by Billy Roper
Two grizzled guys in camo and coveralls, past their prime, blocked the road ahead, holding rifles. It would have been easy enough to flank them and take them out from behind, but there could be more of them, more than they could handle, and they had not come this far to fight, they had come to find a home. Trace held his hands up above his head to show that he was unarmed, his pistol in his pocket, and walked up to talk with them. By the time he came back, they had set up camp.
There was a town above, on the ridge overlooking the highway. It had a couple dozen visible buildings, at least, and none of them had burned, even though smoke came from several chimneys. It was too far away to see clearly, and they all knew that it was impolite to stare. They had told him that the town was willing to trade, but they would have to talk to their leaders, first. He had been asked whether any of them were sick with the fever, and whether or not they ate people. Everyone got serious at that. They had never eaten their dead, or other dead, but there were some tribes who did, and they were considered bad people. Surely this town didn’t think they were like that.
None of them had any special skills to trade. They had no goods to barter in order to persuade the guards to let them pass by the roadblock. Some of the girls might get in, but Trace wouldn’t allow them to try. It was all or none. They made their cookfire by the side of the road under the wary and watchful eyes of the sentries.
By the fire the girl who had been Trace’s favorite before Brett asked them all why they couldn’t just go somewhere else, somewhere that there weren’t any people to say no to them. Another of the set aside girls judged that the people here were weak and few, and their hunters could stalk them and take what they had, even staying if they wanted. Trace told them to shut up. That angered the three hunters they had attached to. Trouble was brewing. Something had to happen. They couldn’t stay like this, wandering on the road in the winter.
The next morning two gray-haired men, bundled up in heavy coats, came to talk with them, bringing a thermos of hot soup for Trace. He drank half, gave the rest to Britt in front of the tribe, and smiled as she took a sip then passed it around, to the set aside girls first. They reluctantly drank after her. She had honored them.
The talk lasted all morning, because Trace didn’t trust the adults easily. But, they seemed to tell the truth. It had been a mountain resort retirement community. There had been a few tourist shops. Most of the people were old. Their guards were aging veterans, their leaders past their prime. There had been talk of what would happen when they eventually died, with no children or grandchildren to speak of in the town. The young people had mostly moved off to find work down in the city years ago. Only those on fixed government incomes could afford to stay. They had wisdom and knowledge and experience, but no one to pass it and their little town on to, until now. They let the tribe in. All of them.
Trace told the hunters to be on guard, but it wasn’t a trap, after all. They were taken past the roadblock and up the exit ramp off the highway, over the hill and into the town. The guards brought them to a building marked ‘Senior Center’ where they were surprised to find the lights were on inside, and it was warm and dry. There four old ladies acted like their grandmas, fussing over the little ones and ladling out bowls of the same kind of soup for everyone. The tribe stood in line just like they were back at school in the cafeteria. Some of the younger kids looked like it was Christmas. One or two were crying, but happy tears.
Britt and Trace went through the line first. By the time the others had their bowls and had sat down against the walls after the scattered chairs were all full, their bowls were empty and they were back in line for more. The little old ladies gave them as much as they wanted.
The bathrooms worked, and the showers, too. There was a huge hot water tank, and they all took turns getting cleaned up. The four old ladies then took all the girls off to the small department store to find clean new clothes. Then the guards did the same for the boys. Britt noticed they asked Trace’s permission, showing him respect in front of his people, before each move.
A lot of the older people had left town to find their children or grandchildren when the war started. Most of them had never come back. The few who did told them enough to make them keep the roadblocks manned. Over the last year, many had died when their medicine ran out or they needed a doctor. The grocery store and convenience store had carried them through, but there were only a couple dozen people left in town, all of them aged. They had just been waiting on a gang of raiders to come through and finish them off. Now they had hope, too.
The first night, warm and clean and fed and in new clothes after going through the closets of a few of the empty houses to augment the store’s clothing, the tribe slept together in the Senior Center. The towns folk brought blankets and pillows and it all seemed unreal, but Trace posted sentries like always, with four shifts throughout the night to keep watch. The next morning the old ladies came back and made them all pancakes. Pancakes, with syrup.
After breakfast, Trace met with the veterans, and then with his hunters. He made the announcement. They would stay, at least through the winter. Every kid cheered him. Britt clapped and whistled. She liked it there, too.
First, he told them to divide up, the couples each choosing an empty house that was as near the center as possible. There were eleven boys who had girls, no girls alone, and about forty single boys.
It wasn’t perfect. There were some false starts. One of the young boys had to be punished for stealing food from an old woman in the town. Trace made him stand while each member of the tribe struck him with their fist as a sign of rejection of the crime, with the old people watching, sickened. He survived and learned his lesson. The second ranking of the set aside girls tried to move in on one of the old men, and his wife got upset. Trace let her choose the punishment. She chose for the girl to become her house servant. Brett figured the husband was happy with that arrangement, as well. The only unhappy person in the outcome was the young hunter she had abandoned.
It was hard for the handful of elderly veterans to step aside and let the teenagers have full partnership in the town, a partnership that quickly eclipsed them. Still, they had a lot to offer in terms of passing on knowledge. How the solar power worked, that kept the water treatment plant going, and the lights and heat on. The federal government and the homeowners association’s investment in the panels for the senior center and the assisted living apartments came in handy. How to use the twenty-odd rifles and shotguns and pistols in the community, and reload ammunition for them as long as the powder lasted. How to garden in the greenhouse and the fields beyond, once spring came. There would be vegetables, including tomatoes. There would be wheat. They learned how to make bread. Britt would have pizza. How to ride the horses from the riding stable. How to get over their feelings of abandonment and betrayal, most importantly.
Trace and the older boys learned how to keep things running as best they could, and the girls learned how to be girls again. Britt refused to leave his side until they had their own place together, for the two of them. The old folks didn’t think it was all quite proper, but it was a new world and so much had been lost from the old, they were just happy to have a future to contribute to. Trace rescinded the rule that all had to leave on their eighteenth birthday, since they had a place to stay and defend. With the tribe and the townspeople together, they were nearly a hundred strong. The community began to weld together.
Trace passed his eighteenth birthday, and everyone was glad that he did not leave them, Britt especially. His beard had begun to grow more full, from the sparse yellow fuzz it had been, and he stood tall and strong. She was the happiest girl in the world. When he strode through town, with a pistol on his hip and a rifle over his shoulder, a half dozen young men following him to hang on his every word, she was the most proud, too.
Instead of looters, the tribe became caretakers and defenders, once they came to see all of it as theirs. The elderly residents, they accepted along with their new home, and
were accepted in turn as a new lease on life for the town. Britt learned as much as she could from the women, along with the other girls. She spent a lot of time decorating the small cottage she had picked out for herself and Trace, and having the boys bring in furniture from empty houses that she rummaged through.
There were thousands of books in the town library, and one of the old ladies had been a school teacher. She wanted to start classes for the younger children, basic reading and writing and math and history. Trace made those under fourteen go, all winter long. In the evenings they all got together, the whole town, in the senior center meeting room and watched movies, a new movie every night.
Most of the veterans liked to pick war movies when it was their turn, and the boys liked them, but Britt and the other girls liked it when the town women chose “romantic comedies”, even though a lot of the times she didn’t understand the parts that were supposed to be funny.
All the town ladies taught the girls how to braid and style their hair in different ways. Britt twisted her light brown tresses into curls that Trace liked, and learned how to make dresses like they had worn in the old days.
The food in the small store and the homes of the town fed everyone until the thaw. By then they had learned everything they could learn inside. The cold and the freezing snow and ice had given them a chance to adjust, and to form a society. Trace and his hunters knew how to use the guns, and how to keep the electricity and the water going. They had settled the tribe into twenty homes and former businesses adjacent to the senior center and apartments, to extend the electric grid without overburdening the solar. It was like the war had never happened, in many ways. They were well fed and clean and rested. Then came the spring.
Time has a way of compressing itself like a spring, a decade can be forgotten and a year seem to last forever. The months of cold had passed like a generation, bonding the young and the old, and creating new bonds within the tribe, as well.
The family units that had formed, at least around the girls who had chosen one of the boys, became the real core of the community. The bachelors, the boys without girls, focused on learning how to clear the open pasture and meadow and break the soil with the golf course’s tractor. Soon there were corn shoots sprouting up on the fairway, and rice in the water hazards. A small herd of cattle was driven up to the edge of town and pastured in the fenced baseball fields of the city park, with tall summer grass cut and bundled and stacked by hand to dry for their winter fodder.
The traders visited the local homesteads that were still occupied, to establish good relations. For the most part the mountain folk needed more from the town than they had to offer in trade, but there were some exceptions, such as the family who taught them how to milk their cows and turn the cream into butter and cheese.
Britt and the other ten girls of the tribe helped out the older women with all of their daily chores, taking care of the physical work and learning everything a mother and a grandmother might have taught them, in a better time. Soon they were making their own clothing using skills they might not have learned if the war hadn’t happened.
Three of the girls were under fourteen, and five of the boys, for the library’s school. She was just over the age to go, but she still visited it almost every day, reading some every night. Mainly she liked to read craft books, things she could use, but at night she read to Trace from poetry books about a world they would never know, and soon be forgotten.
The harvest was plentiful, with squash growing high and wide around the ninth hole of the golf course. Some of the old ladies taught the girls how to can the vegetables so that they would keep all winter, and beyond. Potatoes and corn and okra and squash and tomatoes and green beans were eaten fresh all summer, then preserved in glass mason jars from the antique stores. The unmated teens formed wood-cutting parties to haul in enough fuel to augment the electric heat for the next cold season.
Britt stopped having her period. At first she was afraid she was sick, but when she mentioned it to the old woman who had been a nurse, she found out that there was nothing wrong with her at all. The nurse was worried because she was so young, but the teacher reassured them that women used to start families early. Trace was embarrassed at first, when she told him. Then he became proud, and hugged and kissed her, after he thought about it and saw the expression in her eyes. That was the right reaction.
The whole town threw a party to celebrate, and the elderly town preacher insisted on performing a ceremony to marry them, that night after they all ate. Britt watched a movie in the center about wedding crashers to know what to do, but in the end they just held hands and repeated what he said and kissed. Trace had found a couple of rings and gave her one of them and wore the other. That was that. The other girls who had boys all had to get married, then, too, so there were ten weddings that week. The bald-headed old pastor couldn’t have been happier.
With the fall, the bachelors formed hunting parties to raid the abandoned farms below, bringing back quarters of beef that filled the freezers of the grocery store. That kept them from having to slaughter their own. Then and only then did they go after venison, rabbit, and squirrel. An unexpected surprise were the wild pigs that had gone feral in the valley. Noone would go hungry, this year.
Two more of the girls got pregnant, and the old ladies acted like they were their own grandchildren being conceived. The women were all knitting and crocheting baby blankets and caps and booties. The world was not dying, after all. There would be new life, and soon.
By the time the winter came again, they had learned to think of the mountain town as home. None of them ever wanted to leave for very long, and until the time came when they began to trade with other villages, there was no need to. The other towns envied their electricity, their plentiful food, and their running water, among the other luxuries of life the tribe helped maintain, but none of them had the manpower to take away the security Trace and his people had built. He let outsiders in, a few at the time, to buy and sell, as a show of strength to any who might threaten them.
Britt grew heavy with her child, and stayed in, feeling sick. The nurse was watching over her, making sure she got plenty of rest. Trace brought her food to her, just as he had when they first met. The other girls paid attention and made sure that their young men did the same for them, whether they needed it or not. One of Trace’s former girls was especially dramatic about it, angry that she wasn’t having her baby first. Britt just smiled.
When people from off came to trade, they were awe-struck by the town and its conveniences. Especially the girls who visited, who left amazed by how clean and well-fed everyone was. Some of them didn’t want to leave at all, which caused tensions between the tribe and other towns who resented losing their women. The trickle of new females wasn’t enough to fill the homes of the thirty young men who still needed mates, though.
It was the middle of winter, in a snowstorm, when Britt sent Trace up the hill for the nurse. She brought two other old women with her, and made Trace leave. It was the first time Britt had seen anybody else tell him what to do, successfully. A hard night followed, but the next morning the sky had cleared and one of the old women trudged over to the center where he had slept to tell Trace to come and say hello to his new son. The baby and the momma were both alright.
Those of the tribe without women, who had become the hunters and the laborers of the town, were discontent. If not turned outwards, their natural drives were a recipe for disaster, Britt saw. She advised Trace to encourage them to turn outwards, instead. He followed her council. The bachelors began to think of the girls in those other towns, and talk about war brides. That is how the township wars began, and how the mountains were united, but that is a story for a different chapter. By then Britt had given Trace three sons of his own, as heirs of all their tomorrows.
Chapter Seven
At about the same time that one of the elderly boomer veterans was dying in Trace and Britt’s mountain village, to be replaced by their second son, other
life cycles were opening and closing, far away. When one generation had eclipsed another, and those in turn had brightened and faded, the eternal cycle of civilization from struggle to decadence resumed.
The generation following the balkanization grew up frugal and lean, with malice in their hearts and revenge on their minds for what they had lost. In terms of land and blood they regained much of it. They raised their children to remember, and hunger for more. Eugenic science, unbridled by ethical fetters, took the human genome map and DNA science which had been in its infancy, and opened up entire new fields of research. The third generation were born with traits largely selected for by their parents, with the exception of those Naturalists living in Darreian rural communities and certain religious sects.
Giving free will back to people on such a grand scale meant that the former trends towards the subsumation of the most recent and recessive traits back to the more primitive mean were reversed. The CRISPR technology of the decade pre-Balk had just opened the door for more research and scientific breakthroughs which made specific genetic modifications possible after single-trait selection became commonplace.
The first few experimental cases outside the lab had required lifelong anti-rejection medications similar to organ transplant recipients, with the end result being that even their in vitro offspring reverted back to the unmodified original phenotype in back-telegenic digression. The key came in the second generation, when gene editing at the chromosomal level shifted into permanent revisions that could be passed on to succeeding generations through natural reproductive means, unassisted…