Desolated

by Lou Cadle

  “Bite is about all we can do.”

  “There’s Curt’s crossbow. Which reminds me.”

  “What?”

  “Again, something to talk to the whole group about. Since we can’t figure out what to say or do to keep Zoe safe, beyond having you talk with her, I guess we need to get a meeting started with everyone.”

  They walked back up to the picnic table area. As they approached, so did C.J. Dev looked around, didn’t see Curt, and called to the boy. “C.J., is your father here?”

  “He’s cleaning game. He had me bring a rabbit.”

  Rabbits were rare. The same heat that had killed the domesticated rabbits had driven the wild ones to cooler climes. “Would you run back and ask him to come over? He can bring the game if there’s a lot of it, and we can all help clean. We need to talk.”

  “Okay,” the boy said, and he took off running across the backyard.

  Yasmin said, “What do I do with the rabbit? It’s too hot to let it sit here.”

  “Build the fire back up and spit it, I guess,” Dev said. “Unless you feel like making a stew.”

  “Stew’s just as easy,” she said. “I can put this on the heat and cut vegetables while we talk. Are we going to talk?”

  “Yes,” Dev said, looking around. “Is everyone here?”

  “Missing C.J. and Curt,” Joan said. “And Pilar went out to check the highway, make sure they’re really gone.”

  “Good idea,” Dev said. “Joan, when everybody is here, would you take the lead? Run the meeting?”

  “I’ll facilitate, sure,” she said.

  “I’m going to check on my father and Zoe,” he said. “Try to get them back here.”

  And that’s what he did. His father hadn’t gotten very far on digging the hole. “Are you sure this is where they are?” he asked his father. Truth was, he thought his father had it right. But if he could wear him out, digging holes in different places, that might keep him safe today.

  “I’m sure,” his father said.

  “Anyway, we’re about set to meet,” Dev said. “Everyone wants both of you there. We don’t want to make any decisions without you.”

  “There’s no decisions to be made!” Arch said, throwing down his shovel. He staggered a step, and Zoe went to take his arm, but he shook her off. “We fight, or we die.”

  “But what do we fight with?” Dev said, his voice quiet. He wasn’t trying to argue with his father. He actually wanted an answer, one he hadn’t thought of himself.

  “Bows. Rocks. Our wits.”

  “That’s why we need you,” Dev said. “You have the best military mind here. We need your wits to make a plan. And they won’t be back tomorrow, so we don’t need the grenades right this second. But we are talking right now. Okay?”

  Arch glowered, but then he nodded. “Fine. We’ll talk. But talking won’t protect us.”

  “I know, Dad. I know it won’t.”

  Chapter 12

  Sierra walked away with her father from the meeting feeling worse than when it had begun. For one thing, two of the boys, Gustavo and Luke, had overheard some of the men talking about the young women here. Neither was willing to say exactly what they’d heard, but Luke had said, “It was bad.”

  “Disgusting,” Gustavo said.

  Sierra would corner one of them later today and try to get specifics. But she knew the kind of thing it probably was.

  They hadn’t come up with anything new. What was there, after all, to come up with?

  Dev had mentioned his one plan, and that could only happen if the same exact scenario repeated itself. Curt might take the men guarding all the rifles with his crossbow before either man got a shot off, and then someone else and him could take the rifles and shoot the men up here.

  For that to work, it’d have to be her, Curt, Dev, Zoe, and possibly her father with the rifles. Joan had never gotten comfortable with guns, and Dev and Curt were probably their two best.

  To her father she said, “I don’t know if I can still shoot straight. At least Curt keeps in practice with the crossbow.”

  Pilar said, “You use the blowgun. You know how to lead a target. Your instincts are good. You can still do it.”

  “It’d take me a full minute to reload a magazine,” she said. “If I could even remember how.”

  “You’d remember, but I doubt there’d be much reloading required. A few accurate shots, at least under the scenario that Dev suggested, and the armed men would be taken care of.”

  “Once we have guns, the younger people can be taught to shoot as well. But there’s still the problem of ammunition. They couldn’t have much with them—unless there’s a hidden compartment in that wagon.”

  “There must be,” Pilar said. “Were there saddlebags on the horses?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Also might be ammunition in those. It’d be nice to capture a few horses. We could teach them to plow, expand the grain fields.”

  “Speaking of which, I need to hit the garden.”

  “I’ll take care of the eggs,” he said.

  And they worked the rest of the blisteringly hot afternoon.

  Over dinner, they continued the conversation with the boys, all of whom were there. Georgia had gone to eat with the girls at the Quinn house.

  “If we killed a dozen of the military men,” she said, bringing up a point she’d been thinking about all afternoon, “I don’t know that we could stay here. Wouldn’t they retaliate?”

  “I imagine so,” Pilar said. “Unless they have fewer men than we’re thinking back at their base.”

  “So we couldn’t use the horses to plow. Not for long. And do you know how to make a horse plow?”

  “No,” she admitted. “Maybe Joan or Arch does. Or Dev. He did 4-H, right?”

  Troy said, “What’s 4-H?”

  “A club,” Sierra said, and explained.

  “Like a game?” Brandie said. She had settled in to life on the sofa, and she was obviously enjoying being with her lover at meals. They held hands under the table. “They made a game of doing what we do to live?”

  “I guess it does sound a little odd now,” Pilar said, “but the people who gained skills in that club are probably doing the best in this world. Or second-best, after real farmers, market farmers with ten years’ experience.”

  “What’s a market farmer?” asked Gustavo.

  Pilar said, “You’d grow enough for you and your family, and extra, to sell in town on Saturdays for people who had other jobs. Like you said Payson had farmer’s markets?”

  “And they’d trade for that, right?” asked Troy. “Like you’d grow apples, and I’d trade you for potatoes.”

  “No, they paid money,” Pilar said.

  Sierra saw confusion on all the faces of the younger people. They didn’t understand the concept of money. And, having been away from it for more than half her life, it no longer made complete sense to Sierra. Amazing that people had trusted a piece of printed paper enough to hand you food or galvanized fencing in exchange for it.

  “Why wouldn’t you just preserve it? Can it or dehydrate it?” said Troy.

  “We did can. And we froze a lot of it,” Pilar said.

  That look of confusion again. And this time, doubt. “You guys don’t really believe there is such a thing, do you?” Sierra asked.

  “Freezing?” Brandie said. “I guess I do. I mean, some days it’s really hot, and other days not so much. It gets cold at night in the winters, but cold enough to turn water solid? That’s what it means, right?”

  “Right,” Pilar said.

  “So if you can have celery that’s solid,” Luke said, “how do you eat it? Don’t you break your teeth?”

  Pilar and Sierra exchanged an amused glance. “You put it in a soup, and it becomes soft again,” Pilar said.

  Sierra said, “Actually, freezing and defrosting—unfreezing—makes the textures change. Nothing stays crisp after that.”

  “Why not?” asked Troy. “And why doe
s it make food last?”

  Pilar gave it another try, describing blanching and freezing and how to use frozen foods once they were defrosted. But there was a lot of skepticism on the faces around her.

  “You guys are making me feel so old,” Sierra said.

  “You are old,” said Barry, frowning in confusion.

  Pilar said, “If she’s old, what am I?”

  “Older,” Barry said.

  Sierra couldn’t argue the fact. “Maybe one day we’ll see snow again,” she said. “And it’ll freeze, and you guys can see what it does.”

  “That’d be uncomfortable,” Pilar said. “And it’s a lot of work. You have to cover the vegetables or harvest them and get them inside.”

  “Why?”

  “Freezing kills them.”

  “But you just said you did freeze them,” Brandie said. “You’re confusing me.”

  “I’m confusing myself,” Pilar said. “Plants won’t stay alive in a freeze. Or, most plants won’t. Onions, potatoes, parsnips, beets, they’re all happy being frozen in the ground. Others stay edible if you keep them frozen. But as soon as they defrost, like the morning after a freeze, they start to go bad, and quickly.”

  “Okay,” said Troy. “So this is something you used refrigerators for, is that right? To keep them frozen.”

  “Right!” Pilar said, sounding relieved someone understood some part of what he was saying.

  “How long could you freeze them for?”

  “Six months or even longer. They’d lose flavor slowly, start to taste stale after that, but you could still eat them until the next year’s crops came in.”

  “Could you do it with the nutria?” Curt had given them two of the large rodents for dinner from his traps.

  “Yes,” Pilar said. “Same thing, except you didn’t have to do anything to it before you froze it. Just clean it, wrap it in heavy paper, freeze it.”

  “That’d be handy,” Luke said. “Meat goes bad fast.”

  “Anyway,” Sierra said, “there’s a cup of stew left. No grain, but stew. Brandie, you want it? You’re eating for two.”

  “What?” she said, frowning in confusion.

  Pilar said, “It’s something people say about pregnant women. There’s a second person inside you, and you’re eating for yourself and to help the baby grow.”

  “That makes me sound selfish.”

  “No,” Sierra reassured her. “Merely pregnant. I ate more than a regular share when I was pregnant. And when I nursed my babies.”

  Brandie looked down at her stomach. “It’s hard to believe there’s a person in there.”

  “Won’t be long before you can’t doubt it,” Sierra said. “It’ll start to move, and you’ll feel it.”

  “That must be so weird,” Gustavo said. “I’m just as glad I can’t get pregnant.” Then he flushed. “Sorry, Brandie, I didn’t mean that in any bad way.”

  “I wish those men hadn’t appeared right after it happened. Now I’m really worried,” Brandie said.

  Troy put his arm around her. “It’ll be okay,” he said.

  “We’ll keep you safe,” Pilar said.

  “I won’t hide while you guys are in danger,” she said. She looked at Sierra. “Did you? Hide when you were pregnant?”

  “No,” Sierra said, “but I didn’t have any reason to. Nobody threatened us then. I was lucky. But do you want the last of the stew?”

  “No,” Brandie said. “I don’t feel all that great.”

  “Then why not go lie down on the sofa?”

  “There’s dishes to be washed,” she said.

  “Other people can do that. Lie down if that feels better. Sit up and be still if that feels better.”

  “If you’re sure,” she said, looking around the table.

  Everyone reassured her it was fine. Sierra and her father had done the cooking, so they let the younger people do the washing up. They used wood ash for that now. Sierra and Misha had, together, figured out a way to make soap, but it was a time-consuming process to make it. They only used it for washing laundry and people. Dishes got clean with plain water, if all that had been eaten was vegetables and grain or eggs, or with ashes in the pot or pan that had cooked meat, if there had been any meat that day. Ashes plus a bit of rendered meat fat created something like soap.

  Around sunset, there was a knock on the door. “Sierra, it’s me,” Zoe said, walking in. “Dad said you wanted to talk to me.” Sierra was sitting at the kitchen table, a pile of her notebooks in front of her. She’d been glancing through all the instructions and knowledge she’d recorded, back in the first ten years after the end of oil.

  Zoe pointed at the notebooks. “I remember those. You used to write in them all the time when I was little.”

  “I was looking through them, seeing if I could be reminded of anything I’d forgotten. And thinking about if they were worth taking, if we have to leave here.”

  “Do you think we will?”

  “Perhaps eventually,” Sierra said. “Let’s sit outside. It’s cooler.” And more private. Brandie and Troy were in the living room.

  “This sounds serious,” Zoe said.

  “Your father and I are both worried about you. We don’t trust those men.”

  “I know.”

  “We don’t trust them in particular with you. Or with any of the girls.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re thinking about rape. About how some men force themselves on women. Sexually. I’m sorry, this is really none of my business, but have you had sex yet?” Sierra had never seen a sign of her daughter being romantic with any of the men.

  “Yes. I don’t think I like it.”

  Really? Sierra had never felt that way, at all. “Maybe you haven’t found the right guy yet. Or woman.”

  “Guys, I think. I’ve tried two. Are they really all that different?”

  Sierra had to laugh. “I’ve only had three, so I’m not an expert.”

  “Do you think Joan is?”

  “I have no idea,” Sierra said. “Not the Joan I knew. But she was young once. Maybe so. You can ask her.”

  “Not that interested in the answer.”

  “Well, I guess some people aren’t. I wonder if that’d make rape worse for you or not.” She was thinking aloud.

  “Sierra,” Zoe said. “It sounds awful. I mean, it’s an attack, right? Brutal.”

  “Yes. I wanted to tell you about when it almost happened to me. How I felt. How scared I was. I want you to be as afraid of it as I used to be.”

  “It sounds disgusting. I’m not really afraid of it though. I’d fight.”

  “Twelve men? I don’t know that you could fight off that many.”

  “Twelve?” She looked confused for a moment. “You mean, they’d all...?”

  “Happens.” Emily’s story wasn’t hers to tell. That was two men—or two that Sierra had witnessed—and they’d taken turns. She didn’t like thinking about that. “It happened a lot. War seems to make it happen more.”

  “When there are women soldiers, do they ever?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t certainly. I had no urge to do that after a fight.”

  “Did you ever have an urge to force someone anytime?”

  “No!” Sierra said. “I was thinking about sex in general. I guess as close as I came to wanting to rape was more like an urge to kick or spit on the body of a guy I had killed.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe you ever killed anyone.”

  Sierra shook her head. “Is it? I did. I liked it. So I guess that makes me only one step away from a rapist.”

  “Weren’t they shooting at you?”

  Sierra remembered the good guy she’d accidentally killed. “That was the idea, yeah.”

  “So it wasn’t the same as picking out someone to hurt for no reason.”

  “Maybe not.” Sierra wasn’t so sure. “I wouldn’t rape—I never did—but men do. Maybe some women too, but Vargas and his men don’t have women. Th
ey are all men, and that’s why your father and I believe that they’re dangerous to you.”

  “I understand, I guess. But what can I do about it?”

  “You could hide when they come.”

  Zoe snorted. “I’m not going to do that.”

  “But we wish you would. If not hide, make yourself scarce. If they’re going to be over at the Quinn place, come over here.”

  “I won’t hide.”

  “Then don’t hide. Weed our garden for us. Or gather eggs. Pump water. Or do it at Joan’s. Do something useful if you want, but keep out of those men’s way.”

  Zoe didn’t answer, but it seemed that she was thinking. A breeze stirred for a moment and then fell back to nothing. The evening star was shining out. Venus, her father had told her, often the first thing you could see shining at night.

  Zoe said, “Do you think they’re going to take our stuff from us? They haven’t so far except for our hen.”

  “I think they may leave only enough for us to survive and take the rest. They’ll call it a tax, but it’ll be stealing, just the same.”

  “So what you’re saying is, they’ll see me—and the other girls—as something they can take. Like part of the tax.”

  Sierra appreciated her daughter’s insight. “That’s very much what I’m thinking.”

  “If they do that, won’t they make people mad?”

  “If we get mad, so what? What do we have to hurt them with?”

  “Maybe we could poison the food we give them.”

  “If we had poison, we might.” The Quinns had had some rat poison, but it had been used up long ago. If it hadn’t they’d have been using it in the grain fields to hold down the rodent population.

  “I meant plants. Misha points out dangerous plants all the time. We could mix some of them in with vegetables.”

  “Good idea.” Sierra wondered if they might not watch for that. Were it her, she might oversee the harvest of the tax or only take whole vegetables like squash and melons and tomatoes. “I’m not sure it’d work, but we’ll add it to the pile of ideas we’re collecting.”

  “You don’t trust them at all, do you?”

  “It’s best not to trust people with a lot of power and with no limits to that power.”