Years After Series | Book 1 | Nine Years After

by Clary, LeRoy

  “So?” I asked.

  “We showed ourselves all day long, erected our tent in the open, and fed the fire at night a time or two to keep it going. We always had our guns nearby in the daytime, the rifles places where he would see them.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “He could have, and he probably planned to come at you while you slept in the middle of the night as he did to those others.”

  Tess said with a sternness in her voice I hadn’t heard before, “Leave him alone, Cap. He’s figured out most of it and knows there’s something fishy about our story. Danner, we never slept in our tent. We entered one end and out the other, where it was under that tree. We slept under that cedar you and I talked about. The lower branches hung almost to the ground and hid us.”

  Cap took over the explanation. “One of us was awake at all times. That’s why we added wood to the fire all night, so we could see him when he came for us. We wanted him to come creeping into our camp. We’d have shot him dead right there.”

  “What if it wasn’t him?” Mayfield asked.

  “Let me give you both some advice about the world as it exists today. Never, and I mean never, enter the camp of others without calling out and introducing yourself first. There are several reasons to sneak into a camp—none of them good.” Cap ended the conversation with that.

  For me, that was a good lesson. I would remember to call out.

  It also told me Cap and Tess were far more dangerous than we had believed. They had set a trap that the killer was ready to trip—until I stumbled into their plans. The madman probably wanted to kill Mayfield and I, along with Cap and Tess. Collect a trophy from each of us to remind himself how important he was.

  They hadn’t asked how we’d come out on top in our battle with him. That was a little odd, but they would think about it and come to us sooner or later. The idea that a pair of inept fools fresh up from the bowels of the earth could encounter such a deceptive animal and emerge winners must be answered.

  While I trusted them, and believed their story, holding back a little information is a measure of my nature. When playing poker, one of my favorite hands is a pair as my hole cards, the smaller denomination the better. Drawing that third one to give me three of a kind is where a player had to learn to keep his face slack, prevent his eyes from twitching, and his posture must remain loose—while inside doing happy mental backflips.

  A stray reaction or smile, a shift to a more aggressive position, or even the eyes becoming more active can be noticed by the other players and they will drop out, leaving you to win a small hand instead of a large one. It’s when they have a strong hand, say a pair of kings, and believe they hold the winner that’s what makes the game.

  Nothing beats the owner of the kings trying—and succeeding—in forcing me to match his bets, again and again, all the while, knowing he will eventually lose the hand. One stray word from me will blow the potential rewards. He must believe he has a better hand.

  For some reason, dealing with Tess and Cap was much the same. Bragging about the roundhouse kick of Mayfield’s that had leveled the killer might make them watch us closer and be wary of us instead of thinking us incompetent. For now, I lagged far behind, intentionally stumbled over exposed roots, and complained while wearing our new army clothing and carrying the new backpacks that made us stand out like the moon among the stars at night.

  It was like bluffing. Holding back our prowess with accurate shooting and unarmed fighting until needed. We might never need to display our cards.

  Nothing they had done outwardly alarmed me. They had been good to us.

  It boils down to trust, again.

  I don’t give it. People earn it. It takes time.

  Mayfield had it. We didn’t agree on things a lot of the time, even when it counted, we often disagreed, but we always trusted each other.

  I walked along, tripping and stumbling while watching the birds in the trees flit from branch to branch. A squirrel leaped from one tree to another. All I could think of was what would happen if it missed? Just once. It seemed a stupid chance to take.

  One bird, black one with red wings kept pace with us for a while and scolded me. It may have been scolding the others, but I had the distinct idea it was directing its ire my way. I might be criticized for not watching my surroundings closely enough, but not if the other person understood that I’d never seen a bird until a little over a week ago was explained. A black bird with bright red wings raised all sorts of questions. There were hundreds of new things to see with every step and I wanted to observe them all.

  Cap took us along the edge of the wide valley where we caught glimpses of the farms below between the trees and dense undergrowth. He never allowed us to be seen. The distance was such that dogs didn’t catch scent us and start barking. We moved like ghosts.

  Later in the day, when the sun was past its peak, we paused and ate more beef jerky and he explained we were going to travel the road because there were no other options. The landscape was changing. I’d been obsessing about our clothing and how it stood out. He shared my thoughts.

  “Here’s what we can do. At the next stream, we’ll smear mud on your pants. Trade shirts with us, and we’ll get some mud on them, too. Your backpacks have to go. They are too distinctive. Carry your things inside a rolled sleeping bag, tied with twine. We have twine you can use.

  “Our guns?” Mayfield asked.

  He shook his head sadly. “Sorry. The holsters are beautiful and practical. They also stand out like they are made of liquid starlight on a dark night. They have to go.”

  “Why?” I found myself asking.

  “Because they are so beautiful and useful. Others will kill you for them, besides making you look like you just came up here from below in a sanctuary.”

  “Maybe we can smear mud on the backpacks. Scuff them up with the rough edge of a rock. Make them look old.” I hated to get rid of them.

  “Their value is not in their beauty,” he said. “It’s their function, the design, and the material they are made of.”

  “What do you suggest? Throw away our guns, too?” My anger was contained, barely.

  He said, “I can give you a belt. Once we’re home, Tess can teach you to sew a holster from leather we’ve tanned, and you’ll look like everyone else until you show your bright and beautiful pistol. You might want to remove the silencer and carry it in a pocket. Use it when you need it.”

  Despite my anger, he had a point. Several of them. “A flap on the holster could help hide the kind of gun it is.”

  “Yes. Anything to hide their newness and the questions they will raise. It’s not an exaggeration that people will kill for just one of the four guns you have—and the ammo is worth more. But the first time people see any of them, it will be like a long time ago when I was in high school and a student showed up in a brand new corvette.”

  He was trying to make an impression on me. I had no idea what he meant, or what a corvette was.

  Cap laughed at himself as he realized that. “Okay, let me try again. What if everyone had broken-down guns and little ammo other than what they made themselves, and a stranger showed up with guns that looked like it had never been fired, and they carried a backpack full of new, shiny ammo? How would they react?”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, they’d try to take them from you. People depend on their weapons for defense and food these days. Bows and crossbows are becoming more popular as guns break or jam or blow up in a neighbor’s hand because he used too much powder.”

  Tess called to us from the edge of the creek.

  She and Mayfield had exchanged parts of their clothing and the camo shirt Tess wore had dark mud stains drying, as well as a green scarf tied around her waist as a belt. Mayfield wore a brown shirt with patches on the shoulder and left arm.

  “What do you think?” Cap asked me.

  “We should do the same. They both look like they have been up here for years.”

  At the edge of the
creek, Mayfield happily smeared black mud over the lower half of my body, a little too enthusiastically in my opinion. She accidentally managed to swipe a handful on my bare arm. Her grin was tempting me to retaliate.

  Tess said to me, hands on her hips, a repressed smile in her tone. “Are you going to take that from her?”

  I spun and grabbed Mayfield as I called her “Princess.” She ducked and came up under my armpit and shoved. I landed on my backside in the four-inch deep water with a giant splash as her triumphant laughter started—but I reached out and grasped her ankle and pulled. She landed with a splat beside me.

  Most girls I knew would have protested or gotten mad. Mayfield rolled at me quickly until she was on top and had hold of my arm, which she tried to bend in ways nature hadn’t intended. I tried to free myself, only to try standing just as her leg whipped around and I was in the mud again.

  Cap and Tess were howling with laughter. I sat there and smoldered. Cap peeled off his thin shirt and the vest he wore. He tossed both in my direction. I gave him my army shirt.

  The first thing he did was cut the sleeves off, making himself another vest, but one with pockets. He rinsed it in mud and placed it in the sun to dry.

  Before everything dried, we had removed our belongings from the backpacks and filled our sleeping bags with what we would keep, which was not much. I managed to slip the maps inside with the other items without anyone noticing. We rolled them and tied loops of thin rope around the outside, then we smeared a thin layer of black mud to make them look older. Mayfield tossed some sand on the wet mud and that made them more used.

  The tent was rolled inside my bag, the beautiful and functional backpacks discarded. With dirt smeared on her face and the dirty clothing she wore, Mayfield almost looked the part. I assumed I did too.

  We walked and as we did, I appreciated our backpacks more and more as the thin ropes cut into my shoulders. The nine-millimeter shoved in my waistband where it chafed against my hipbone. The sun felt hot in my face, especially where the skin had flaked away.

  Cap was familiar with the area. He steered us around pockets of farms, moved parallel to the roads, and he watched and listened as we moved along game trails and the banks of streams. He avoided bridges. We walked around or splashed across.

  Even though we traveled mostly downhill, it was tiring, the footing slippery, the rocks underfoot were loose. We moved slower than I’d have thought, talked little, and encountered no other travelers.

  Before dark, we emerged into a wide, open area beside a small river. The water was white as it rushed past and over boulders. We set up our tent while they stretched a tarp to sleep under, one side higher than the other to break the damp wind and to sluice water to one side if it rained. A simple solution to five or six problems at once.

  We gathered in a small circle and talked, without a fire. There were houses not far away in the valley, and a few higher up on the sides of hills that would see it and possibly investigate. While cool enough to huddle under a sleeping bag, we talked.

  They told us of their life, their family, the people who had died, and of their ambitions and past lives, even before the bombs fell. In return, Mayfield did most of our talking, telling the truth most of the time and only leaving out a few details of the day we were evicted.

  They were fascinated at how people lived without the sun, surrounded by only a few others, and the regularity of each waking “day” similar to all others.

  “You’d never seen the rain?” Cap asked.

  “Or snow?” Tess added.

  We’d seen rain a few days earlier, but never before. On the other side of the conversation, we asked about how they fed themselves, more specifically, how they located food to eat each day. That had been and still was, a mystery to me. I asked, “What if you don’t kill a deer or rabbit?”

  “Then we eat carrots,” Cap said without pause. “And who likes to eat carrots every day?”

  “You don’t like my carrots?” Tess asked as if offended.

  He looked at me. “When you come home without meat for several days, carrots can taste very good. That’s the trick you’re looking for. When we kill a deer, there is too much meat to eat before it spoils. So, we cut it in strips, smoke it, and add whatever spices we have and make jerky.”

  Tess added, “I plant carrots about once a month. That way, there are always some ready to harvest. Same with onions, most beans, and a few others. Apples are dried in the sun and saved over the winter. You have to think of the future and store food in a safe place.”

  “More than one,” Cap added. “We had a bear get into our food stores one year and learned a good lesson about having more than one.”

  The night went on like that. Sharing information. They picked our brains about things they didn’t know, and we did the same with them.

  They explained the work they needed help with at their farm. It wasn’t complicated. It was tiring and we’d earn our food and shelter with manual labor. Along the way, we’d go fishing and hunting, help with the garden, and generally learn what it took to live in the eighteenth century.

  “Horses?” Mayfield asked.

  “You’ll ride them, clean up after them, feed them, and they’ll pull your wagon. If things work out, you might even have a couple as gifts so you can ride to Montana in style,” Cap said.

  We eventually crawled into our tent and our sleeping bags, our minds roiling with new information and hopes of the future. In the dark, I heard Mayfield say softly, “I like it here.”

  “Me too.” My eyes were closed, and sleep came quickly.

  A single shot from a nearby gun abruptly ended my sleep.

  Cap screamed, “Run! Don’t let them catch you.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mayfield pushed past me. Somehow, she had managed to get out of her sleeping bag and peeked out the flap. I twisted and turned, then broke free of the clinging material and joined her as another shot sounded.

  There were men in our camp. In the moonlight, we saw there were several. Most were around the tarp Cap and Tess slept under, and they may not have yet realized our low, long tent also contained two people.

  “Guns,” Mayfield ordered since I was behind her. “Get our guns.”

  On hands and knees, I rushed to where they were stored. The rifles were wrapped in clothing to hide them, the semi-automatics near where our heads had been. I grabbed them and hurried to Mayfield.

  She leaped outside and fired at least three shots before I joined her. The men retreated, surprised there were more people and at the number of rounds we fired. We rushed to where Tess held Cap’s lifeless head in her lap as she wept. At least two bullets had killed him. I turned my back to them and watched for enemies to shoot.

  The men fired a few shots from darkness, none of them coming close to us.

  “We need to get to cover,” Mayfield snapped.

  Tess hugged Cap tighter and wept.

  “Now,” Mayfield said, snapping off a shot at a darting figure against the gloom. He fell and screamed in pain.

  The proximity of Mayfield’s shot seemed to awaken Tess. Her entire body flinched, then recoiled.

  I was standing in the open, the moonlight enough to allow me to be seen by those who had taken shelter in the trees. More of them returned fire. Two bullets struck the tent behind me, meaning they had flown past me, to my left. Too close. My eyes were adjusting. There were over ten intruders and I was making a target of myself.

  “Mayfield, we have to find protection. About a dozen of them out there,” I exaggerated as I glanced behind.

  Tess was still in shock, unable to move.

  Mayfield helped her stand. She had an arm around Tess’s waist and pulled along her behind. I threw my left arm around her waist and we drug her limp body between us. I wondered if she had been hit. Mayfield was right-handed but held her gun in her left and as men in the shadows moved, she fired.

  One broke from cover right in front of us. I shot him in his chest and searched f
or more. I wanted more to expose themselves. That was the way my mind worked. I’d heard the term fight or flee. My mind had shifted into the choices of fight and flee. Both at the same time. My shots had hit at least three of them, and we entered the darker shadows under the trees where we had protection, pulling a wailing Tess between us.

  They couldn’t see us any better than we could see them. I kept trying to run, to move faster. Suddenly we were in thicker underbrush and the three of us couldn’t advance side by side. Mayfield said, “You take her. I’ll protect our back.”

  The weight of Tess shifted, and it was all I could do to keep her moving. Mayfield remained a few steps behind, backing as much as possible and shooting at any movement.

  A nearby shot sounded. It came from maybe ten steps away from where a man had stepped from behind the trunk of a tree. I returned an instinctive shot and watched him fall with satisfaction.

  I couldn’t see Mayfield. She was not behind me!

  My head twisted violently as my eyes searched—then settled on a mound on the ground.

  “No,” I sobbed, knowing it was her before I fell to my knees. I pushed Tess against a small tree and dived to the ground hoping it was not Mayfield.

  It was.

  She was dead. One bullet through her head, just over her left eye.

  Time passed. I don’t know how much.

  A voice from not far away from us said, “Drop your weapons. You’re surrounded.”

  I fired randomly until the gun was empty and inserted another magazine. My fingers fumbled with the action and my eyes were blurry with crying.

  Someone in the dark charged forward and tackled me as another kicked my head. I saw the foot swinging at my head as I fell. I never felt it strike.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Waking from a bad dream can scare a person. It’s worse when waking and finding it was not a bad dream—it was real.

  Filtered streaks of light slipped into the dark space where I lay providing minimal visibility. My hands were tied behind me and that same rope also bound my feet, which were why my knees were bent. I was bowed backward and lay on my side. My head hurt, dried blood from the kick to my forehead had run down into my right eye making it hard to open. Only the left eyelid worked properly, the other was stuck closed.