by Clary, LeRoy
It was short and abrupt. I told them that what we did was for the other three-hundred people down there, not them, that if I ever saw any one of them in the future, I’d shoot them on sight and if I didn’t have a gun, I’d slit their throats.
Mayfield added, “If I see any of you instead of Danner, I will not shoot you. I’ll make your death linger for days. I’ll make you beg for a bullet.”
We didn’t say good-bye. Mayfield pointed at the door and we left, closing it softly. As Mitch and Adam had suggested, we spent an hour digging and replanting shrubs and small trees in front of it. Dirt and rocks covered the bottom edge, hiding the shape of the door. We went up on the hill above and used our feet to push branches and bushes ripped from the ground down in front, hoping to make it look like they had fallen there in a small landslide.
In the moonlight, the door was completely hidden. Hopefully in the sunlight, it would be the same. Then we walked the area side-by-side, removing every gun, tent, and whatever else that indicated the soldier had camped there. We buried it all in a shallow ravine. We filled in the firepits and kicked the rocks aside to natural-looking positions.
Mayfield turned to me. “We’ve done a lot more for them than those below did for us when you think about it.”
“In the morning, we might find a few things we missed. Make a final pass over it all.”
“In the morning, I will already be down this mountain. Whatever we missed will be covered with the next rain. I’m done here.”
The hardness in her tone was tinged with sadness and anger. Between us, we’d killed eighteen men. I refused to think about them, their families, the futures that would never arrive, and hundreds of other things. Which is similar to being told to stop thinking about pink elephants, so that’s all you can think about. A child’s game.
We walked under starlight and crystal-clear skies down the remains of the road with no destination in mind except to put distance between our old home and us. We had done far too much thinking and killing for one day. Our minds had gone into a sort of hibernation and overload. We walked until the sky was getting lighter with the dawn. Then we moved off the old road a hundred steps and spread our sleeping bags where the ground felt soft under our feet. No fire. No tent. No sleep for either of us until well after the sun came up.
Mayfield woke up screaming in terror twice.
I didn’t scream. I cried. Again, and again. Almost endlessly sobbing.
Somewhere around mid-day, I sat up, exhausted, my mind dull and numb.
Mayfield was not in sight.
Calling out to her was a bad idea in our situation because there was no telling who else might hear me, so I waited.
She came back, walking slowly, eyes red and puffy, and she refused to look directly at me.
I said gently, “We did what we had to.”
“And now we never need to speak of it again.”
That was her way. It had happened. We did our part. If we had not, the results would have been far worse. It was over. Now, we would never speak of it.
That was not my way. While I may not speak of it to her, I would remember the red splashes as my bullets hit their chests. The way they crumbled and fell. How they lay in death, their bodies in positions unlike none while alive. Their dull eyes looked at me in horror, so I had rolled the bodies face down onto the tarp we used to drag them.
Without realizing it, I had made sure each one was face down. It was the only way I could do what we had to. However, my internal horrors didn’t end there. The bodies were sealed in the entrance to Deep Hole where their bodies would rot. If anyone from below tried to leave, they would encounter the remains.
And there were the unknowns I feared, those I created. Wives, families, children, parents, all of whom would wait for an eternity for those we killed to return to them. Inside, I bled for them.
Mayfield could order us not to talk about it, but I knew her. She would wake with her nightmares and fears as many tears would fall from my eyes. Years from now, if we survived, we would both wake in cold sweats and beg forgiveness to unknown gods with the only excuse being it would have been worse if we had done nothing.
How many others in the past had faced the same dilemma? Probably tens of thousands. That didn’t make it any easier.
Mayfield intentionally stepped directly in front of me and stood a few inches away. She said, “What now?”
The valley that was filled with farms was right ahead. We were still unsafe because of our new clothing, which still appeared new despite washing them with ash, and our pale skins that hopefully didn’t stink as bad as before. There was also our lack of knowledge of the surface. We had so much to learn. There seemed only one good answer.
I said, “The lake.”
“I thought so, too.”
Another daunting climb back over the mountainside, to reach the edge of the water in the meadow where we had spent the night waiting for Mitch’s brother. There, we could build a campfire, drink clear water, and be relatively safe. We could also learn and experience life above ground, and we could let our skins brown in the sun.
There was more to discuss—a lot more. Plans to be made. Major decisions to explore.
Mayfield still stood expectantly in front of me, her shoulder slumped, her lower lip trembling.
Those physical things were uncontrollable. I probably looked no better.
She said we would never speak of the long night of killing, as my mind called it. I placed my arms around her and rested my chin on her shoulder as she silently wept. By the time she finished, I imagined her shoulder was wet from my tears.
She pushed herself away, turned without meeting my eyes, and took an unsteady step east. Before long, we were again climbing the small mountain, using a different set of game trails and natural breaks in the forest to move ahead.
Unlike before, I glanced behind us several times, searching for signs of our passing, or others following. There were many indications we’d left. Too many. I started stepping over soft mud and places that would leave tracks. Instead of pushing through thickets or dead branches that would snap off and tell of our passing, I went around.
It was not much. But it was a beginning. A growing awareness.
My legs had been stiff in the morning but now seemed to have already gained some strength. I wouldn’t walk all day like Mitch for a long time, but as we slowly climbed the mountain, a sense of pride welled. When we reached the crest, not the same place as the first time, but with just as magnificent a view, we sat beside each other and looked out over the valley.
I pulled the binoculars out and we shared them, fascinated by what would seem the smallest things to those people below. Horses and cows looked much the same at first, the cows were chubbier. They moved differently.
People worked hard at tasks we didn’t understand. Three people at one farm crawled on their knees down rows of plants, selecting some and pulling them from the ground. They discarded them in the rows where they knelt. How and why were beyond me.
Some cows were kept closer to the houses. Dogs often moved with sheep, and at times barked and directed them. Why the sheep obeyed dogs was another mystery nobody had ever explained to us. There were many things to watch and wonder about. We talked and reasoned out some, but others remained.
On one farm, two men gathered dead grass and piled it high on a wagon that transported it into a large building, only to return to the grassland in the empty wagon and the process was repeated. The most interesting thing was watching the people that rode horses. That was something I wanted to try.
We searched diligently for any signs of another army or members of it. There was a lot of time left in the day, so we watched the upper end of the valley closely for anyone going in the direction of Deep Hole and saw none.
Taking Mitch’s advice, we decided to make our skin darker. During the afternoon, we took turns napping, using our uniform tops to lie on, and the bare skin of our upper bodies soaked in the warm sun. By late afternoon when
we were ready to travel back to the river and our camping spot, our skin had turned from white to red. Not all of it. Our armpits were still white, and we joked about it as we walked. Instead of turning brown, we turned red.
The later in the day it got, the more my skin tingled, then it began hurting. Mayfield complained, too. By the time we reached the campsite, we were walking with our arms held out from our bodies and the shirts rubbed our skin raw and painful. After setting up the tent, we crawled inside our sleeping bags.
Sleep didn’t come despite our need for it.
It was not only the remembrance of the battle and how easily either of us could have died. Nor was it the killing. It was because our bodies had burned red. The slightest touch was agony. Since we’d exposed our fronts and backs to the sun, both were burned. That left us no side to lay on.
I sat and tried to sleep. Didn’t work. There was no position to be that didn’t hurt in some manner. Laying on my left side hurt less than any other side, so I tried to remain motionless, but as soon as I dozed off, my body shifted, and I woke again in agony.
From the tossing and turning beside me, Mayfield was no better off.
The night passed slowly, with me catching a snatch of sleep here and there.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Our skins were brighter red in the morning. Not the tan color we expected. It hurt worse. When a finger touched our skin, it momentarily turned white, then red again. No matter what position I tried, it hurt, and I couldn’t get comfortable. Wearing a shirt was unbearable.
Mayfield acted and talked as if our situation was somehow my fault, with grunts, growls, evil stares, and once she curled her lip in my direction as if she smelled raw sewage. In her mind, the situation was somehow my fault.
When the sun fully came up, we remained in our tent, out of the direct sunlight, in misery and fits of restless sleep all morning. Somewhere around the middle of the day, I went to the river to get a drink and wadded in. The coldness of the water felt wonderful. I sat on the muddy bottom and let the soothing water rise to my chin.
Only then, did I call out to Mayfield and invite her to join me. We spent the afternoon in the water under the shade of a tree that had branches that looked like they were limp, and the slightest breeze moved them with calming swaying.
We sat in the chest-deep cool water and talked of everything and nothing but avoided one subject as if the words would curdle in our mouths. No matter, my mind kept thinking of the slaughter, as I began to describe it.
There in the water, we talked of going east to join Mitch and his family. In the future, we might do that. We decided to guard the entrance to Deep Hole for a few more days as a precaution, as soon as our skin condition allowed us to move around. We assumed it was a temporary redness or Mitch would have warned us. He should have warned us anyhow.
It seemed to us that since it had taken one day to get ourselves burned red it should heal in one. We only had to put up with the pain for the remainder of the day.
We slept a lot. Ate little. And avoided all direct sunlight for two more days and it still hurt.
The redness faded slowly. We returned to a more normal color, although not as white as before. Mayfield suggested we go over the mountain and check on the sanctuary entrance one last time, as well as searching the grounds near it for anything we may have missed in the dark. She said, “Then, we can watch from up on top where we got burned from the sun.”
“A place in the shade up there,” I added.
The trip back seemed longer. We found no signs of others visiting, but in the area where they had camped, and around it, we found dozens of items we’d missed. A shirt hung on a branch, a battered rifle leaning against a tree, and more.
As if to complement our cleaning, the sky turned dark gray on the way back up the side of the mountain and before we reached our tent, rain fell. We knew what it was from books. Nowhere in those books had it said how cold it would be, or that once wet and cold it was almost impossible to get warm.
We spent two more days and nights in the tent while the rain fell at a steady rate. The ground under us became soggy but the tent remained watertight. The fire went out. Boredom took over before dark of the first day. By the end of the second, I was ready to wrestle Mayfield for the right to stay inside while the loser went out. No less than three major fights broke out, and we refused to speak to each other for hours at a time.
The good thing about the rain was that it would wash away footprints and where the soldiers had made camp. It rinsed the top of the ground and returned it to pristine as if we’d never been there. Our people were safe, for now. We huddled inside the sleeping bags because we had no wood for a fire and besides, the rain would have put it out again.
When the sun finally appeared, it was near the middle of the third day. Steam rose off the ground. Within an hour, the surface was reasonably dry. We went in search of firewood.
Thinking there might be drier wood higher up, we walked to the top of the next hill to the east. It was not a long walk, perhaps ten minutes and too far to carry wood back in quantity, but we wanted to stretch our legs and explore.
At the top of the next hill, we found no wood, but someone had. In the valley on the other side, a column of white smoke rose. We moved closer, careful to stay hidden and watch for dogs. Two people, a man, and a woman moved about gathering firewood, stringing a line between two trees, and hanging their wet clothing to dry on low branches. We watched them do other tasks we didn’t recognize, and a few we did.
They were older than us, but not by much. The man had broad shoulders and a heavy black beard that hung to his chest. He was a bull of a man. Instead of carrying smaller firewood, he hauled a log twenty feet long and placed it next to the fire. That brought up a hundred questions in my head, such as why expend the energy to chop it into smaller pieces when there was other wood available?
The woman was tall, thin, and moved with a confident quickness that I admired. She never seemed to trip, stumble, or be unsure in her actions. Everything was fluid. Smooth.
A single rifle leaned against a tree near the tent they had set up, which was not a tent, but a sagging rope between two trees and a patched tarp tossed over it. Everything looked well-used. The tarp was patched and sewn with large stitches that were clear from our vantage. It was faded, as were the pieces of material used for the repairs.
It suddenly struck me that with the EMP event and the war, all computers had ceased instantly. That included those used in manufacturing. Factories, where things like material were made. They quit forever. Without computer chips, distribution to far-off markets because air, rail, and trucks all came to an abrupt halt. There were no “new” cloth or materials created, no raw ingredients to make finished products.
After nine years, every scrap of cloth available had been used up, repurposed, and made to serve other purposes. That brought up the question of what would happen to the aging material after nine more years?
It was not only material. It was everything. The rifles the army we’d killed were pathetic, as were their bullets. When brass shells were no longer available, people would probably revert to waxing paper to keep out moisture and keep the powder dry, and those would be only bullets. Either that or load the muzzles with powder and ram lead bullets or balls down the barrel after, one shot at a time.
Civilization was rapidly reverting to what it had been a hundred and fifty years earlier. However, the people didn’t have the basic skills of those a hundred-and-fifty years earlier.
As we watched, I argued with myself. We, as a race, had a long way to go to rising to the level of a hundred-and-fifty years ago. Who knew how to make steel these days? Or navigate without GPS? Or to the other extreme, make a pencil?
Which was one of the mysteries I’d once tried to solve while in school. Just how did they get lead into the center of a wooden pencil? We had more than a few pencils in Deep Hole, but when they were finally gone—who could make more?
Mayfield touched my sho
ulder and indicated we should move away from the smoke and camp. I followed her. When we were near our camp, we paused and she said, “What now? We can’t build a fire, or they might see or smell the smoke because they are so close.”
“What if they pack up their things in the morning and continue to wherever they are going, and walk right into our camp along the way?” Asking that was just to let Mayfield know that I was thinking ahead, too. Sort of re-establishing our pecking order with me nearer the top.
She was at the top. We both knew it, but it was like my duty to continually push her. It had always been that way with us. I pushed, she excelled. She pushed, I tried to do better.
I said, “We have about a dozen problems if they discover us, none of them good.”
Her eyes meaningfully fell to the pistol on my hip.
They were innocent people. I said, “If we circle their campsite at a distance, we should find where they came from. Their back trail. It would be logical to assume they are not going back to the same place, so we could set up a temporary camp there and be safer.”
She gave me a vapid smile, the sort that an adult gives a child who says something silly like ‘I think water can flow uphill’ or ‘I think I can see in the dark.’ The adult knows it is not true, but instead of telling the child he or she is wrong or silly, lets it go on while wearing the same smile Mayfield now wore.
“What?” I asked.
“Suppose they came up here for a day or two to hunt a deer or catch fish for their family. This afternoon, they might return home and if they do that, they will certainly use the same path they used to get here—and then they will find us if we are camped there.”
“Then, how do we protect ourselves?”