Years After Series | Book 1 | Nine Years After

by Clary, LeRoy

  Was it a punishment of some sort? If so, was the girl or horse being punished? On another farm, two boys and a dog herded the animals, mostly sheep, and a few goats, through a gate that took them into another area filled with taller grass. When they ate that, the grass in the first field would probably have grown tall enough to switch them back. That made sense.

  What I saw and understood, was that at every farm there were three, four, five, or more people. Farms seemed to need a lot of labor. The idea of a person living alone so we could capture and talk to him or her was not going to happen in the valley we watched.

  That is not to say it was time wasted. We only knew small things, often vaguely remembered from books, mostly schoolbooks that I’d avoided whenever possible. We didn’t have a lot of them in Deep Hole. Some were designated as schoolbooks, but we all knew they were from private collections. Our resources were so limited, we sometimes used repair manuals for study guides. The thing is; you make do with what you have.

  What Mayfield and I had since being banished was what we remembered and what we carried on our backs. Not much. There seemed to be little need for knowing the rules of a dozen games of poker, or where the best places were to hide when work assignments were being issued. The rest was knowledge gained from a society of only three hundred and whatever books our teacher could scrounge.

  On the positive side, I could read a repair manual and put the knowledge to work in repairing a lighting fixture or test the temperature of the water used to cool the little reactor that powered the entire sanctuary. If we had remained down there, my job would have probably evolved into the maintenance of it or other equipment.

  Mayfield said, “See anything interesting?”

  “I think we’re looking in the wrong place. These people work their farms, feed their animals, and don’t seem to do much of anything else. They live in large groups and the only travel they do is transporting crops or feed.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, there are a lot of other things I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Like?”

  I decided to tell her about the woman and the clothing she put on ropes. When finished, she was as puzzled as me, even after looking at the clothing hung on lines in neat rows. She swept the binoculars from side to side and finally handed them to me with a shrug. “What now?”

  “The man with the dog that chased us seemed to be alone.”

  She scowled. “You’re not suggesting we go back there, are you, Danner?”

  “No, but it suggests there may be more like him. Not everyone can be a farmer.”

  We watched until almost dark, when a group of similarly dressed men came down the road in two lines, side-by-side. All wore faded blue. At first, it was amusing to watch them coming our way, growing larger and clearer in the binoculars. They sang a song with a regular beat and their feet mostly were in unison as they struck the ground.

  Mayfield was watching, the binoculars to her eyes, when she gasped. “Those are weapons, rifles, on their backs. Each soldier is carrying one different, but I think we’re looking at an army.”

  I guessed there were twenty of them. There were a few who brought up the rear who rode horses. One man kicked his horse in the ribs and made it run ahead to a farm. The soldier leaped off his horse and talked with the farmer, then rode back, where he shouted words we couldn’t make out. The line of men turned and entered a field intended to hold livestock.

  Within minutes, they had tents set up and campfires blazing. Everything was orderly, even the rows of tents, and as the sun went down, they sat around and ate. We saw them talking and laughing.

  Mayfield said, “Interesting.”

  I turned to her. Of all the words she could have chosen, she said, interesting. That would have been far down on my list, so she must have figured something out. I asked, “Why?”

  “I’ve been thinking. You only have an army if there is another army to fight against.”

  Such a simple conclusion—and so accurate.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We watched them until dark, and after. None of the farmers came out to speak or interact with them. The soldiers remained isolated and that seemed telling—although what it told us was open to our interpretation.

  Nobody climbed the hillside of the ridge we hid behind, so it seemed we were safe enough. As the temperature dropped later in the evening, we found our tent navigating by starlight and climbed inside the warm sleeping bags. Mayfield complained about the cold and I thought about offering to climb into her sleeping bag with her and warm her up.

  I only thought about. I didn’t say it out loud.

  Considering all that had happened, running for our lives from the dog, locating a valley full of farmers, and then an army marching in as if on parade, my thoughts swirled with all the newness and unknowns. I laid on my back, eyes peering into the dim interior of the tent while considering moving my sleeping bag outside so I could watch the sky.

  There would be stars and the moon. Cool breezes. Cooler air to breathe, the air that was saturated with the smells of life: grass, leaves, trees, animals, and more. All that waited, all things I hadn’t smelled since seven, but all somehow familiar and welcome.

  My body refused to move. My eyelids closed for longer than the normal blink and I decided to allow them to rest for just a moment. When I opened them, sunlight shone through the thin material of the tent.

  Beside me, Mayfield still breathed in a regular rhythm. It struck me that to sleep with someone implied a kind of trust. She was helpless, yet totally at ease. Maybe she felt the same about me. Probably, I decided. After all, it was her sleeping and not me.

  Tiny needles fell from the trees above and collected on the outside of the tent, but when I listened closely, I could hear each one strike the thin material and sometimes hear it slide down to join the collection of others at the bottom. When the breeze puffed, the tent reacted by bowing in on one side, then a few seconds later a blizzard of the needles from the trees fell.

  To someone who had spent their life above ground, that might not seem important. Indeed, they might not even notice it. To me, it was wonderous.

  “What are you thinking about?” Mayfield asked in a groggy tone.

  “Nothing.” I was not going to admit where my mind had been and that it was fascinated by such a small thing when we had far more important things to resolve.

  She said, “Last night before I fell asleep, I had an odd thought.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Don’t take this wrong, but in a way, I’m almost glad they kicked us out, Danner. No, let me be entirely honest. I am glad. Down in the sanctuary, my brain was doing things in slow motion. If I made a mistake, oh, well. Tomorrow it might get corrected. Or later. Who cared?

  “And now?”

  “A mistake can kill us, or either of us. There is an immediacy we’ve never faced. It’s exciting.”

  “We may die today,” I responded, just to hear her argue.

  She didn’t answer for a long time. “Maybe. And it might be worth it. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “Completely. I was thinking earlier about how we’ve experienced more in a day of being out here than in our entire lives in Deep Hole. I feel alive out here.”

  She sat up and started wiggle out of her sleeping bag. There was no room to stand inside the tent, barely room to sit in the middle. The peak was waist high, but it was half again as long as our sleeping bags. Our packs were at our feet. She finally managed to free herself.

  She said, “I’ve got to pee.”

  Her saying that made me have to also. I crossed my ankles tightly and waited.

  She finally called, “Your turn. By the way, the army has gone.”

  After pulling on my boots and relieving myself on the trunk of a nearby tree, I went to join her on the top of the small hill that stood between us and the valley. We didn’t lay down again in the same spot because the grass was coated with a thin layer of water. It hadn’t
rained, but everything was damp and wet.

  She was right. The army had gone, probably while we slept the morning away. The sun was well up in the sky. The farmers were again working at one chore or another, many the same as the day before.

  Mayfield pointed. “Those soldiers came from the far end of the valley and were going up that way, along the same road we followed.”

  I nodded.

  She continued, “That’s where we came from, according to the map. We know there is nothing of interest up there but the entrance to Deep Hole. Our map indicates that the valley ends with a tall mountain.”

  That needed some time to work its way through my still-sleepy brain, but as it did, there was nothing contradictory I could find in her reasoning.

  The more I thought about it, the more curious I became. There was the remnant of the smaller road, steep sides of mountains, a river that boiled white as it raged down the canyon. A few burned cabins, one with a dog, others fallen in, or worse.

  In my mind, I remembered standing at the doorway to Deep Hole that first time. The hillsides were too steep to climb, the valley too deep to descend. To my left had been more mountains, and the ground rose to meet a single mountain that seemed to block the end of the valley.

  To my right, the ground had dropped and there was part of the old road. The river flowed that way. It was a natural way for us to travel. However, Mayfield was right. There was nothing else up there.

  If all that was true, why had the army gone in that direction? Perhaps we had assumed they continued in the same direction. The camp last night, as well as the trip, could have been training and today they returned home. That seemed reasonable.

  “Well?” she asked.

  While my mind wanted to answer in one way, my tongue said, “We should check. They may have gone back in the direction they arrived from, but what if they didn’t?”

  “What are you thinking, Danner?” Her voice was softer, sounding a little scared.

  How to put a completely unreasonable idea out there when it was going to sound like idiocy. Instead of thinking, I plunged right in, like jumping into a pool of ice water, as if I’d ever done that. “There is nothing up there but a couple of destroyed cabins, mountains too steep to climb, and the entrance to Deep Hole.”

  “That was my thinking.”

  “Look,” I tried to sound reasonable, “they may have gone back the way they came. In fact, that is probably what happened.”

  “It’s easy enough to check,” she said. “We can go back the way we came and cut a perpendicular course down the side of the mountain. If we don’t find their trail, they went another way so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “If we do find they went that way?”

  She gave me one of those looks that can spoil food. “We follow them, of course.”

  “Deep Hole isn’t our concern anymore. They kicked us out, remember?”

  “We still have almost three hundred friends down there. Well, maybe a couple of hundred, but they are the only ‘family’ we have. We might not get along with them all, but we don’t wish them harm.”

  “So, you do think the army is looking for them? Or for Deep Hole, I should say?”

  Mayfield turned away from me as she collected her thoughts, then said, “We have to know for sure.”

  I agreed. We had to know and there was only one way to gain that knowledge. We were going to follow the army and see where they went and what they did.

  If they returned the way they had arrived, we would continue with our original plans. I said, “Let’s gather our things and go see.”

  It didn’t take long. We wore our backpacks and carried our rifles in our hands as we slunk between trees, around shrubs, and untangled feet from clinging vines. Our destination was the east end of the valley where it narrowed, and the mountains rose steeper. If they went that way, it should be easy to locate evidence of their passing.

  It didn’t take long to find the rutted road or the little of it that remained. Not many people traveled that direction, again because there was nothing up the valley. Green grass almost knee-high grew where the original road had been. The grass was trampled down in twin rows.

  Ever observant, Mayfield pointed. “The grass is all bent forward, towards Deep Hole.”

  She was right. In their passing, booted feet had pushed the blades in the direction they walked, an interesting revelation and one that I should remember in the future. Even as I looked to confirm her observation, a few blades beaded with moisture were beginning to stand upright again.

  All that was well and good. Still, there was a nagging inside me that refused to be alleviated. The gist of my concern was not the banishment, but those left below. They were not getting the truth told to them, and I saw no way to correct that—or even if I could, would I? The moral dilemmas forced upon me continued to conflict.

  I wanted to strike back at our leadership. That was a fact. It was also true that those friends below should know the truth about the surface. It was not the desolate wasteland with mutated monsters roaming around in search of hapless humans. No matter how I tried to resolve the contradictory information, there were too many variables.

  Again, we didn’t have enough information to make qualified choices.

  Mayfield said, “Are you even listening to me?”

  “No,” I admitted. “My mind was on other things.”

  “Points for telling the truth, Danner. Take half of those points away for being stupid and putting us in danger while your mind is elsewhere,” she snapped. “Armies usually send out scouts ahead. Do they leave others behind to see if they are followed?”

  “If so, I’ve never heard of that.”

  “All the same, we shouldn’t go in their tracks. If nothing else, they may turn around, and we would run directly into them.”

  That was a good point. We could travel parallel and check on their passing from the tracks they left now and then. There was safety in the concealment of the trees. Besides, we didn’t care where they were going or what they were doing, unless it involved Deep Hole.

  My skeptical mind kicked in again. What if they tried to break into Deep Hole? The outer door was steel as thick as my hand, the locking mechanism six hardened steel rods twice as big around as my thumb. Same with the inner door that led to the stairs.

  It would take explosives to breach the doors—or not. Despite the doors being like those on bank vaults, the areas beside them were granite. Several feet thick, but still a single man with a hammer and chisel could carve out a new door, a tunnel, given enough time. Once in the ‘entrance hall’, another new tunnel could be chiseled for the inner door.

  The second would take an L-shaped tunnel to come out at the top of the stairs, but that wouldn’t be a problem. At the bottom of the stairs, the door was steel with a massive locking mechanism, but nothing like the other two.

  Small charges placed in holes drilled in the granite might clear three or four inches of rock with each explosion. I could imagine the first door being bypassed in a week with explosives.

  Okay, I’d convinced myself that an army, or even one dedicated individual, could break into Deep Hole—but then another problem arose. Why? I had to ask myself why would the twenty soldiers we’d seen the day before care a wit about the three-hundred of us living down there?

  The easy answer was that they didn’t.

  My imagination had gone berserk. Mayfield’s, too. We were paranoid. The troops ahead were on an unrelated mission. I relaxed as much as possible, considering the circumstances.

  Mayfield was leaning closer and watching my eyes. “Back with me, Danner? For real?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re going to have to share with me what you were thinking so intently about.”

  “Mostly that you are paranoid and may have gone berserk.” I flashed her my winning smile and mentally praised my quick humor.

  She didn’t buy it. She said, “Don’t try to joke your way out of this. I think yo
u were just telling me the truth. I’m scared too.”

  That’s why she was so much smarter. That and her BS detector when it concerned me was extraordinarily accurate. I said, “We’ll talk later. Right now, let’s follow them.”

  When they paused for the noon meal, we came abreast of them. A quick count revealed they were all there but the horsemen. There were no horses, either. Sarge would be sorely disappointed in us if we were in that army group and we were in charge and didn’t put out at least four sentries, one in each direction.

  We were on a hillside above them, on a rise that put us fifty feet higher. We wiggled and settled in behind a rotting log so big I couldn’t circle it with both arms if it was still standing. I cut a small bush with my knife, slicing instead of chopping, and stuck it in the trunk. It was smaller than my little finger went into the rotted wood easily, the bush stood upright in front of my face.

  Behind that little bush, I could see the soldiers. They couldn’t see me, even if they looked right at my location. Mayfield duplicated my feat.

  We were learning. More importantly, we were beginning to use our heads.

  There was little enough to see. Twenty men in a rough circle in a clearing, talking and joking. They were close enough that even a whisper might be overheard, so we remained quiet. While fragments of their conversations drifted up to us, most of it meant little.

  The four men or guard duty were not there. Everyone was together as if on a picnic. My immediate thought was that they didn’t think an enemy was nearby.

  There was one guy, though. His voice was higher pitched, and he talked loudly. We heard every word in the quiet of the forest. The problem was that he was damn funny and intent on entertaining the others. He told a story about an ugly girl and a mule that stuttered when it talked, and I had to claw my fingernails into my forearm to hurt enough that I didn’t burst out laughing.

  The story was a good one. The man that told it was hilarious. It’s that sort of thing that goes wrong and ruins the best of plans. Something always goes wrong.