The Silent Years [The Complete Collection]

by Jennifer R. Povey

  Nonetheless, Helen walked into the square and over to the gallows. The platform and upright were already constructed, but the 'branch' of the tree had not yet been put in place. Did anyone know how to tie a noose anymore? She rather doubted it. Maybe they wouldn't even manage to hang the person. On the other hand, the only alternative she could think of was a firing squad.

  They couldn't afford the ammo. That was the coldest thought she had ever had in her life. What value a human life?

  It should be more...

  "Mayor!"

  She turned at the call. Three people were walking into the square, two men and a naked girl. She was not Silent, and glanced around, her entire form tense, ready to bolt.

  "Found this wildling skulking around one of my barns. Stealing food, you know. She seems to be on her own."

  That was not usual. Wildlings ran in packs like dogs. In fact, dogs often ran with the wildling packs. Maybe that was a modern reflection of the old bond between children and puppies. "What's your name?" she asked gently.

  "Irene."

  "Did you get separated from your friends?"

  She nodded. "Bad men took them."

  Helen was suddenly alert. "Silents?"

  "No. Men." Irene made the distinction clearly. "Men who wanted children."

  Helen had heard of that. It was fairly common for some people to try to forcibly civilize the wildlings. "Do you want to stay here? It's not very safe to be alone."

  Irene glanced at the men, then at Helen. "Who would I belong to?"

  "We'll work that out." There would be no shortage of couples willing to take her in, especially as she seemed...tame enough.

  "I don't want to belong to anyone."

  "I know that. But...you're better off here than most places. Trust me, girls aren't property here."

  "Children are property everywhere." The wilding was highly articulate.

  Helen realized Irene was highly intelligent. "We can try and find your friends."

  The wilding shook her head. "More bad men than you. They'll beat you up and take your kids as well."

  "Where was this?" That came from one of the men.

  "Two days south. Maybe three, for you." The girl sounded proud of herself. "In tents," she added.

  "Some kind of scavenging expedition," Helen said. "I doubt there are really that many of them." Irene, after all, had not seen everyone here.

  "Two tens, at least," Irene supplied.

  "Then not more of them..." But too many for the adult population to want to take on at once. What did they do? "We need a war council. Go. I'll look after the kid."

  Irene relaxed visibly as the two men left. "You won't let us go either."

  Helen shook her head. "We don't keep anyone by force, even wildlings. But you might want to stay."

  "I want to be free."

  "So do I. And those men might decide to try and make us all less free." And they had lost their best tracker and suffered from tension and division. Milkins, in his bid to be sheriff, would shift the community’s power structure. Had Stephanie been murdered solely to encourage them to reinstate the police? She had always had mixed feelings about police.

  "Why?"

  "You said it yourself. They're bad men. Come on." Helen began to walk up the street, and was relieved when the girl followed instead of bolting.

  "Where are we going?" Irene asked, keeping a bit of distance.

  "To get a decent meal. I'm sure you haven't had one in two days." Helen heard a faint rumble from the girl’s stomach.

  "I haven't...eaten."

  "Then let's fix that before we talk any more about people belonging to people and any of its implications." The quickest way to get the kid fed was to take her to Sandy's. It would also get a few stares, but there was no way she was taking her home. She could already think of three families who could handle another child.

  "Okay." She stared a bit. "So tidy."

  "We do our best. It's always good to be clean."

  The girl looked down at herself, as if realizing she was not clean.

  "We'll fix that, too." But who did she see as she stepped into the tavern but...Milkins.

  His eyes drifted over her, then rested on the girl. "Taking in strays?"

  She shrugged. "Patrol found her." Then, with a certain reluctance: "We'll talk later." She did not want to, but Milkins might be useful in dealing with the 'bad men'… if he was not in league with them.

  Sadly, that was quite possible. But he turned to Irene and, with surprising gentleness, said: "What's your name?"

  "Irene," she said with a faint hesitation.

  "You should stick around. Beats being out in the wild any day of the week."

  She looked dubious. But then, she seemed to notice the smell from the kitchen. She was drawn that way as a magnet attached was to her nose. "Mmmmm."

  In fact, she actually made it all the way to the door, nobody having the heart to stop her. Helen heard laughter from within.

  "Just the one?"

  "Somebody apparently snagged the rest of the group. The usual thing," Helen noted. "Except they're camped about, oh, forty miles away, tops. Big group, and all men."

  The expression on Milkins' face was unmistakable. He turned utterly pale. Then, he fled the room.

  Helen stared after him, then followed. She was fairly sure Irene was in good hands at this point.

  He was running for the corrals, utter fear on his face.

  "Thomas Milkins. Stop." She used her best command voice, practiced from years in court.

  He ignored her. He grabbed his horse, untying it quickly, but by this point others had seen. If he wanted to ride off, he would have to ride somebody down.

  "What the hell is going on... Pardon me, ma'am." That came from the harsh-spoken, but soft-hearted Vernon.

  "I don't know," Helen admitted. "Are those your friends, Tom, or your enemies?"

  He sat there, one hand on the reins, the other drifting to his gun. Then, he seemed to think better off it, and instead shifted his off hand to the saddle horn. "I don't know any more."

  Helen took a deep breath. "Get down, Milkins."

  Wonder of wonders, he slid to the ground. The horse snorted with faint frustration. Perhaps it had been looking forward to a bit of a run. Slowly, Tom lifted his hands a little.

  "I don't know what to do."

  "What you can do is come back to Sandy's, have a glass of applejack, and tell us what the heck is going on."

  He followed, but she could see the tension within him. Like Bruceton had felt over the last few weeks. Tom Milkins was about to fly apart.

  Once at Sandy’s, Milkins sank into a chair. Helen flagged down a waitress, sending her off for applejack. "Your former friends?"

  "I thought I could hand them this place on a platter."

  "Coolemees?"

  "Not...quite. We reckoned we could put the old state of West Virginia back together, but under a...different rule of life."

  "Patriarchal."

  "Isn't that the way of most of the world, now? Wasn't it that way before, even if we didn't want to admit it?"

  She could not tell him he was wrong. "So, what changed?"

  "Max murdered Stephanie. She heard us talking." He inhaled, then exhaled. "There, now I've betrayed my partner."

  "Because you disagreed that he should have killed her."

  "She was a girl. It could have been handled differently...except you breed strong minded women here."

  "I'll take that as a compliment."

  "We thought we could take, what, twenty five men? But hell, you'd have everyone over ten fighting."

  "Of course we would. How can you really afford not to?"

  "We don't get as many incursions further south, I guess more of the Silents were killed in the early days."

  She still swore they were breeding. "Even so. This isn't a world, a life, in which you can dismiss anyone's potential. So. You changed sides because Max was an idiot."

  "And because..." He paused. "You
hate me, but you still want me to be sheriff."

  "That's just keeping friends close, enemies closer," she quipped. Or was it? She could not let feelings get in the way. "That and, dammit, you could have done the job."

  "And now nobody here can trust me, nobody there can. I'll leave," he offered.

  "Oh no. You don't get off the hook that easily. You're going to help us, Milkins. For Stephanie's sake."

  He downed his applejack. "No. No, for my own."

  She found herself smiling. Just a little.

  -#-

  They hanged Max within a day. It was done properly: he died quickly, his body cut down and burned.

  Tom watched it, emotionless. "I can't decide whether he deserved that or not."

  Helen had signed off on the hanging in the end. "Hard to tell. But we had little choice. If we'd exiled him, he'd have run straight to your old friends with every detail of our defenses. And we can't afford to keep him locked up."

  Tom was not locked up. He was just under watch. He was going nowhere without an armed escort, although she had let him keep his own gun. Both of Tom’s escorts had faster draws.

  "Point. I still think you're going to win this fight."

  What fight did he mean? For the future? Helen would never trust Tom. He had as much admitted he had switched to the winning side. He'd probably end up leaving of his own accord once this was over. She would not stop him. She knew how he would end up—dead in a ditch somewhere.

  Should she have done something about him after all? No. Not until he had convicted himself. "Why did you try to run?"

  "Because I didn't want to be on either side. You made me choose." That was an allegation. Tom did not, quite, whine when he said it.

  "You put yourself in the fix. If you had any real loyalty to anyone except Tom Milkins..." Everything he had done and said made more sense now. He wasn't just a misogynist; he had been trying to put the women where they could not fight back. The village owed such a debt to Irene.

  She gave herself the last word by walking off, headed for one of the few places she could look out into the woods without risking being eaten by Silents.

  Tom had told them everything about these people. Tight leadership, male dominated, a focus on producing as many children as possible. Since Tom’s former community had started having children earlier than Bruceton Mills did, they had not found all of the children to be immune. That pain and darkness would haunt humanity, perhaps forever.

  Probably their daughters would not name their children until they spoke their first word, for until they did the children could not be considered human. No more than the body that now burned had been human.

  They faced a different, old kind of inhumanity now. The kind that had caused women to kill their own infants, or let them be killed, or leave them out with the garbage in the hope somebody who could afford to feed them would pick them up.

  Helen could stand the thought no longer. She walked away, considering drowning her thoughts in applejack. Of all things, she missed whiskey. Plain, ordinary whiskey. She had always preferred Irish, especially on a winter day. Maybe somebody was making some, somewhere. If she could find some, it would be a memory of the life she had once had. A life in which she had not been an accomplice in the death of a man, even if Max had been a murderer. The taste it left was dry; it called for something to wash it away.

  She resorted to cider. Less likely to make her develop 'problems,' but she was no longer sure one drink could do that. Tom's face, Stephanie's, all of their faces blurred together and became the accusing face of Max Sorensen.

  She had had no choice. Silent faces accused her too. Not human. None of them human. She remembered...

  ...fleeing Washington, on foot, her car abandoned. Fleeing as what had been the capital of the United States destroyed itself. The cities had suffered the worst: too many people, too close together.

  ...stealing a car and driving west until she ran out of gas, then on foot. How had she even ended up in West Virginia? She no longer knew, no longer remembered, no longer cared.

  Yet, she remembered looking out of the window of her tiny apartment. The lights, the streaks of traffic below. The sounds, the horns blowing, engines backfiring. Even the occasional shot was just a part of it all. Sandy's was suddenly too quiet. The quiet of the small town. The quiet of the eye of the hurricane.

  The quiet of the grave.

  Had she failed after all? Would they be better off not resisting? Helen considered. Unwed women would be forced into marriage with the men who best deserved the “privilege.” Those wildlings would probably be beaten and broken. The memory of Irene asking 'who will I belong to?' popped into Helen’s mind.

  No, Irene was just being a child. She did not truly fear slavery, surely? That was not really happening, just another attempt to deal with the wildling problem the way most wanted to deal with it. To make the lost boys grow up.

  Lost girls. For some reason, more of the wildlings were girls. Maybe girls were tougher. Irene, her face tough, untrusting, yet desperately wanting to belong to somebody.

  No, belong with somebody. Belong to was slavery. With was family. Could she really get the difference across to the girl? Helen wasn't sure.

  The wind shifted, now it came from the south. Helen fancied it carried with it the scent of violence, of iron, of gunfire. Yet, they did not know for sure that these men would be hostile.

  She shook her head. It was all in her own imagination. The breeze had opened her door, which faced south.

  She stood up and stepped outside, taking a deep breath to establish exactly what was on the wind. There was nobody on the streets at all. No sound except silence.

  For a moment, she flashed back to that journey, to times when she had wondered if she was the last woman on Earth. Once she had appreciated solitude. Now she feared it. The younger generations feared it more. Or perhaps those who did not fear it remained alone in the wild. Not all wildlings were packs of children. There were adult loners too.

  Some of them had probably gone nuts. Was Helen going nuts?

  No. She just needed a break. Once the crisis was over, she was going to take one, whether they wanted her to or not.

  She had to.

  -#-

  "I don't know, Helen." John Mark's voice was soft and uncertain.

  She leaned on the council table, her chin resting on her hands. "If we had not done hanged him, then people would have mutinied. You could see it in their eyes. But the fact that we have..."

  "It sets a precedent."

  "Does it? We've never had a murder before. Whatever we did would be a precedent." She looked up at him. He seemed very tired, face drawn and hair stark white. She did not want to think about what she looked like...she seldom did on a good day, knowing she looked awful most of the time. Once, she had had better teeth, better hair and, of course, makeup. She knew she now looked like an old woman.

  "Even so, we have never instituted the death penalty."

  "Haven't we? I'm betting some of those we've exiled didn't make it. And don't tell me that's different. We've done everything we can to stay American..." She tailed off.

  "America doesn't exist anymore." Mark gave that pronunciation clearly but with surprisingly little bitterness.

  "I can't disagree with you." She looked at him again. Yes, he definitely looked old. But he also had a strength to him. She needed that strength some days and now was one of them. Maybe it was because he still, despite everything, managed to believe in God. She had lost that. She suspected there were entire settlements that were based on seeking God's forgiveness for the sins of the past. Sins of unsanctioned lust, when the real sin of the past was pride.

  "There's only what we have built here, and if we keep raising the kids right, we'll keep it. That's what worries me about that. Does it teach them anything but vengeance?"

  Helen considered that. "Maybe, maybe not. It's not like they're like the kids before. Heck, next to the kids before, they aren't kids at all."

>   "You've got a point there. We're making them grow up too quickly." Mark finally sat down next to her. "This is enough to make me go find something potent and drown my thoughts."

  "I tried that. All it did was make me miss good beer." She made a wry face at him.

  "It's rum I miss," he admitted. "But I bet the thing most people here miss are washing machines."

  "Yes!" She glanced towards the window. "One day we'll get it all back."

  "But will we make the same mistakes?" He started to stand up, apparently determined to have the last word.

  She was not about to let him. Except the best she could come up with, for all of her effort and thinking was: "I hope not."

  Chapter Six

  The next day, one of the patrols did not come back. They were working in pairs now. She wished she could let Tom advise them, but she could not trust him. He was not a good man.

  Had the Silents or those strangers attacked the missing patrol? They would probably never know. Two good men and horses gone. John Mark walked through the streets, making sure everyone down to the teenagers was armed. Even some of the pre-teens had slingshots or the like and the will to use them.

  That was what this world had done to them. There were no children. Only adults who had not yet reached their full size and strength.

  So why did they seem so much happier than the kids she remembered. The kids who had wandered around in black, spouting emo poetry. It had been fashionable to be unhappy, for that generation — the last before the plague. They had embraced disaster, expected it, and gotten it.

  Perhaps it was for the best. What kind of world would such children have built when it finally came time for them to rule it? Who knew? Some of them would probably never have grown up. Before it had been too easy to stay a child one's entire life.

  Helen, though considered a full grown adult, had really been a child before the day she realized the plague would not remain isolated in a small town in Washington state.

  As far as she knew, the plague had gone global. India, China, Japan, were all as bad off as here, if not worse. Africa might be better off. Mexico probably belonged to the Mayans once more, safe in their small villages. The poor would inherit the earth; those who had had nothing would be at the front of the renaissance. Or would they?