by Trent Reedy
“Twenty-six of the thirty of us men made it.” The prisoner I’d spoken to, Doug, stepped into view. A couple old bruises stained his face, and his arm was wrapped in a sling. “Eighteen out of twenty-one women and girls.”
“A nineteen-year-old girl hung herself last night,” Cal said. “I think they done some, you know, some real nasty things to them.”
“Girls?” I said.
“The youngest they had in those pens was ten years old,” Doug said. “She hasn’t said a word yet, but they finally convinced her to eat a little. Another girl was twelve. She’s not much better.”
It was quiet for a moment. “You’re really PFC Daniel Wright?” Doug said, looking at me closely.
Oh shit. Not another “rise up” maniac. But he’d been wearing a flight suit. He could be a US pilot. He might want to kill me. Maybe he would. “Yeah,” I answered.
“I want to thank all of you for getting us out of there. I know it cost you a lot. I’m grateful. We all are — everyone you rescued. That’s why I’m going to be honest with you.” He took a deep breath. “I’m Second Lieutenant Douglas Griffith.”
I looked at him for a moment. “Bullshit,” I said. But I saw his resemblance to the photos I’d seen on the news.
Griffith laughed. “No, it’s true.”
Cal stood up straight. “You with Idaho, er, the Northwest Alliance, or are you with —”
“Cal, he’s President Griffith’s son,” I said.
“Bullshit!” Cal said, bringing his rifle around from where he had it slung over his shoulder. “They reported you dead.”
“Well, shot down,” I said.
“I was shot down, but I ejected. I destroyed my transponder signal, figuring Idaho had the same technology and could find me the same as the US. I had a knife, my sidearm, and my flight suit, and I was way the hell out in the middle of the Idaho wilderness.” He smiled. “You people have a lot of wilderness.”
“How’d you wind up in that camp?” Cal was almost pointing his AR15 at the lieutenant.
“Cal, put the gun down,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he surrenders.”
“Well, all of us pilots get SERE training. That’s survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. Standard procedure for being shot down and alone, deep in enemy territory, is to stay alive and evade — avoid contact with the enemy. But once when I was hiding, I saw these guys on the road hauling a whole group of terrified people in chains. I guess I was like you. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen. So I ran out to try to rescue them. I got three of them before one of the guys knocked me out with a baseball bat. I woke up on a chain gang, and I’ve been there ever since. They had me for about four months.” He looked down. “It was pure hell. Thank you so much for getting us out of there.”
I turned away from him to hide my tears. In my head, it made sense. We lost five people and had four wounded, and we saved almost fifty lives. But in my heart, if I could go back in time, I swear I would have scrubbed the whole mission. Voted no. Forced JoBell to sit it out, at least.
“You know she believed in what we were trying to do,” Cal said. “She made that big speech. She couldn’t stand the idea of a camp like that going on.”
I knew he was right, but that didn’t take away the pain that was hurting me far worse than the bullet holes in my shoulder and thigh.
* * *
I heard there was a big debate on the council and around the Alice Marshall School about what to do with Lieutenant Griffith. I was glad to stay out of it. I wanted out of everything. Eventually, after making Griffith swear to never reveal the location of the school to anyone, and after he volunteered for a work detail, they let him stay.
After about four days, they decided they trusted me enough to leave me untied, and I joined the others in the bitter cold Alice Marshall School cemetery for the one funeral they’d saved for me. Seventeen crude headstones made out of chunks of basalt marked the place now. Nine were for the bodies of our people. Seven marked the prisoners who had died in their fight to be free. One memorialized the girl we’d rescued from the camp, who had hung herself. Nobody had known the girl’s name, so the gravestone was marked FREE WOMAN. Now a bunch of us were gathered around the cold stone that was all we had left of JoBell.
The wind tore through the sad little meadow, bringing with it the first stinging snowflakes of the coming winter. Becca, Sweeney, Cal, and TJ moved in closer to me on my homemade crutches so we could protect one another from some of it. Chaplain Carmichael quoted scripture about Heaven and sacrifice, that part that talked about the greatest love being when someone lays down their life for someone else. I wondered about that. Thousands were laying down their lives all around the world every day, but it didn’t seem like there was any great love involved. I thought about Specialist Sparrow and how she didn’t believe in God. Once, Luchen had asked her why she didn’t believe. She’d asked him how he could.
I knew God was real, because I knew how much I was being punished for all the wrong I’d done.
Finally, Chaplain Carmichael stopped speaking. Before we came out here, he’d asked me if I wanted to say a few words, and I’d shaken my head sadly. I had nothing left to say.
We stood in silence for a long time, but right as we started to head back to our rooms, Mr. Shiratori stepped into the middle of the circle. “JoBell was one of the most brilliant and courageous students I ever had the good fortune of working with. Rarely have I encountered anyone with as much passion, and as much compassion, as she had. In fifteen years of teaching, she was the only one I ever worried might beat me in a classroom debate.” People laughed a little through their tears at that one. Mr. Shiratori wiped his eyes. “Actually, she did sort of beat me in a debate. She changed my mind, and the vote I would have made, when she gave her historic speech in front of our council, convincing us to authorize the mission for which she gave her life.
“I say it was historic, because she said it was up to all of us to make sure ours was a good story, to make sure our history book chronicled the best of us for our children and those who come after. I know none of us, nor the forty-four people she helped liberate, will ever forget her. She was taken from us far too early, yet we will always remember the love and respect we all share for JoBell Marie Linder.”
Afterward, we walked back toward our building, Sweeney, Becca, Cal, TJ, and me. JoBell was gone. The thought of it pulled the hope and air from my lungs, the strength from my legs. I couldn’t hold my tears back, and I couldn’t hold myself up. Cal and Becca put their arms around my back and waist, and together, all of us, except for the one I needed most, went back to the tiny room we called home.
* * *
The snow on the day of JoBell’s funeral was a dusting. The snow that fell near the end of October was not. The snow that hit us a couple days after that was worse. They hadn’t given me back my gun by then, but I could at least walk, and though Dr. Nicole said I would probably have a limited range of motion in my left shoulder for the rest of my life, I could shovel snow. The sting of the cold and the burning in my shoulder and thigh hurt like hell, but I liked the hurt. Sometimes when I hurt enough, or when I worked hard enough, I could almost forget.
So I worked my ass off all winter. The snow got deeper than I thought was possible. Our farthest-out guard bunkers were completely buried in snow, over and over again. Digging out to them became a real problem, and we worried our guards might get stuck out there for a long time and freeze or starve to death. Finally we figured that if we could hardly get to our guard positions, anyone else would have an even harder time getting up to us, and we brought the outer perimeter guards in for the winter.
I didn’t interact much with the people we’d rescued, but for the most part, they were a big help. Yeah, they made the food supply stretch a little thinner, but most of them were so happy to be out of that terrible place that they were eager to join our community and help share the workload. More people allowed us to get more wood chopped, more snow shoveled, more cooking a
nd cleaning done, all faster.
Not all of them stayed. Just before the snow came, three men and two women asked us to take them as far as we dared take anyone, to the outskirts of the city of McCall. The rest of them figured their old homes were all run by the Brotherhood or otherwise destroyed by war, and few of them wanted to take their chances out on the road. Since we blindfolded the ones who wanted to leave for most of the trip away from the school, there was little chance they could give away our location to anyone who wished us harm.
I didn’t go to all the council meetings anymore, and when I did, I rarely joined in the discussion. But I did get into it at one meeting, mad as hell. Pam Bean was leading an effort to keep the prisoners we’d rescued off by themselves in a couple of the classrooms. Mr. Shiratori and some others argued that people should move around, so that the newcomers could live spread out with everyone else.
When I heard about what Pam wanted to do, I shouted her down. “Pam Bean! JoBell did not die —” I stopped, chest heaving, and then pointed at the chair where Mr. Grenke used to sit. “Ryan Grenke did not die so that we could keep all the brown people in segregated housing!”
“We don’t even know who these people are,” she fired back. “Some of them don’t even speak English.”
“You know Kenny Palmer from Freedom Lake! You going to say he isn’t one of us just because he was captured and had a far rougher time than us? You don’t know the rest of them because they’ve been kept apart,” I yelled. “One of the guys we got out of there, Chris Stone, used to be a broadcast engineer. He probably knows more about radios than Sergeant Crocker did, and he’s been working on them constantly. But he’s not good enough to live with the rest of us?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t even make tactical sense keeping them separate! You’ve been getting people all scared that they might do something bad to us. If they were dangerous — and they’re not, but using your twisted logic — if they were dangerous, that’s all the more reason to have them living with the rest of us, so that we can keep an eye on them, and so that they become a lot more us and a lot less them.” I slapped my hands on the table and looked straight across at Mrs. Pierce. “When you vote on this, I vote to move the newcomers in with us. Any of you who vote to put them off by themselves are sick. Almost as bad as the Brotherhood, who had them locked up in cages.” I walked out of the room as straight as I could with my bum leg.
The newcomers began moving in with the rest of us the next day.
We’d done our best to prepare for the winter, rationing food all summer, smoking rabbit, duck, deer, and moose meat, chopping and stacking what seemed like millions of pieces of wood. We rationed food even more carefully through the winter. We had a slightly larger meal for Thanksgiving, with wild turkeys our hunters had brought in, and the kitchen people saved a few treats for Christmas, like chocolate and stuff. But other than that we ate simply, and not a lot. The biggest priority was making the canned and preserved fruit stretch to make sure everyone had enough vitamin C. By late February, supplies were running low, and people were starting to worry.
Always, I kept working to try to keep my mind off JoBell, and always I failed. I shoveled snow, carried wood to where it was needed, volunteered in the kitchen washing dishes, and pulled a hell of a lot of guard duty, sitting in the dark in the council building, looking out the window with night vision glasses. I figured I hated the nightmares that came with sleep, and I’d be up anyway, so I might as well let others sleep. Of course, nobody went on duty alone. Sweeney, Becca, Cal, or TJ joined me sometimes, but Jaclyn stayed up with me the most. It’s like she knew I was trying my best to put all that hurt away so that I could function. So she just talked about football or some crazy stuff that had happened at some old party. Anything but the terrible thought that always ached inside.
* * *
By the middle of March, the days were getting longer and a little warmer. Some of that snow had finally begun to melt.
“Come on, Wright, you gotta see this thing before it’s gone,” Cal said. He was wearing about six layers of clothes — jeans, sweatpants, a snowmobile suit that fit a little too tight, gloves, and a big, dumb, poofy hat. He’d dumped a pile of extra winter gear on the floor next to my rack, all over the pieces of a kerosene heater I had taken apart for repair.
“I told you. I’m busy,” I said. “I ain’t got time to go build snow forts with you.”
His shoulders fell a little. “Sweeney and Becca are already out there waiting for us. I told ’em I’d bring you.”
“Well, if those two are out there, I don’t want to interrupt them.”
“It ain’t like that,” Cal said.
Jaclyn knocked, and the door swung open. She leaned against the door frame, all suited up for the snow too. “Wright, you seriously need to see this. It’s three stories high.” She shrugged. “Well, two and a half.”
“Right! The roof on the top room fell in this morning, but the rest of it is holding up.” Cal pushed the pile of clothes with his foot. “That’s why you have to come see it before it’s gone. I ain’t asking you to come play, just to see it. ’Cause the kids who built this thing, they’re like snow fort engineers.” He looked up like he was thinking real hard. “Snowineers? Fortineers.”
Jaclyn smiled. “Maybe snowengiforts.”
“Exactly.” Cal couldn’t tell Jackie was making fun of him. “Or like snow … like fortisnow. Snowfoneers … wait —”
“I will go out there and see this thing if you two will shut up,” I said.
“Yes!” Cal started to head out. “You won’t regret this.”
I suited up. I didn’t know where Cal had found all this gear, but it didn’t all quite fit. I figured I wouldn’t need more than I wore shoveling. I’d only be out there for a little bit.
Jaclyn and I walked down the hall toward the stairs. “Why won’t Old Man Winter die already?” she asked.
“I know, everybody else does,” I said.
She stiffened and stopped. We were on the landing, halfway down the stairs, and with no electricity, the stairway was kind of dark. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Can it wait until I finish fixing that stupid kerosene heater?”
“No, actually. It can’t.” Jaclyn sounded serious.
“What’s up?
“Look, there’s no way for me to say this without sounding like a giant bitch, so I’m just going to say it. Just hear me out.” She sighed. “It’s been six months.”
I stopped on the landing, thinking about turning around and going back to my room. I’d been getting through the day, the last week or two really, pretty much okay. I didn’t need her bringing up what I knew she was going to bring up. “Oh, six months? Is that the time limit? I’m not allowed to be sad anymore because it’s been six months?”
“No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.”
I was so pissed, so frustrated, that I wanted to hit something. “We were engaged to be married. We’d been dating for almost five years. I’ve known JoBell since I was like five years old.”
“I knew my parents since I was born!” Jaclyn glared at me, fists at her side. She wasn’t backing down. “Other people have had losses too.”
“So?”
“So, believe me, I get it, you wanted to go numb at first. You threw yourself into work to distract yourself. But your friends want to be there for you. This whole town, or whatever it’s called, wants to help you. But you keep pushing everybody away.”
I leaned until my back hit the wall, and then I slid down to take a seat on the carpeted wood stairs. “You don’t understand,” I said.
“I don’t understand? Are you kidding me?” She spun away from me and started down the steps.
“There’s nothing left for me in this world!” I called after her.
She stopped and faced me. “Then maybe you find something to start living for. Instead of spending all your time thinking about all that’s been taken from you, maybe think about what you have left to give.”
It took a while, but eventually I got up and went out to the snow fort. Cal was right. This place was impressive. I’d heard it started out as a pile made from the snow everyone had shoveled again and again around the latrine cabin and the dining lodge. Some kids had started digging tunnels into the pile, and some of the tunnels were higher than others, so they began to hollow out different floors of the hill.
“This is genius,” I said when I walked onto the bottom floor, almost standing straight up. The kids had found half of an old pipe, about four feet long, but split open down the side like a little trough. They filled it with water, let it freeze, and then popped out ice poles, which were thick enough to act as a frame for the fort.
“Wright!” Cal called from above. “Get up here!”
Sweeney slid down a snow chute into the bottom room. “Dude, if we would have had this much snow as kids, we would have lived in the snow.”
“Don’t say that, Eric.” Becca came down the packed snow steps. “We almost did live in the snow.”
“So it’s held up with ice beams?” I said. “I’m not sure we would have figured all this out.”
Becca smiled. I hadn’t seen that much excitement in her eyes in a long time. “They linked some of their beams end to end, and then covered them in slush to freeze them together.”
I walked up the snow steps to the second floor. Jaclyn and TJ were talking there. I gave her a nod and a smile. I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d meant back there on the stairwell, and I wasn’t sure I could measure up to her expectations even if I did figure it out. But I could give it a try. It had been a long, terrible winter.