by Billy Roper
The new leader, the Shield Wall Regional Coordinator, said at the next town meeting after the funeral that they needed more help expanding into other counties, so he was running for Sheriff right then and there and if elected would hand back a firearm and ammunition to every adult male between fifteen and fifty. He won pretty much unanimously, even the old Sheriff voting for him. The militia tripled his manpower. By summertime every county that joined theirs was sending tax produce and livestock, and getting protected in exchange. Feudalism was back. The town had been right at a thousand when the war started, then dipped a bit, and then it started arcing up to meet the county seat’s declining population and pass it as they met.
The funny part was that once the churches were allowed to start meeting again and hold their own school classes, since the army was in the school building, they taught their congregations from the pulpit and the blackboard that this was how it was supposed to be…for the next seven years, at least, until the rapture was due, it turned out. The new Sheriff outlawed homosexuality and that made them even happier. He went to the largest church in town, as an example. Married a local girl, right there in the church, the pick of the litter, prettiest girl in town. There were a bunch of empty houses for them to choose from. Only a few hundred new people had been let in, at the outskirts of town where they set up squatters camps while waiting to be vetted, and most of the people who were out of town when the war started just never made it back home. But empty stores were being turned into houses and apartments anyway, and some of the college professors up at Madisonville were studying hydroelectric power. They’d see how that worked out.
All around the former United States, small villages and towns were facing the same fate. Trying to survive without the grid, without outside governance, and without help. As was always the case in large scale disasters, the strongest and most ruthless fared better than the soft and urbane. Those who believed in equality and tolerance either became victims or someone else’s serfs. The two classes were not considered synonymous. It was better to be a slave and have a place, than to be a corpse and have a shallow grave.
The Mayor rubber-stamped official city business, but everybody knew who was what. When a couple hundred beggars from Chattanooga came to camp out in the National Forest, it was the Sheriff and his men who pushed them back into Georgia, except a few who had good skills like doctors and engineers. The teenager went on that campaign, and earned his red laces in three different states.
Soon the border regions of the Carolinas, all the way to the flatlands, flourished compared to the diverse areas beyond, as the people in the highlands more comfortably adapted back to a pre-industrial lifestyle. They happily found common cause with East Tennessee and northern Georgia, as did the people up in West Virginia. The rapidly maturing teenager saw a new territory uniting around their army, glad to offer their loyalty in exchange for protection from outlaws and raiders.
He also brought home a war bride, a girl named Melanie whose parents had run off and left her in the refugee camp. When he first saw her she was dirty and scared and starving. He never asked what she had done to survive, but the other soldiers, some of whom also took women home or even adopted orphaned children, thought she was too old to be a daughter and too young to make a wife. She was just a year younger than him, and glad to have a place to go where she wouldn’t be hungry and and cold. She said she would cook and clean and wash his clothes and anything else he wanted. He had some ideas. She had light brown hair and gray eyes and looked more twenty than fifteen, at least he thought. Get her cleaned up some and she might do alright. Besides, she didn’t have anybody else, either. Just like him. They were two peas in the pod. She refused to leave his side from the moment he caught her. Melanie stayed with the camp as it cleaned out a few more camps and chased off some road trash, spreading the word about the new bosses who weren’t to be messed with.
A year after the war began, Tellico Plains had become the center of a stable administrative region calling itself Franklin again, fudging a little bit geographically with the old name by being further east than the original, but still standing on tradition. This time it stretched between two asphalt borders, 75 and 85. Up and down the mountains, the word spread, and people came. Some of them were able to build small hydro dams, first a small one by the 360 bridge, then a bigger one at Bald River Falls. Soon others were cropping up wherever water moved. That brought more people in, and mills going and lights back on.
Those who were able to bottle the lightning, to fix downed lines and channel the spark down them, created the new centers of commerce and trade. The mountains came to life, and life came to the mountains. Most of the new people started filling in the lodges and cabin rentals, then built from there, along the water. He didn’t have to take Melanie up into the woods to some empty vacation place to squat, though. He had a home of his own to return to.
That was how the exile came home, back to his own house, which had been improved with a wood stove and a cabinet full of non-perishable food in his absence. He had a good job as an army scout, and finally threw out the tv and laptop, along with the telephone. It was never gonna ring, anyway. He had electricity again, and that was good enough for now. She could run the vacuum cleaner and the dryer and the washer, now that the water department was operating full time. Hot showers, any time they wanted them.
Melanie walked through the big house, in awe of everything. Especially the food. She couldn’t seem to get enough to eat. She started going through his mom’s closets to see what might fit her. He didn’t mind. The cat was waiting for him in the back yard, calling out like a little girl and running to meet him when he opened the doors and windows to air the house out from the cigarette smell. He guessed he’d better name it. “Come here, Exile!” he called, and the cat did a fainting goat at his feet to be petted. It was good to be home.
Chapter Six
There had always been pain in the world. The only normal people were the ones you didn’t know very well. The only happy lives were the ones you only saw from the outside. Everybody cheated, and everybody lied. Never trust anyone. Never hesitate, once you had a hunch. These were the lessons she had learned by the time she began her monthlies.
The world used to be a more private and cleaner place, where they blared out on commercials and kept in wastebaskets what should have been her own business and disposed of out of sight. Things had changed. Nothing was false any more. Except people’s words.
Those monthlies had come late due to her poor nutrition and constant physical exercise, but her other outward signs of maturity were already there, waiting. She had been thirteen when the bad men came and took her away. There was a lot she hadn’t understood. More she had only guessed at. Sometimes she had still felt like a little girl. She didn’t have the freedom to act like one, though. That had been taken from her, stolen, along with her innocence.
There seemed to be a struggle going on between nature’s adaptive urge to early sexual maturation for the purpose of reproducing the threatened species, and a counter-balancing drive to delay procreation due to the constant stress and strain just to stay alive. God knew that it wasn’t much of a world to bring new life into. But with little chance for entertainment elsewhere, since people couldn’t watch t.v., it happened a lot. Sometimes without one of the parties involved, almost always the female, not having much choice in the matter. But all that had come a lot later, when she was much older. Over fourteen, and a married woman.
Nature and its animalistic drives ranked hunger and lust about even, depending on the weather and the time of the day. Food and sex competed evenly for satiation. You couldn’t live without food, though. Not for very long. Even less, without water. But sometimes people would give up both to satisfy the other. There were ways of making the trade without feeling like you were dirty, though. Women had been doing it since Eve, she remembered her friends at school saying. She wondered where they heard that from. From what she had read, Eve had gotten tricked into it, too.
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br /> In the forest she ate acorns and moss, roots and tender shoots, worms and snails and bugs, and whatever else she could find, when she had to. Usually, she did better than that, though. At least she never had to sneak around to a town and sell her body for a meal, even though she had thought about it more than once.
Britt had forgotten her middle name. Noone who remembered it was still alive. But she also didn’t remember where she had been born, and it didn’t bother her in the least. She had learned a lot, after all, to replace what she had lost. She could build a fire without matches, and a shelter from the rain and snow. She could catch a fish and cook it on that fire, and dig a toilet far enough away from the shelter that she didn’t get the sickness. Her dad had taught her that.
Most fathers might have taught their daughters more girly stuff, or left them to their mothers. Her dad hadn’t been the kind of man to let her be confined to cooking and cleaning and playing dressup. She was his princess, but there was no pea to agitate her. Britt was calm and tough, like her dad. When the race riots had started and the roads had been closed, he had calmly packed up the family and taken them on what he called an extended campout in their rustic time-share place in the woods. It had just been a half hour’s drive away. They could get there without running the risk of the freeway. Only a week before, when her mom had asked him if they should go to her mother’s upstate, it had been wide open.
He also had promised to teach her how to shoot, but then the bad men came and her dad had tried to satisfy them with supper, but that hadn’t been enough. Britt’s mom had been pretty, still, a lot like her daughter. They complimented her a bit too far and when her big brother spoke up, one of them hit him. Then her dad shot that one, and it had all went bad. By the time it was over her mom and dad and brother were dead and she had been taken along back with the bad men. The next few weeks she had blocked out completely from her mind. Then they let their guard down and started making her do chores around the camp, cooking and carrying water, along with what happened at night. One day she went to the pond with a bucket and just kept running.
She’d gone a hundred yards before she dropped the bucket. Tears filled her eyes and she couldn’t get a deep breath. Her thighs were sore from running and from before. Still she made herself move. They might have been right behind her, at any moment a hand would clamp onto her shoulder from behind and drag her down. It would be even worse, then.
Maybe they didn’t think she was worth chasing after. It’s not like they had any reason to be afraid of her, or anyone she might tell. Britt had stayed up for two nights, walking as far and as long as she could, to put distance between herself and them, just in case they changed her mind and came after her. Finally, she stopped. Britt sank to her knees in the damp, rocky dirt along the trail. She listened until her heart stopped beating in her ears and the wash of her pulse grew quiet again. There was nothing to hear but the wind and her own breath, and the creaking of the trees.
In times like these, her dad had told her to try to take stock of where she was and how she had gotten there, so she wouldn’t get lost, or stay lost. Britt didn’t know where she wanted to be, rather than there, but it seemed like a good idea. She thought back to how she had gotten there.
The death of her family seemed like a blur, she didn’t quite remember in sequence exactly how the whole incident had happened. There must have been a clear point where it could have been prevented. Maybe when the men had walked up onto the porch of their vacation cabin where dad had taken the family when it had gotten too late to get out of the county by the interstate. Or when they had knocked on the door and asked if they had any food to spare. Once they were inside, it had really been too late.
The tears came hard then, and she sobbed and rocked and wished her father was there to protect her and take her home. Then she remembered. He had let the bad men in.
Why was it that her brother had been the one who had to speak up in that awkward silence after the bad men had made the nasty joke about her mom? Her dad had been quietly slipping his pistol out of his pocket, but shouldn’t he have said something? It had been so embarrassing, and the shock of the long-haired one cursing and slapping her brother, and her dad, a helpless look on his face, standing up from the table and shooting that one, then the one next to him, but it wasn’t enough, it just wasn’t enough.
They were hurt but didn’t die quick like in the movies, and the other two had tackled her dad, knocking over him and his chair to the floor. Her mom had screamed out her daddy’s name and she and her brother stood frozen while they held him down and stabbed him, so many times so fast. He took a long time to die. Long enough to watch what the men did to his son and his wife and his daughter. There had been so much blood, she had lay in it, the blood from all of them soaking her while she closed her eyes and tried not to scream or cry while they did it.
Her brother had screamed for his mom and his mom had screamed for her dad until they both stopped, but Britt had never asked for help from anyone. She knew it wasn’t coming.
One of the men her dad had shot, the one who had hit her brother and said nasty stuff about her mom, was hurt too bad to do anything to them. She still thought that was kind of funny, after all. They left him there when they were finished, promising him they would come back with help, but they never did. He was probably still there, keeping her family company, taking her place, laying there where she should have been, dead with the rest of them.
The other one her dad had shot was hurt but didn’t die. He just couldn’t use that one arm and when she had left it looked awful, swollen and black and smelly. When the other two bad men had left each time to try to rob or steal from other cabins, they had left him to watch her. He made her do the worst things when they weren’t around. Things he didn’t want them to know about. She had run away when all three of them were there, for a couple of reasons: one, so that she would know where they were, and two, so that he would be asleep. The other two didn’t pay as much attention as the fevered and sick one. He was sick, all right, in a lot of ways. Britt hoped he died, eventually. She almost wished she could hang around and watch him go, but inside she knew that he would hurt her so bad she couldn’t get away if she tried, if she didn’t leave soon.
She hadn’t stayed on the road, she didn’t really know where she was, or how far from home, when it had been home. The bad men had bragged about visiting all their neighbors, anyway, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to help them. So, she kept right on walking, camping and fishing and eating and sleeping, until the moon had gotten full twice. Some days she went hungry, but she was able to stay alive. She got tougher along the way, and stronger. Able to live off of less for longer. Able to eat things she would never have considered food before. Three or four small fish the size of her finger, bones and all, were enough to keep her going all day. There were plants to eat, too, if you knew them. Plantain and wild onion and poke salad.
You didn’t need a rod and reel, or even a line and hook. Just find a pool where there were fish and break a limb into a sharp pointy spear and let them come to you to nibble the dead skin off. She used her shirt for a net to catch the smaller ones. Nobody was looking, anyway.
Her body healed. The bruises faded, the cuts and burns scabbed over and left pink scars. She stopped peeing blood and her parts stopped hurting. She washed her clothes and her body over and over again in the creek. Her mind didn’t heal as quickly. She had bad dreams every night, of her family all laying and bleeding together, and the bad man with his black and swollen arm.
At one of the campsites she was able to see a treestand for deer hunting. She climbed it and from its height discovered that there was a parking lot for the picnic area on the other side of the branch, with an empty pickup truck sitting alone on its edge. Britt sat and watched for half the day, but nobody came back to the truck. Around sundown she climbed down the treestand ladder and waded across the water to the gravel trail. The truck was locked, but she used a rock to break out the driver’s side
glass and slept in the cab that night.
The hood had been left up, so it must have broken down there before the war started and the owner got preoccupied somewhere else. It looked like they had planned to come back, though. She found two full beers in the floorboard, along with a half a pack of cigarettes and a bunch of trash. There was a lighter, though, and some tools behind the seat along with a duffle bag with some dirty clothes in it. Britt left with the duffle bag, the lighter, a pair of pliers, a regular bladed screwdriver she could tie to a sapling as a better spear for fishing, a pair of socks and a t-shirt and jogging shorts with a drawstring that she could cinch up to fit her. She drank the beers and felt happier than she had been in a long time.
Britt had a lot of time to herself to think about what used to be and what wasn’t, any more. That all changed when the other kids found her. She had gotten used to being alone, and let her guard down. They were quiet, and used to hunting faster prey than her. Knives came out and spears leveled, circling her and the fire she had made too big that night. Her backpack was grabbed. They took her stuff, examined it, and gave most of it back. The leader kept a pair of her socks as a token. He accepted her, so the rest of them did, as well. She left with them, few words being exchanged between them. Britt wanted to know more about them, especially the alpha. She sat and watched them interact when they stopped to eat. He brought her a plastic bowl of meat. She smiled and tried to ask him a question, but he turned away and she didn’t want to talk to his back.