by Anna Oney
***
Naked, the couple lay on their sides, facing each other. First to wake from their nap, Hunter brushed back a few strands of Fawn’s hair that had draped over half her face as they slept.
God, you’re beautiful, he thought, admiring the freckles spread across her cheeks and over her nose.
The impetuous passion that had coerced Hunter to carry her inside their cabin was brought on by a mixture of worry over how long it’d be until he saw her again and the last words that’d escaped her heart-shaped lips. The repercussions awaiting their arrivals back home could prevent them from leaving again, indefinitely. Fawn could handle herself better than anyone he knew, but the thought of her being punished had him dreading for her to wake.
“Huh-Hunter?” Fawn stretched and yawned. “How long have I been out?”
“Not long enough,” he replied, sitting up. “I don’t want you going back there.”
“Nor I you,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “But we can’t abandon our families. We need a plan.”
“Sergeant Finch, the lady in charge, I saw her carrying a cylinder that looked important. I watched four guards escort her with it to the main headquarters.”
“Good,” Fawn said, slinging the blanket from her legs. “You need to get your hands on that cylinder.” She slipped on her tanned leggings and donned her top. “It could shed some light on what we’re really dealing with.”
“Hey,” he said, grasping her wrist as she turned away from him. “What’re you going to do?”
“Asher’s bound to have something similar hidden inside his tent.”
“Don’t put yourself at risk,” he pleaded, kissing the top of her hand. “Please.”
“You know how stealthy I can be,” she said, sitting on the bed. “If it’s possible . . . let’s plan on sneaking back here in two weeks. Sound good?”
Hunter leaned back against the pillow and gave an exasperated reply.
“Would it matter if I said no?”
Gliding the back of her fingers down his beard, she pecked his lips.
“I think you already know the answer to that.”
***
By sundown, Hunter had arrived back at the farm. He was greeted by Dwight and two armed soldiers who stood outside his cabin door.
Here we go, he thought, stopping his horse in front of the group of men.
“Howdy boys. There a reason y’all are here?”
Dwight stepped forward, bringing his hands together before his waist.
“Sergeant Finch wishes to speak with you.”
Hunter peered over Dwight’s shoulder, noticing that they’d kicked in his cabin door.
“Y’all going to fix that?” he asked, dismounting from Rodale.
“Come with us now,” Dwight replied, holding his hand out beside him, “or we’ll take you by force.”
The soldier to Dwight’s left handed him a pair of handcuffs.
“Are you coming with us?”
Hunter cursed himself for leaving behind his bow when he’d departed to meet up with Fawn. Leaning against his chair inside his cabin was his father’s bow. He figured this was the reason for the break-in. Unlike Fawn, he didn’t believe it necessary to bring his bow wherever he went. Now, however, he wished he had.
“Doesn’t look like I have a choice,” he replied, eyeing their automatic rifles as he tied Rodale’s reins to a post adjacent to the cabin’s door. “Let’s go.”
The community’s inhabitants watched from their porches as the soldiers escorted Hunter to the main headquarters. A gust of wind ripped through the middle of the tent’s flaps, revealing Sgt. Finch sitting on the edge of a desk. Arriving ten feet from the tent, Hunter’s anxiety over what Fawn was experiencing at Back Wood, had him struggling to stay focused on his own predicament.
“Mind your manners,” Dwight said, glancing over his shoulder as they came within three feet of the headquarters.
Having had no interactions with Sgt. Finch, Hunter’s plan was to be as polite as possible. Until he learned what he could get away with, that is.
Dwight halted before the tent, waving for the soldier to Hunter’s right to open the flap.
“Welcome,” Finch said, as they began filing in. “Have a seat, Mr. Bogan.”
Sgt. Finch’s pixie cut defined her features, making her nose seem larger than it actually was. Her cheeks stuck out past her sunken, electric blue eyes, that could’ve easily fit another eye between them.
Hunter shuddered at the image.
“Yes ma’am,” he replied, sitting in the wooden chair provided to him.
As Dwight and one of soldiers stood on either side of Hunter, the other soldier guarded the exit behind them.
“We take our rules very seriously, Mr. Bogan,” Finch said, crossing her legs. “Once they are posted you are to adhere to them or there will be consequences.”
“Am I to be punished, then?”
“I’m getting to that,” she replied, rising from the edge of the desk. “You telling Dwight to ‘go to hell’ is simply unacceptable. All soldiers of the NWA are to be respected, regardless of their rank.”
“Are we to be respected?”
The soldier guarding the exit snickered behind them, receiving a wide-eyed glare from Dwight.
“You’ve lost our respect, Mr. Bogan,” she said, walking around the desk. “But worst of all, you’ve lost our trust.”
“Ma’am—”
“Our philosophy is that if you break one rule, you’ll break another. We can’t have you negatively influencing the members of this community.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
At a leisurely pace, Fawn walked side-by-side with Juniper. The thought of Asher’s men waiting for her outside Back Wood’s gate sent her stomach turning.
The darkest corners of her mind worked their way toward her frontal lobe.
How many of these people am I going to have to kill? she thought, clutching her bow.
Over a span of seven years, she’d killed five men and three women. Scavenging wasn’t the safest venture. Strangers were always looking to steal what Fawn had slaved to discover. Their bargaining tactics were weak, and they turned to violence as the first, “No,” escaped her lips. But every arrow loosened or swing of her hatchet chipped away at her soul.
The only man she hadn’t been able to kill was the only one she’d actually wanted to. Rape was just another form of murder — spiritual murder. An assault on the soul. An abandoned traffic jam, overrun by vegetation that had spread from the woods, sat on a road called, Lacing Switch. At eighteen, during her first solo scavenging expedition, she’d awakened to a violent tugging at her leggings and breechcloth. Two years later, the pain had begun to regress, like the tide of an ocean, but the simplest actions from the people around her would provoke the buried memory to thunder back to shore.
She’d been weak then — unprepared, naïve, yet to experience the eye-opening cruelty of others. He’d threatened to slice her open from naval to nose if she put up a fight. Had she had an inkling of the depression and PTSD that would follow, perhaps she would’ve fought. It would’ve been better to die, she’d thought, after she’d arrived home three days early from her outing with blood staining her thighs. Death would’ve given me peace. The “murder” had lasted for three hours, but she never got a good look at his face as he kept her profile pressed hard against the ground.
“Hey there,” a woman’s voice said, drawing Fawn from her train of thought.
As she tightened her grip on Juniper’s reins, a white dog sporting a red collar bolted between Juniper’s legs and ran out ahead of them.
I am not in the mood for this. Go away.
“My, my,” the voice said. “Somebody’s crabby today.”
“Is that you, Joy?” she asked, peering to her left and right. Nothing, no one. Only the slow, twirling fall of leaves as they made their way to the forest floor.
“How’d you know?”
“I’m assuming wherever Stella goe
s, you go, too.”
The shuffle of leaves beside her forced Fawn’s neck to whip to her right. A young woman, at least half a foot taller than Fawn, walked beside her. The woman was clothed in a grown-up version of the same coral, knee-length dress the young girl had worn during their first meeting.
“Mostly,” Joy replied, chuckling lightly. “But not always.”
Instead of braided pigtails, Joy’s wavy blonde hair hung loose over both of her shoulders. Like before, her feet were bare and unscathed. This time, however, her toenails were painted, and they were a shade darker than her dress.
“How old are you today?” Fawn asked, tilting her head to meet Joy’s gaze.
“Seventeen.”
“Oh, to be seventeen.”
Fawn sighed, remembering the brimming confidence and carefreeness of her teens before that fateful night on Lacing Switch. The young men from each community vying for her attention (before Hunter had gathered the courage to speak to her), the richness of her auburn waves (now striped with random strands of grey), her heart, untattered, yet to experience the real sting of loss.
“Why’re you here today?” Fawn asked, attempting to shake her head free of years past.
Joy craned her neck, peering upward, as though she could hear something that hadn’t reached Fawn’s ears.
“Before you get home, there’s someone who’s going to need your help,” Joy replied, as Stella made it back to them, panting. “In three, two, one . . .”
Just as quickly as Joy and Stella had appeared, they vanished, and with their leave came a high-pitched squealing.
“What the—,” Fawn began, as Juniper pounded her front two hooves at the ground. “Come on,” she said, and whistled twice for Juniper to lean forward. “Sounds like its coming from the west.”
Fawn tugged at Juniper’s reins until they faced the direction they needed to go and kicked at Juniper’s sides. Four gallops in, Juniper had reached her maximum speed. The wind accumulated by their pace whipped Fawn’s braid behind her bare shoulders, resembling a slithering, airborne snake. She was slow in ducking out of the way of a low branch and barely blinked as her cheek was nicked. The pain didn’t register, nor did the sensation of blood trickling toward her jaw. Adrenaline’s an amazing thing, she would think later.
Six minutes into their ride, Juniper stopped abruptly, coiling Fawn’s braid against her back as she was thrown hard toward Juniper’s front. The middle of Fawn’s chest collided with the back of Juniper’s neck, knocking the wind from her. With her head hanging to the right of Juniper’s neck, Fawn eased herself to sit up.
Relieved she hadn’t been hurled to the ground, Fawn struggled through her labored breaths, and whispered, “Easy, girl, easy.”
“Easy,” she repeated, realizing something had spooked Juniper into halting their progress.
The screaming had ceased, which, to Fawn, meant they were running out of time. Leaning slightly to the left, Fawn’s gaze found the confused, pain-ridden face of a bobcat caught in a snare, ten feet away from them.
Seeing that Juniper refused to move closer, Fawn dismounted, and tied her reins to the lowest branch of an oak tree.
Thudding against her thigh was the stock of her father’s hatchet as she inched her way closer. The bobcat resumed its frantic state, hissing and growling as she reached the halfway point between them.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, holding out her hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
A ground snare, disguised by brush, cut into the bobcat’s stomach, drawing blood. The grass on either side of the animal had been beaten down by its attempts to free itself. The thin loop of wire secured around the bobcat’s middle hadn’t tightened all the way — a fluke occurrence in an otherwise deadly trap.
Fawn knelt two feet in front of the thrashing animal of muscle and spotted fur, and eased her hatchet from the loop at her side. Crimson blood coated the bobcat’s fur below its stomach. A bobcat was a definite threat, even to prey much bigger than themselves, but even a predator needed help sometimes.
“I’ll help you,” she said. “Don’t make me regret it.”
The bobcat snapped its jaw and swung its clawed paw as Fawn lowered the hatchet toward the wire. Fawn’s natural reflex was to draw back her hatchet to defend herself, but as she did so, the bobcat cowered beneath her. Registering how savage she must’ve looked, Fawn lowered her arm, and shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, resting the hatchet on her thigh. “But don’t do that again.”
She spoke to the bobcat as she would Juniper or Amos’s Gooner to show respect. The bobcat had no understanding of the human language, but the animal ducked its head, retracting its claws.
“Okay, good,” she said, cautiously inching closer on her knees. She nodded. “We seem to have an understanding.”
She detected the unmistakable odor of urine staining the air and noticed the animal was male. The bobcat had peed itself. An involuntary act Fawn remembered she had also done that night on Lacing Switch — trapped with no hope of escape.
The bobcat followed Fawn’s movements with the hatchet, cocking his head. She was able to lift the constraint so that the hatchet’s blade could fit between the bobcat’s skin and wire. He jerked as she sliced the bind that cut into his stomach. By the time Fawn was finished, the wound looked as though a perfect line had been drawn through his flesh.
The wound continued to bleed, but no significant damage had been inflicted as the bobcat was on all fours in no more than two seconds. For a moment, Fawn feared he would pounce on her and do what bobcats did best — tear out her throat. But all he did was gawk at her, with an almost awed expression, as if wondering, Are you friend or foe?
Bobcat’s practically stole food from her neighbors’ mouths by using Back Wood’s hunting grounds to run down rabbits. They also seemed to enjoy sneaking into Back Wood’s coop to devour their chickens. The animal was an enemy to the community, while Back Wood had been a foe to them. Fawn’s fur top was made from the hide of a bobcat, but she made a point not to needlessly kill animals just to add to her repertoire.
The bobcat flicked his ear, studying Fawn, while she studied him in return. As he twitched his bobbed tail, and took another step toward her, Juniper neighed behind her mistress. He then rubbed the side of his body against Fawn’s, sending Juniper into a more panicked state. Fawn heard Juniper’s front hooves leave the ground as she reared back.
By allowing Fawn to free him from the binds, he had shown her a degree of unmistakable trust. Fawn stared after him in utter shock as he parted from them, slowly at first, but gaining speed after his fifth step. On his tenth, he stopped and turned to look back at her, as if to say, “friend.”
Goodbye, Bob, she thought, having already decided on a name. See you around.
Eyes latched to the failed snare, she got to her feet, imagining herself entangled in the same trap as Bob with Asher towering over her. A question arose in her mind. Given the chance, would Asher show me mercy? Would he put aside their differences and cut the binds that could establish a trusting relationship?
Upon the NWA’s arrival, she had considered them instant enemies, but the blind faith this wild animal had shown her had her convinced that nothing was set in stone.
***
An hour after their interaction with Bob, Fawn and Juniper rode up to the community’s back barrier. As Fawn figured there would be, there were two armed guards manning the opened gate. The man on the left had a pockmarked face. He spoke into a small device attached to his right shoulder.
Fizz Fizz Fizzzz
Fawn followed the movement of his chapped lips, deciphering that he’d communicated, “She’s here. Over.”
The other man, who had a small build, sported evidence of a recent shave with three, small blood-laced tissue patches along his jaw. He took a couple of steps forward, making a quick glance toward his comrade as if waiting for further instruction. The name sewn into the pocket of his camouflaged top read, Cpl. V. Kod
el.
“You have a first name, Corporal?” she asked, gently squeezing Juniper’s sides with her calves to quicken her pace. “I’m assuming you’ve already heard of me.”
“Your name’s come up a time or two,” he said, peering over his shoulder, to see if his comrade had finished speaking with the person on the other side of the device. “I’m Vance.”
“What’s he talking into?” she asked, pulling on Juniper’s reins just four feet in front of Vance.
Clamping his lips together, Vance gave her a squinted look of amusement, and swallowed back a bout of laughter, shaking his head.
“Sorry,” he said, realizing she wasn’t joking, “I forgot you people have been living in the dark ages. It’s a walkie-talkie.”
“I see,” she replied, dismounting.
Not really.
“Hold on,” the man with the pockmarks interjected. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Excuse me,” she retorted, tightening her grip on her bow.
“We’ll come to you,” the man said, taking his first step forward.
Beside Fawn, Juniper neighed, and patted her hoofs on the ground, as though she could sense the building tension between her mistress and this approaching man.
“Can’t you read?” the man said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder toward the wall behind him. “Drop your weapon.”
Fawn squinted, focusing her sight on the sign that had caused her and Hunter to come up with a game plan. Right below the section that read, “No persons are to leave without permission from the community’s leader, Cdr. Asher,” she noticed another rule had been added.
“Upon reentry to the community, all persons are to surrender their weaponry.”
In an instant, that nothing is set in stone belief Fawn had had vanished. She found herself grappling with whether to loose an arrow. The weathered pages of Gran’s journal flipped through her racing mind, landing on a particular passage. Countless numbers of her Native American ancestors were gunned down within seconds of the white man’s invasion of their land — Wakiza’s land. Fawn’s land. Right then, she could hear the rattled screams of her people.