The Release

by Tom Isbell

  All eight of them hear it at the same time. They spur their horses forward. The sound grows louder, more insistent. When they reach the edge of a small town, they spy several dozen crows, their ebony wings flapping furiously as they leap, hover, dive. Then the wind shifts and the eight riders smell decay. Rot. Death.

  Hope whips a bandanna over her face and fights the urge to gag. She breathes through her mouth.

  The town isn’t much more than a main street with ten or so buildings lining either side. A long-dead stoplight dangles from a cable above an intersection. A window shutter slaps against an outer wall.

  The horses nicker, tug at the bridles, toss their heads. As they draw closer, Hope sees why: the crows are feeding on a hundred lifeless human bodies.

  The horses come to a stop.

  “What is it?” Twitch asks.

  Flush describes it as best he can, how the corpses litter the streets and sidewalks like neglected dolls, purplish blood pooling the snow beneath them.

  “Who were they, do you think?” Hope asks.

  “Crazies, by the looks of it,” Goodman Dougherty answers, gesturing to the beards, the rags for clothes, the general disarray of the town itself.

  “So who did this?”

  “Take your pick. Brown Shirts, Hunters—whoever wants ’em dead.”

  “Not the Skull People?”

  He gives a rueful laugh. “We’re just trying to put food in our mouths. We don’t have time to attack any others.”

  They stay there a moment longer, their eyes sweeping across the mass carnage. Bodies, blood, crows.

  “Come on,” Cat snarls. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He gives his horse a nudge and the eight ride on, relieved to skirt the town and leave the site of festering death behind them.

  Soon it’s just the wind and the horses’ hooves and eight people breathing through their mouths. No one says a word.

  30.

  THE NEXT DAY, WE came across two more towns where the citizens lay dead and rotting in the streets. Like before, the only activity was that of crows. Lots and lots of crows.

  Something about Goodman Dougherty’s words rattled around in my head. I supposed he was right—it was probably the work of Brown Shirts or Hunters—but it didn’t make sense. The Crazies were just that—crazy—but they didn’t bother the government any, and hadn’t the Crazies and Hunters worked together when they stormed the Compound? So why would the Brown Shirts or Hunters turn on them?

  After two more days of traveling, we came to a resettlement camp created by the Western Federation. Camp Patriot, a rusty sign proclaimed. It dangled from a single hinge and swayed, creaking in the wind. At first glance, Camp Patriot looked an awful lot like Liberty and Freedom: tar-paper barracks, guard towers, mess hall, coils of jagged concertina wire atop the surrounding fences.

  But as similar as this camp was to where we’d grown up, there was one significant difference: all the inhabitants lay dead. Boys were sprawled everywhere—on the parade ground, on the steps leading into buildings, even suspended from the barbed-wire fence, as though their last act had been to try and climb it. There wasn’t a living soul to be seen.

  A couple of us threw up, and the rest couldn’t turn away fast enough. There was no question that this was part of Chancellor Maddox’s Final Solution. As she herself had said, the sooner we were gone, the better.

  We spoke hardly at all the rest of that day. Even when we stopped for the night and set up a meager camp in a stand of pine trees, huddling around a single fire, we did so with the fewest possible words. Just looking into one another’s eyes was enough to remind us of what we’d seen … and what we wanted to forget.

  “You sure you know where this Conclave’s at?” Cat asked Goodman Dougherty.

  “At the capital, New Washington,” he said, biting into some wolf jerky. We were poring over the map—a nightly ritual.

  “Yeah, but where’s that?”

  “It moves around a good deal.”

  “What do you mean?” Flush asked.

  “It doesn’t stay in any one place for long.” We all stopped eating, and Dougherty realized we were waiting for him to explain.

  “After Omega, the president thought it best if we didn’t have a permanent capital. That was part of the problem that day—all the leaders were in Washington when the bombs hit.”

  “So the capital moves?”

  “Every couple of weeks.” He picked a charred crumb from his beard and tossed it into his mouth. “That way no foreign country can ever drop a bomb on it and wipe everyone out.”

  “Are there foreign countries?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine on that one, chief. But if there are and they’re trying to bring down our government, they won’t know where to look.”

  It made sense. It sounded like a lot of work, but it made sense.

  “So how are we gonna find it if it keeps moving?” I asked.

  “The Conclave’s different. Since it’s the inauguration and the twenty-one-year anniversary, they want as many people there as possible, and they’ve been putting the word out so people know where to go.”

  When the conversation faded away, I folded up the map and said good night to my friends. In no time I was asleep beneath a wash of stars, dreaming of a future where I could live in one place—where I, too, wasn’t constantly on the move and trying to evade my enemies.

  The next day I slowed my horse so I could ride by Hope’s side.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  So much had happened since she’d taken me to her home, and we hadn’t really talked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, pulling the hoodie tight around her face. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason.”

  We rode in silence, our horses’ hooves clip-clopping atop the frozen ground.

  “I’m sorry about your grandmother,” she said out of the blue.

  Her words surprised me. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s still hard to believe, you know? I just met her, and then she was gone. Of course, who knows? Maybe she’s still around.”

  Hope gave me a questioning look, and I explained. “I have this weird memory—or maybe it was a dream—of my grandmother once telling me that the dead don’t go away. She said each of the stars represents someone who’s died, and they’re up there, looking down on us.”

  Hope didn’t respond, and I almost wondered if she’d been listening.

  Then she asked, “You found her, didn’t you?”

  “My grandmother? No, like I told them—”

  “Not your grandmother. Miranda.”

  I felt my face go hot. “Yes,” I murmured.

  “Dead?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  “Thanks,” I said back.

  The horses carried us forward, and we let the subject drop away.

  “Where will you go?” I asked. “When this is all over?”

  She shrugged. “Get far away from this territory, that’s for sure.”

  “Amen to that. And then?”

  “Find someplace where I can live and no one can bother me.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Fishing, hunting, growing a garden.” She hesitated. “Maybe learn to knit. I always wanted to do that.”

  I let out a snort. “You? Knit?”

  She slapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t laugh. I could knit.”

  “I’m not saying you couldn’t, it’s just, I never thought of you as the knitting kind.”

  “I could.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  “I just need someone to teach me.”

  “Right.” I laughed, and she slapped me again. “What?” I said in mock protest. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  We rode in companionable silence. It was the first time in forever that she didn’t seem angry with me. For the moment, the image of those massacres was far away.

  “Where will yo
u go?” Hope asked. “When this is over.”

  “Someplace where I don’t have to knit.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Same as you. Find a place where I can live and not be bothered by Brown Shirts—”

  “Or Hunters—”

  “Or Crazies—”

  And in unison we said, “Or wolves.”

  We shared a glance, then just as quickly looked away.

  “Live today,” she said under her breath.

  “Tears tomorrow,” I added softly.

  For a moment, our horses were in perfect synchronicity, walking at exactly the same pace, blowing air at the same time. And then Hope spurred hers forward and rode on ahead.

  As I watched her ride off, I wondered if she and I would ever say to each other what we really wanted to say. I wondered if either of us had that much courage.

  Our horses picked their way east, and although I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised when we emerged from the woods the next day into a bare swath of landscape. In the middle of it stood a rusted chain-link fence with coils of razor wire, stretching miles in both directions.

  On the other side was the next territory. The Heartland.

  “Look familiar?” Goodman Dougherty asked.

  “Not this particular section, but yeah,” I said. We had been here once before, of course. That seemed like forever ago.

  We angled south, not stopping until we reached the town we had seen last summer. Just like before, there were the shops, the houses, the gazebo. The memories of music and food smells came flooding back.

  But something was different. There were no people. No hint of human activity at all.

  I urged my horse forward, but it nickered and stamped the ground. It didn’t want to move. I released the reins and slowly dismounted, walking forward as though in a trance. My fingers curled around the fence and I squinted through the late-afternoon gloom.

  That’s when I saw it … and smelled.

  There were corpses everywhere, and the crows were busy pecking, gouging into eyes and ears, stuffing their beaks with food. Maybe it was because we had been here before, had watched the children playing and heard their squeals of delight, but I couldn’t bear what I was seeing. I turned away and buried my face in my hands.

  “What is it?” Twitch asked.

  “Just like the others, cowboy,” Goodman Dougherty said soberly. “Another massacre.”

  We stood there, the only sound the distant flap of wings as crows bounced from one corpse to another. Argos gave a low whimper.

  When I allowed myself to look again, I let my eyes travel across the bodies. They were just families—mothers, fathers, children—with no weapons in sight. This was a massacre. Flat-out murder.

  I heard a sound and turned. It was Diana—tough Diana—trying to stifle a sob. She was staring at a body sprawled across the gazebo floor. The corpse was a girl from Camp Freedom, one we’d traveled with last summer. When we had made it to this fence, eleven Sisters stayed on the other side, starting their new lives in the Heartland. This girl had been one of them … and this was her fate.

  As I scanned the ground, I saw more of those Sisters, all dead, all lying piteously on the ground, their swollen bodies pockmarked by crows.

  “Come on,” a voice said. It was Cat. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I gave a glance to Hope. Her jaw was working back and forth and her eyes were on fire.

  I strode back to my horse and we all rode on.

  No one was in the mood to talk. For the better part of a year, I’d been dreaming about that town: children playing games, families having picnics, music floating to the skies. There wasn’t a one of us who forgot that first encounter; it was our first vision of what the world could be like. Should be like. All our choices and actions had been based on getting back.

  And now here we were … and things were no better on that side of the fence than they were on ours.

  We found an opening and crossed into the next territory, finally leaving the Western Federation after a lifetime there. Still, no one said a single word of congratulations. We weren’t in the mood.

  That evening we huddled around a fire, silent. To get our minds off what we’d seen, I pulled out the map of the world and asked Goodman Dougherty to tell us about the other countries.

  “You mean what they’re like now?” he asked.

  “No, before Omega.”

  Dougherty did his best, but he found it difficult to concentrate. We all did.

  He was about to fold up the map when I suddenly stopped him, my finger pointing at the top of the page.

  “Wait,” I blurted out. “Who has a copy of the code?”

  They all looked at me funny.

  “You know,” I went on. “The numbers. Who has a copy?”

  “I know them by heart,” Twitch said. “Four, five, three, nine—”

  “Yeah, but can I see it?”

  “Sure,” he said, shrugging.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a well-worn slip, handing it to Flush, who handed it to me. I placed it on the map and examined it. We didn’t understand the numbers, had no idea what they were code for, but maybe we didn’t need to. Maybe we’d been looking at them all wrong.

  “What are those numbers?” I asked Goodman Dougherty, pointing to a series of digits at the top of the map.

  “Latitude.”

  “And these?” My finger landed on the side of the page.

  “Longitude.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  Twitch angled his face in my direction. “They’re number coordinates—a way of pinpointing a location.”

  “A specific place?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what if that’s what these numbers are?”

  He absently ran his fingers along his jaw while he considered what I was suggesting. “It’s possible, but I thought you said there weren’t any spaces between these numbers.”

  “There aren’t, but maybe that’s left for us to figure out.”

  I could tell I had everyone’s attention. Goodman Dougherty put down his unfinished dinner. Everyone leaned forward. Even Argos lifted his head and gave a soft whimper.

  I began reading off the numbers—“Four, five, three, nine”—and as I did, Dougherty found the coordinates on the world map. Except instead of

  4539221103914

  it was more like

  45 39 22 110 39 14

  The map wasn’t big enough to allow the kind of precision that we craved, but it gave us a general idea. Our eyes were fixated on Goodman Dougherty’s dirt-encrusted finger as it traced the map and landed on the first coordinate that gave us the latitude: a line across the northern hemisphere. That narrowed it down to not just the former United States, but also some countries by the names of France, Italy, the Russian Federation, and many more.

  Adding longitude would tell us the exact location. I called out those numbers next—110, 39, 14—and Dougherty swiped his finger to a specific vertical line. As I finished reciting, I was so excited I could barely breathe. But when I looked up, my heart sank. Goodman Dougherty’s finger rested on a desolate chunk of land on the other side of the world. Someplace called Mongolia.

  “Maybe that’s where Omega started,” Flush offered.

  “Or where it ended,” Red added.

  “Or the Republic’s real headquarters.”

  “Or maybe these numbers aren’t latitude and longitude at all,” Diana said.

  We all sat back, and there was a collective sigh of disappointment. I’d gotten my hopes up for nothing.

  “Did you add a minus in front of the longitude?” Twitch asked casually.

  “Huh?”

  “Prime meridian is zero degrees, and that goes through Greenwich, England, so everything to the west of that—like the Republic—is measured in minus degrees.”

  Dougherty went back to the map. Sure enough, there was a western 110 as well as an eastern one. He got out the map of the
United States and traced the number until he located the coordinate.

  “Well?” Twitch asked. Lacking sight, he couldn’t see what the rest of us could.

  Dougherty sat poised before the map, one hand on it, the other buried in his beard. He turned to me. “You wanna tell him or should I?”

  I leaned in to see for myself, and was surprised that his finger had landed on the exact same spot where it had been six days earlier: at the junction of two rivers.

  “The Conclave?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “So not some secret message after all,” I said, disappointed. “Just directions to the inauguration.”

  No one said anything. A piece of wood exploded in the fire and embers flared.

  “Then it doesn’t mean anything?” Flush asked.

  “It means one thing,” Dougherty said. “Chancellor Maddox wants everyone and their mother to watch her be sworn in as president. That way we’ll all know exactly who’s the boss.”

  31.

  THE NEXT DAY THEY ride on, but Hope speaks to no one. Not to Book, not to Diana, not to anyone. She’s not in the mood for talking. It’s not just that the woman who came up with the Final Solution will soon be running the country. It’s also her father. Why was he considered the Butcher of the West? Was he in some way responsible for all of this?

  The landscape flattens and irons itself out. Six days after leaving the others, they ride to the top of a low ridge and draw their horses to a stop. Mud as far as they can see. All the snow has seeped into the prairie, creating an enormous puddle of brownish-black muck, stretching from one horizon to the other. Far to the south is a river snaking through the prairie. Flowing into that is another, smaller river.

  Mired in the swampy landscape in the V of these two rivers is a vast array of mud-splattered tents, sprawling from riverbank to riverbank.

  “Welcome to New Washington,” Goodman Dougherty says. “The capital of the Republic of the True America.” He hawks up a ball of phlegm and plants it in the mud.

  The sight is utterly dreary. People going about their daily chores, walking through the slop, passing between tents that are smeared top to bottom with mud, mud, and more mud. This is the capital city of what was once the greatest country on earth? Hope wonders.