calling her ‘Mom’ is just a habit that probably won’t go away. Besides, she’s almost twenty years older than me.
“I have to know. Or at least find out. I don’t even remember what she looks like anymore, and I can’t imagine what she would look like twenty-three years later if she was alive. The last pictures of her were in my email.”
“I’m sorry, Evan,” she says, putting a hand up to cup my cheek. “I know it’s important to you, but you are important to me. I don’t want to see you hurt. To be honest, I don’t want to be hurt again.”
I knew what she meant. She’d stopped taking long-term lovers over ten years ago when Tremaine had been killed. As far as she was concerned, I was heading into the same territory as Tremaine, with my rushing off to destroy the evil-doers. She’d kept a steady string of lovers all that time, but that was her right. No one questioned her sexual appetite any more than they questioned anyone else’s, even though the rumors might suggest otherwise. She wanted me to be safe, at her side, in her arms. I wanted the same thing, but I had one last search to make, along with an even more important task to perform.
“It’s okay,” I say, leaning in and giving her lips a quick brush with mine. “I’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.” I give her a smile, and she returns it, but a tear falls down one cheek. “I have to go, the troops are waiting for me,” I say, brushing away the tear.
She hugs me tightly, almost making us fall down because of the weird balance of my pack and her hanging from me at the same time. “Be careful, and come home safely. Bri
ng everyone home safely.”
I walk out of the main house and see the volunteers who are going with me. Over seven hundred of our four thousand members are going. Even against five hundred we’d be an unstoppable force, but against half that number, and with them thinking we are all recruits that Colonel Hardaway has given the rallying speech to, it seems almost too easy. Ellie runs up and gives my legs and midsection a hug. Branda hangs back, giving me a small wave. She knows about Mom. Jenna, I mean. It isn’t pleasant to see how hurt she is about it. I can’t think about that now, though. We have a long march through the cold and the snow ahead of us.
“Ready?” I ask my crew with a shout.
I’m answered with a few hundred clicks of heels being brought together and another couple of hundred slaps of hands on rifles. I smile.
“Forward march!”
It’s Harder This Way - available Q3 2014
It’s Better This Way
By Travis Hill
Copyright 2013
Cover art by: Cheryl @ CCR Book Cover Design
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Dedication:
This story is dedicated to Jackie, Junior, Missy, The Dude, and Daisy. Yes, I have five cats. Yes, I’m an old cat woman. Except I’m not a woman. But I’m an old cat woman.
ISBN-13: 978-1491219812
ISBN-10: 1491219815
Character Page
MAIN CHARACTERS
Evan Greggs - main char (38)