Beau and Jamal put the guard I had accidently wounded onto a homemade stretcher and took him to the infirmary. Thankfully, he was conscious and didn’t appear too distressed. I hoped that was a good sign.
Luke had already covered our latest fatality with a sheet. Another dead kid. It was difficult to think of anyone in the Valley as anything other than kids. Apart from Jamal, who had a few months on us, Luke and I were the oldest of any of the people in the Valley, but no matter what we’d been through or what we were doing, I still felt like a child, albeit one with responsibilities.
The dead boy, Ramsey, was just eighteen. Another marker in our little graveyard. A graveyard which was growing way too quickly. He’d only just been recruited to Luke’s security force and I hadn’t even known his name before he was killed. I said as much to Indigo, feeling shittier than ever.
“You can’t know everyone’s name, Isaac. There are too many of us now. Come on, let’s go see Max. It’ll cheer you up.”
I felt like I should stay and help clean things up, but she was right, I needed to see my boy. He was playing happily with Peace when we went into the house.
“Has he been a good boy?” I asked the little girl.
“Yep, he sure has, Uncle Isaac.”
“What happened outside?” asked Ava.
While Indigo talked quietly to Ava, I picked up Max and gave him a squeeze, smiling at the gurgle he produced.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said Ava.
We sat down there for a while before taking Max up for a nap. We lay for a few hours, Indigo and I, in each other’s arms while our little man slept. Just before lunch, there was a knock at the door. It was Luke.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“David, the kid who was shot in the arm by the Marauders, died a few minutes ago.”
“Oh ... ”
“He didn’t suffer; he was zonked out on morphine.”
“What about the kid I shot?”
“Jamal thinks he’ll be okay as long as the wound doesn’t get infected. The bullet went through without hitting anything vital.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
“Yeah, um ... listen. We have the three prisoners at the barn. We’ve been waiting for you. Not really fair to keep them waiting much longer, you know? Death row and all that?”
“Okay. Shit. Of course. Sorry, I didn’t even think of it in all the ... excitement. I’ll come now.”
21
The walk to the barn seemed terribly long on that horrible day.
“So what is your idea? Gassing them?”
I should have known Luke would guess my ‘painless and quick’ execution method. I nodded.
“Good idea.”
“That’s me, I’m a real go getter when it comes to killing people.”
“Hey,” he said, grabbing me on the shoulder. “Remember what they did. What they were a part of. You said it yourself, this is the only way.”
I held his fierce eyes for a moment, then nodded and looked at the ground. “I know, man. I’m just a little down on myself for what happened today. I spotted their hands tied in front, but I thought it could wait. I was going to bring it up with you afterwards.”
“Dude, I saw it, too. I made a mental note to say something to the boys. That makes me just as guilty as you, right? At least you were able to draw your gun! Mine was stuck in my fucking pants.”
I chuckled at his pantomime of the effort he had made to draw his gun, his hook waving in the air as his good hand tugged at the handle.
“Lucky you didn’t blow your balls off,” I said, laughing for the first time in days. “Fine, you’re just as much to blame as me. Stop waving that hook around. You’ll take someone’s eye out ... probably mine.”
I won’t describe the execution in detail, but essentially Luke and I banished everyone else from the barn. We took on the responsibility ourselves, unwilling to put anyone else in a position where they had to witness what was to follow.
To say I didn’t feel sorry for the boys we loaded into the old Chrysler would be a lie. Two of them broke down when they saw the hose leading from the exhaust to the rear window of the car. It broke my heart. The one who had pleaded his innocence to the murder charge cried and begged for his life as Luke closed the door on him. I saw tears in my friend’s eyes and it hit me how unfair this new world was when kids had no choice but to kill other kids.
I think I can speak for Luke when I say it was the most hideous experience of our lives to that point. Taking a life in the heat of battle or in self-defense is one thing, but to have to stand there and watch those three boys die behind the windows of that car, no matter how painless, was monstrous.
Luke held his breath and switched off the car when we were sure they were dead. I opened the big double doors of the garage while Luke opened the car doors to let the noxious gas dissipate and then ran out to join me in the fresh air.
A few of Luke’s men were waiting for us outside. No one said anything when Luke suddenly darted to the side of the garage and threw up his breakfast.
“Give it five minutes. Then take the bodies to the trees out the back and bury them in unmarked graves,” I ordered. “Do the same with the one I killed.”
I put my arm around Luke’s shoulder and we walked back up to the house in silence, neither of us in the mood for conversation.
Late that afternoon, we buried our own dead in the cemetery we had begun in the top paddock of the farm two years prior. A boy named Arthur had been our first casualty. He had fallen out of a tree and broken his neck less than two weeks after arriving. The second had been a girl, Jasmine, who had died from an asthma attack. The third and fourth were the young mother and her baby who had died during childbirth. All of their graves were marked with simple white crosses, their names scratched into them. Senseless deaths in themselves, but somehow less so than the victims of the attack by the Marauders.
What had been four graves now became twelve. Altogether too many for such a tiny and young community. We didn’t have a funeral as such, but Jamal asked to say a few words for each of the victims. I was glad. While I had said words over bodies before, these deaths hit me especially hard. Not because I was particularly close to any of the deceased, but because the Valley was our home and our home was supposed to be a haven. Safety was something I and the others had promised each of the newcomers, and I couldn’t help but feel somehow we had failed them.
Jamal’s words were well-spoken and poignant and I reflected upon what a valuable part of our community he had become. It was no wonder he had been elected to the triumvirate with Luke and I.
Now that justice had been served and we had buried our dead, we had a hard decision to make. We had put off any decisions until the burials were done and, now that they were, we set a meeting for that night. A meeting where we would have to decide the fate of our whole community.
In the meantime, we had doubled the watch on the wall and armed all of the guards with firearms. After the executions and burials, Luke had gone to the top of Boot Hill with his sniper rifle and had stayed there for hours before finally handing it over to Brock.
He had told Brooke he wanted to give us early warning and an early advantage should the Marauders come back, and that might have been a part of why he had gone up there, but I think he also needed a little solitude after the traumatic events of the day.
22
Indigo and I were in our room an hour before the meeting. Little Max was asleep as we talked in hushed tones about the future of our home.
“Luke wants to stay. It goes against his code of honor to even think of evacuating,” I said.
“I know it does. But we have to think of our people, Isaac. If these Marauders come back with a bigger force, they could slaughter us all. You’ve heard the reports; there could be more than a thousand of them and all killers.”
“I know. I’ve thought about every option. If we stayed and fought, we would probably take out a f
ew of them, but eventually they would overrun us.”
“We can’t let that happen, Isaac. I think we have to do something none of us want to do. We have to leave the Valley.”
We both looked to the cot Ben had built for Max. I knew she was right, but I suspected we would have a hard time convincing the rest of the group. An hour later, we convened in the old kitchen. Indigo and I came in and sat down at the big table. Luke was already there. We were soon joined by Ben, Paul, Jamal, Brooke, Brock, Beau, Danny, and Allie.
Indigo chaired the meeting and jumped straight in. “We can’t allow what happened two days ago to ever happen again. This special meeting has been called to discuss measures to keep our community safe. I, for one, can’t see how we can stay in the Valley.”
Her words were met with some gasps of surprise and Luke looked at her pointedly. To his credit, he refrained from interjecting and let her finish.
“We are outnumbered by the Marauders, outgunned, and they would show no mercy if ... when they attack again. There are more of them and they will overrun us. We need to evacuate and find somewhere more defensible and as far away from Ashland as possible.”
Everyone started to speak over one another, only hushing when Luke rapped his hook on the tabletop.
“I can see why you feel this way, Indigo, but I say we fight for what’s ours. Don’t forget, they have a hostage, too. You’re right; they would overrun us if we wait for them to come to us. That’s why I propose we go to them before they get a chance. We attack them first and with the element of surprise on our side. We could take them down before they knew what was happening.”
“Yeah!”
“Let’s do it for Benjamin!”
It was Brock enthusiastically supporting Luke. Allie disagreed with them loudly, while the others were now more guarded and remained silent. Brooke particularly; she sat quietly, her hand resting on her belly. Luke appeared ready to go on when Indigo spoke over everyone.
“What about Brooke and the baby, Luke?”
She said it quietly enough, but her words were just as powerful as if she’d screamed at the top of her lungs. It was one of the few times I had seen Luke without a ready comeback. Brooke’s hand grasped his. He looked at her and she nodded.
I spoke in the awkward silence.
“Indigo’s right, Luke. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this ever since ... ever since the breach. You make good points, but the fact is, even with the element of surprise on our side, the Marauders are better armed and might outnumber us as much as two to one. Surprise won’t help.”
I looked around at them.
“I don’t like the idea of leaving the Valley any more than anyone else. But I also think we can find somewhere not too far away that will be easier to defend and perhaps give us the space we need to keep growing. Who we are is more important than where we are.”
I gestured to Luke and Jamal.
“In our leadership group, we’ve been talking about the future, even before the attack, and all of us agreed that even though we’ve stopped taking in new people, we still have to move eventually. The timeframe we discussed was two years. Right?”
Jamal nodded.
“Yeah,” Luke said, looking at Brooke again before addressing all of us. “Sorry, you’re right. I just want to punish those fuckers so bad for what they did. But if it leaves the people we love dead, it’s not worth it.”
“We all want to punish them, Luke,” said Indigo. “But Indigo and Isaac are right; it would be a suicide mission.”
“For all we know, they already killed Benjamin,” Paul said, saying what everyone else feared was true. Brock looked up sharply, but didn’t say anything.
Ben spoke then, before things got awkward. “Plus, only about five hundred of our population are able to fight, and even then we would only be able to arm about half of them. The Marauders have at least a thousand, maybe more, and they all fight.”
Luke nodded. “All right. I’m convinced. What’s the plan?”
“Well we don’t have a plan ... yet,” I said. “We’re going to need to find a location that will house and feed us all, as well as be defensible.”
“A town maybe?” suggested Ben.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or a city. If there’s nothing suitable in New Hampshire, we might have to cross the old border into Massachusetts.”
“What about back in the mountains? Maybe Lincoln?” suggested Allie.
Silence greeted her suggestion. Perhaps it felt a little too much like going backwards for us, or maybe it just brought back memories we wanted to stay buried.
“No,” Luke said. “I don’t want to be chipping icicles off my hook every hour. I think further south would be better.”
Allie smiled and shrugged.
“Manchester,” suggested Paul.
“Manchester’s pretty big. Wouldn’t it be too big?” asked Beau.
“Well, it was the biggest city in New Hampshire, but it’s not that big. I think its population was about 110,000 people before the attack, so I’m pretty sure we could grow for a hundred years and not fill it up. We could start off populating one part of it and expand as we get bigger.”
“Let’s look at the map,” Indigo suggested.
We went into the living area of the old farmhouse. We had pinned the map of New Hampshire to the longest wall in that room not long after our arrival and had used it to plan forays and scouting missions ever since. In and around Moultonborough and around Plymouth, it was covered in red lines and Xs. Paul traced his finger down the map until it hovered over Manchester.
“Look,” said Luke, a tinge of excitement in his voice. “That river, Merrimack, runs through it, but most of the city is on the eastern side. If we could block or blow up the bridge crossing the river there and blockade the other smaller bridges from the western side, we’d only have to worry about one main road in from the north, the 3. Of course, the eastern side would be pretty unprotected, but the only threat we know of for the moment is from the Marauders.”
“Yeah,” Paul chimed in. “And we could even block the 3 back there where it crosses that smaller river.”
We discussed the move well into the night and the more we talked, the more achievable the goal of moving our settlement to Manchester seemed to be. In the end, we didn’t even have to vote, it simply became a fait accompli. Of course, that was our core group. We all knew we may have some problems when our decision was relayed to the rest of the Valley’s population.
“We should give them the option of staying,” said Brooke.
“Yes, Brooke is right,” said Ben. “We can’t force anyone to come with us. We can only tell them the dangers of staying and hope they make the right decision.”
“Agreed,” said Luke.
Indigo and Brooke went to bed, content to let us work out the logistics of moving such a big group of people with our limited resources.
“How are we going to do this?” I asked, the enormity of the task suddenly hitting me.
“Easy,” said Luke. “We go in a convoy. Our armored Hummer at the head, the three buses and the two SUVs following, then the strongest on foot protected by the other two Hummers bringing up the rear.”
“Do we have enough fuel?” asked Jamal.
“Not for all of the vehicles. We’ll have to ration it out to make sure the buses have the most and probably the armored Hummer. We should be able to put a good distance between us and the Marauders before any of the others run empty though. I’m thinking it might even be worth taking a longer route and avoiding the 93 to keep as much distance between us and them as possible.”
He pointed out a route which would take us east around Lake Winnipesaukee, through Wolfeboro, and back southwest to Manchester.
“We will use more fuel and it will take longer, but in the end it may even be easier to pass. There shouldn’t be as many abandoned cars as on the freeways.”
We agreed with his suggestion and assigned people to look after the logistics. Luke, Ben, an
d Brock would be in charge of the armory and weapons and deciding who would be armed with the precious few guns we had. Jamal would take care of fueling the vehicles. Paul would be in charge of supplies, while Indigo, Brooke, and Allie would be supervising the younger of the children. I would oversee the whole operation with the help of Beau.
The rest of us went to bed at 2 A.M. after deciding we would leave at dawn the following day. That would give us around thirty hours to prepare. As I lay in bed, unable to sleep, a new sense of purpose replaced the last vestiges of anger and sadness at the recent attack and the deaths earlier that day. We just had to hope the Marauders didn’t attack before we left. Even if they did, we had our early warning team on motorcycles in place and, in a pinch, we could evacuate in a short time. It would just be much better to leave on our own terms.
23
It’s hard to say how I was feeling when we woke up a few hours later. While I was glad to put the last day behind me, beginning what would be our final day in our home had its own kind of melancholy, even if it was tempered somewhat by the anticipation of adventure.
As I ate breakfast with my friends and family, I became more and more enthused by their excitement and optimism. Not only were they excited at the prospect of finding somewhere bigger and more permanent for all of us to live, I think they were almost as enthusiastic about simply doing something different, about having an adventure.
“We should make the announcement,” said Luke, as we helped clear away the dishes.
“Yep.”
That part I wasn’t looking forward to.
We bit the bullet a few minutes later. Luke, Jamal, and I went to the verandah. Luke made his call on the loudspeaker. The crowd gathered a little quicker than usual, perhaps in anticipation of something dramatic like the trial the day before.
I waited until the flow of people into the Square had slowed to a trickle before I began.
“Welcome, everybody.”
The After Days Trilogy [Books 1-3] Page 58