by Jason Ross
Everyone except the sick boy jumped to cracking the dry gourds on the floor or the table and separating out the loose, dry seeds.
“Why weren’t we eating these?” Julie stuck some in her mouth.
Isaiah shook his head, “They were all dried up. It’s not the season. I didn’t think about the seeds. But don’t eat them yet. We need them for medicine, for Denny. Leah—stop what you’re doing and go find a rock and a board. We need to grind these up into powder. I remember the Natives used pumpkin seeds to get rid of parasites. These should work the same.”
The boy moaned on the floor, rocking back and forth inside the sleeping bag. Cameron clawed at his hair in desperation. He’d never felt so helpless.
The turd Ruth had dug from the privy had been riven with worms, almost a rope of them coiled around what little nutrition the boy had left in his poop. Cameron pictured the worms in his son’s intestines, writhing, sucking, hunting for nutrition.
“Focus, Cameron!” Isaiah almost shouted. “Open these and pick out the seeds. Stop fretting and work.”
Cameron blinked back the desolation that threatened to swamp him and focused on the gourds that Isaiah swept off the table and dumped into his lap.
Crack, split, dump. He forced his hands to the simple labor, though his senses drowned in liquid terror. A knot formed in his stomach, and Cameron pictured it as his own parasite chewing him from the inside out. He welcomed the pain. He imagined it drawing agony away from the boy, taking it into his own stomach.
Crack, split, dump. The crashing waves of love and terror could not be contained, but he could execute the gross functions of smashing the tiny, smelly pumpkins. The girl, Leah, knelt beside him and picked the clustered seeds out of the dry pile of fiber in front of his aching knees. It was good that she did because his fingers buzzed with adrenaline—insensate and thuggish. He couldn’t force them to pick out the seeds if he tried.
There was no escaping the truth: his family was completely exposed to the horrors or Mother Earth unbound. She was revealed, vengeful and cruel, and Cameron knew she wouldn’t hesitate to devour his son from the guts out. His son suffered, and Cameron could marshall no salvation but to follow the orders of the awkward polygamist.
Fifty-foot waves of crushing love swelled and then dropped into hundred-foot troughs of despair. Cameron hated himself for hating Isaiah. If he repented for his abuse of the polygamist family, maybe God would save Denny.
They were all so hungry, so close to the edge of oblivion. Denny had become a bony, stick-figure version of the Little League shortstop he’d been four months before. He would not survive an onslaught of parasites. Like the rest of them, he was dying by degrees already.
Crack, split, dump. In the hazy hunger and arrhythmic thumping of gourds on the floor of the dim room, Cameron despaired. His sin had brought them here. He had succumbed to slavery and abuse, at least in his heart. So, the devil feasted on his family, given leave by God because Cameron had abandoned decency. He was like Job in the Bible, if Job had been a soulless sonofabitch.
“I’m sorry,” Cameron heaved the words out. The saliva in his mouth turned to slurry. He’d been weeping without realizing it. Everyone paused their thumping and cracking. “I’m sorry, Isaiah,” he repeated. “I’ve been a dick.”
The pause lingered. Isaiah looked up and nodded acknowledgement, but he was probably too tired from collecting the gourds to speak. One-by-one, they went back to thumping and cracking.
8
Sage Ross
Elgin, Oregon
C-Zers Drive-thru
* * *
Sage hadn’t ever been to a job interview before. It probably wasn’t good that his first-ever job interview would be live-or-die.
They’d moved him to the dining area of a drive-through burger shack, and given him a burger, which felt about as strange as being interviewed naked. Over the last two months of eating rattlesnake, wild rabbit and shriveled, discarded onions, he’d assumed hamburgers had gone extinct.
The police captain pulled into the parking lot of the burger joint in his cruiser. He got out and shook hands with the militia officer supervising Sage. The two bullshitted for a bit. Sage couldn’t hear what they were saying through the glass, but he watched as they guffawed and knee-slapped like old fishing buddies, which they might have been.
Sage had sent the one dude he hadn’t killed—the talker—back to the women and children two nights before. Then he hightailed it down and out of the canyon in the dark. The moon had been waxing, so he had an extra hour of light. At all costs, he wanted to avoid facing the women and the kids of the men he’d killed.
The barricade guards arrested Sage at the mouth of the canyon. They handed him over to the officer—a forty-something-year-old guy with a paunch, wearing old-school, green and brown military camouflage. They locked him up in an office at a plywood factory that appeared to be the centerpiece of town. The “jail cell” was just a room with a deadbolt; not much of a jail, really. It was cold in the room, but they gave him a couple blankets and warm food. His toes came back from being numb for a week. Nothing seemed frostbitten. Some skin sloughed off, but the flesh underneath looked pink and healthy.
When Sage told the officer he wanted a job with the militia, and that he had firearms training, the man cocked his head and nodded. It seemed to be the right thing to say. They fed him real food and told him to wait until the police captain could come around and “get an eyeball full of him.”
The captain leaned up against his cruiser in the parking lot of the burger joint, never casting a glance toward Sage, laughing it up with his friend. Sage took the opportunity to wolf down the rest of the burger and start in on the fries.
Through the glass panes, the sound of the conversation clarified and Sage picked up bits and pieces: the militia had mixed it up with a Mad Max gang from “south-a-Boise.” The militia had known the gang was coming and had shot them to pieces as they passed through Powder River Gulch, wherever that was. Apparently, it’d been a one-sided engagement. The militia slaughtered the biker gang and left their corpses on the asphalt of the interstate as a warning to the next biker gang.
That probably explained how a string of farming communities like Union County, Oregon, hadn’t been overrun by starving city folk—they killed anyone who tried kicking in the door.
The captain wrapped up with his buddy, in perfect time to catch Sage licking the grease off the wax paper in the bottom of the burger basket. Sage dropped the paper when the captain came through the glass door.
“So, young man, they tell me you know how to shoot? They say you killed Joey McCullum and his brother with one shot. That true?” The captain looked too carefree to be the man in-charge. He had a little gray showing on the fringes of his full head of hair and his jaw was a sharp, square line. He looked like a casual athlete who hadn’t given up his every-day run, even during the apocalypse. The man exuded vitality.
“I guess so. I didn’t mean to hit them both, but the first guy definitely pulled his gun on me.”
The captain waved away the explanation. “Neither of those boys were going to make it out there. These days, you’re either part of the team or you’re dead. The McCullums were never part of the team. They were the losers selling weed under the bleachers at half-time. They actually did that in high school. Those boys weren’t going to survive in this new, improved world.” The captain smiled his winning smile, which must’ve been a habit, since he didn’t need to sell Sage anything.
Sage didn’t know what to say. He felt like he might be a murderer, so he just nodded.
“We’re looking to hire out-of-towners,” the captain said, changing the subject. “Ya know, for the department.” He indicated the police cruiser. He wasn’t wearing a uniform—just a captain’s department coat and a T-shirt underneath that said Ironman Coeur d’Alene Finisher. “We got all the locals we need on the force, and we’re bulking up the squad with new blood. You want in?”
Sage hadn’t been pre
pared for it to be this easy, but he liked the captain. In any case, there was nothing to think about. He nodded eagerly.
“We’ll get you all your stuff back. Your rifle too. Ferguson already topped off your 30-30 ammo and we’ll get you set up with fatigues—that’s the department uniform now that we’re the police, army, navy and air force, all rolled up in one.” The captain got up from the table and held out a hand. “Welcome aboard, Sage Ross. You’ll be on my personal cadre.” Sage shook on it.
He hadn’t been this lucky in a long time. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have things click. He’d been carving out his existence with sheer force of will for months. This turn of events felt like normal life. It felt like all those years when his mother made sure he had no complaints. Easy street.
“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.” It sounded cheesy.
The captain smiled and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Just because it’s the apocalypse, doesn’t mean it’s gotta suck.” He smiled again and Sage smiled right along with him.
Grande Rhonde River Settlement Ponds
La Grande, Oregon
* * *
The other guys in the police called him “Stack,” and Sage hated it. Word spread around the militia that he’d killed two men with one bullet, and that became his calling card, whether he liked it or not: Stack.
Today, he ran security on work parties putting up the greenhouses. He wished he could help with construction, but his orders were to stand around the workmen and “look like you’re paying attention.” Apparently, theft had been an issue in the past.
To Sage’s eye, La Grande city teetered on the edge of being too big to control. He didn’t know the population numbers—maybe ten thousand or so—and there seemed to be fissures in the spirit of cooperation, to put it mildly. An us-and-them gulf persisted between the law enforcement and the workmen on the project.
Snow had begun to fall in dribs and drabs in La Grande. It was early December and, while it hadn’t “stuck” yet at that elevation, they got a few light frostings every week. The sky clamped down around the valley, a sullen gray lid to a powdered sugar pot. The primary focus of the town was winter food production.
The agronomy professor from the tiny Eastern Oregon University oversaw the construction of fifty hoop greenhouses, clad in heavy, clear plastic, along the settlement ponds of the Grande Rhonde River. Ten of the greenhouses were to be dedicated to winter greens, but the majority were being tasked to grow russet potatoes in trash cans that were, even now, being collected from every home in town. The town subsisted on the last of the fall harvest, the local herd of beef cattle and twelve grain elevators alongside the railroad tracks. They would need more than that to make it through to the next harvest, and nobody in La Grande, so far as Sage could tell, had any illusions about the federal government coming to save them. This far from urbanity and this close to the furrow, people accepted a harder existence. They probably always had.
But not everyone was a farmer in La Grande. In the other towns of Union County, the ones off the “beaten path” of I-84, almost all the residents tilled the ground or ran cattle. A good number of those grew stupid stuff like golf course-ready Kentucky bluegrass, or peppermint for essential oils—stuff not even the cattle would eat. No matter what they grew, though, the majority of Union County grew something.
In La Grande, what they called “the city,” there was another class of human, and Sage could pick them out of the work crew like picking green jelly beans out of the bowl. Only this bowl was mostly green jelly beans.
They were the people who had once provided services for the people who tilled the ground: waiters at the local eateries, drug dealers, furniture salesmen, pizza delivery guys, even the tellers from the local bank. They were people who didn’t make anything anyone could eat, and they fell into a new class that the farmer class called “Klingons,” as in “freeloaders.”
What struck Sage as particularly strange; he and the other militia guys called them Klingons too, even though most of the militiamen didn’t plow either. The police department, which had combined with the county sheriff’s department and ballooned from thirty men to almost four hundred camo-clad warriors, hovered over them in a class by itself. Not even the farming class dared challenge their dominion over the county.
Chamber’s militia made sure the farmers were left alone to grow whatever food they could with winter looming. That meant keeping the Klingons out of their pastures and from stealing their livestock. It also meant keeping the rest of the world out of the Grande Rhonda Valley.
Captain Chamber’s uncanny foresight, prior to the collapse, made it all possible. He’d been locked, cocked and ready-to-rock when the curtain fell on the modern world; a bona fide prepper with guns, ammo and even a solar system powering his ranch at the edge of town. His forethought and personal magnetism had unified all law enforcement under his control: city police, sheriff’s department, even the two forest rangers who lived in La Grande.
The day the stock market closed, the other deputies whispered to Sage, the captain ordered every shop, store, gas station and storeroom buttoned up tight. He pulled his department back into La Grande and put a gunman in front of every store and ordered them closed indefinitely. La Grande, Oregon entered the apocalypse without even a run on toilet paper.
When it became apparent that the crisis was permanent, it was the most-natural thing in the world for the police to assume control of all manufactured goods and gasoline in Union County. As a result, nobody went hungry and they had reserves of fuel. Chambers organized soup kitchens and bread lines in eleven locations around La Grande, and shipped out regular deliveries of red winter wheat to the outlying towns. A lot of modern amenities, like fresh veggies and disposable batteries disappeared, but everyone ate, assuming they got with the program.
Unless they produced food on a farm, every Klingon checked in, every morning except Sunday, with their assigned work crew. Mostly, they built greenhouses, rounded up trash cans and assembled watering system for the potato project. Sometimes, they were trucked out to help farms with mission-critical manual labor. Of course, the Klingons bitched. They had no way of knowing how bad it was outside their valley. All they knew was that they were now the lowest social class, and they were being forced to work with their hands and backs.
Sage grew accustomed to getting the sideways stink-eye from the Klingons working the greenhouse project. It was part of working for the department.
He overheard their complaints about the captain “robbing the town blind,” but as far as he could tell, Chambers took nothing extra for himself. He didn’t need anything—his ranch was sitting pretty.
Sage caught remarks, tossed over shoulders, about “getting run out on a rail.” When break time was over, the Klingons would say passive-aggressive shit like, “Better get back to it, boys, or the captain’s henchmen, here, will run us outa town. Won’tcha?”
It came as no surprise to Sage; the first men he’d met coming out of Union County had been exiles. If a man couldn’t bring himself to cooperate in the game of bare-knuckle survival, he was sent away to try his luck against the elements. Goodbye and good luck. The captain’s force was on-track to deport all malcontents, for one reason or another. Being unskilled wasn’t a crime in Union County. Being a bitch about it was.
Hovering over the work crews alongside the frigid river, Sage had a lot of time to listen, observe and think, and it began to make sense why the captain sought out-of-towners for this band of merry enforcers. As more and more people were shown the road, in a small community like La Grande, every local officer would eventually come up against a hard pill to swallow; somebody the officer knew and loved—a family relation, a high school pal, or the childhood babysitter now married to a coke addict. Eventually, a local cop would be forced to exile someone he cared about from the county.
Marching men, women and children to the county line was no picnic. Sage had taken his turn at it like everyone else. Those people
knew they were being walked to their death. South of the county line was a one-way ticket to Rapeville for the women and Murdertown for the men. The biker gangs controlled everything south, around Boise.
North, over the Blue Mountains, the masses of starving Seattle-ites and Portlanders hid in ambush, hungry for fresh meat, but only if the exiles could first survive the snow-piled summit. They called it “exile” but it was a barely-cloaked execution.
The deputies debated duct-taping their exiles mouths, including kids. Listening to the begging, the arguing, the sob-soaked entreaties to give them just-one-more-chance; it was almost more than a man could bear. Sage couldn’t imagine what it was like for an officer who had grown up as part of the community. Any officer who could—those with their own farms—had already left the force.
Sage shrugged his La Grande Police coat up around his shoulders. At least if he could help with the work, he wouldn’t be so damn cold. He hated watching men work. Through a relentless campaign of shaming, his dad had instilled in him a phobia about standing around while there was work to be done.
“Hey, Goldbricker,” his dad would shout in front of Sage’s friends. “A man looks for work. Only a lazy piece of shit stands around with his hands in his pockets.”
Sage shifted back and forth on his feet while the Klingons worked on the greenhouses. One of them walked by carrying a twelve-foot bundle of PVC over his shoulder, but the balance was off. Half the PVC slid out the back and clattered to the ground. Sage pulled his rifle sling over his head, settled the 30-30 on his back and trotted over to help. The Klingon gave him a quizzical look. They rebundled the PVC and carried it together, over their shoulders, into the greenhouse. Sage dropped the load and walked back to his post by the water bowser.
“Hey. Stack!” The senior officer put his hand on Sage’s shoulder. “Don’t do that again. There’s plenty of Klingon-power to get this done. We have more hands than we have work. You’re skilled labor.” He tapped Sage’s rifle barrel. “Don’t get in the habit of carrying pipe. It’s a waste, and it fucks with your mission readiness. You copy?”