After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  17

  “Why does anyone fight?” Elm asked as the fire crackled and the whiskey flowed.

  They’d followed Elm back to his place on the outskirts of Brookdale, a small half-horse town where he ran what had once been a hardware store, but now had a weathered sign hanging on the outside wall with words scrawled in red paint: ‘Trading Post.’

  Elm had told them he’d been left the last guy standing in the town but had been doing okay. Some of the people who knew about his place would come from Chicago to trade food for whatever he’d been able to find or salvage from the towns around there. Up until a few weeks before, he’d also taken his truck into Chicago when the weather allowed for such a trip, just to look through abandoned houses for booty.

  That was until his truck had stopped working.

  Now he couldn’t even get it to start. But it was just as well—because of the war.

  “It’s a territory thing,” Elm continued. “There are three main groups who decided to stay in the city and see if they could make a go of it. As usual with this kinda thing, ego gets in the way; no one wants to compromise, too many guns, no one wants to lose face.”

  “And they’re setting fire to buildings?” Nathan was incredulous. As if things weren’t bad enough, when everyone needed to be working together, things like property and territory should be shared and worked on together, not fought over.

  “Yup. And executing people in the street. All sorts. Never have I been so glad to not live in the big city.”

  Elm leant forward and put another log on the fire. “I guess they’ll either all kill each other or one group will beat the others, and then we’ll get back to scratching out a living.”

  Nathan shook his head, thinking of how Detroit had been reformed into one dominant grouping who had the largest slice of the pie for themselves, with have-nots on the other side of the coin, and it had only been armed insurrection on the part of Rose and her crew that had brought Brant down.

  If he went back to Detroit in five years, would Rose be the new Brant? Jealously guarding what she had for the few? Would the situation require another rebellion? Was this the pattern for all cities and concentrations of people from now on—a lawless battle for supremacy?

  Last guy to die gets to keep the prizes.

  It made Nathan sick to his stomach to think of how quickly things had fallen apart and come to this. It made Cyndi’s prepping all the more vital. The skills she’d learned and the ways she could apply them now in this screwed up world had made it natural for Brant and the others to want to entice her to Detroit. It wouldn’t do well, he thought, to spread it around that Cyndi was so useful. He could be sure people would come for her again if they could.

  Before Elm left them to sleep, he gave Cyndi a Lakota Cradleboard for Brandon. Two laths of pine carved intricately with representations of prairie animals, and a hooded hide carrying enclosure into which Brandon could be placed for Cyndi to carry the baby on her front or back, keeping both hands free. It was a beautiful object.

  “Got no use for it myself these days; figured I could pass it on to someone who does. You can’t carry the baby in the crook of your arm forever now, can you?”

  Cyndi’s eyes sparkled with gratitude. “Thank you. It’s beautiful. I’ll cherish it.”

  “Don’t cherish it. Use it. It’s not an ornament,” he laughed, and he sounded to Nathan exactly like Cyndi had when she’d told him that pregnancy wasn’t an illness.

  Cyndi took the ribbing with the usual grace Nathan associated with his wife. She was all quality.

  They bedded down on the comfortable furniture in Elm’s living room as the fire burned lower. The dogs were penned outside, and the sleds stowed in the garage alongside Elm’s broken-down Dodge. It was a red ’95 Dodge Ram, and Nathan promised Elm he’d take a look at it in the morning if he wanted him to.

  “I’d appreciate that, fella,” he said as he got up to leave the room, but then he turned, looking down at Nathan, his family, and his friends. “You sure are a long way from home, ain’tcha?”

  “We are that,” Nathan agreed.

  “Well, I suggest you keep going as soon as you can, my young friend. There ain’t nothing here, but death and graves.”

  The Ram needed a new fuel line and the thermostat was fritzed.

  “You’re lucky it’s so cold now,” Nathan told Elm, wiping his hands on a rag as he pulled his head out from under the hood. “You run it too long like that and your engine destroys itself. You can’t run it until we get you some new parts.”

  Elm bit on his thumbnail in thought, but finally answered. “There’s a Dodge dealership and shop in Pinkersville, about six miles up I-90. Should have what we need there?”

  “I would think so.”

  “How about you take me out on your sled and we’ll have a looksee?”

  And so, an hour later, Nathan was shouting, “Hike! Hike!” to the dogs while Elm sat in the sled with his crossbow across his lap.

  Cyndi had spoken to Nathan quietly before they’d left, while Elm had been showing Freeson and Lucy his crossbow skills in the yard.

  “You’ve got your pistol?”

  Nathan had patted his shoulder holster. “Of course. Wouldn’t be seen dead without it.”

  Cyndi had whacked Nathan on the shoulder in response. “Don’t even joke about it. Like Elm says, there’s a war going on, and although we’re miles outside the city, we don’t know who or what you might run into.”

  “Straight out and straight back. Promise. Then a few hours to work on his Dodge and then one more night and we’re out of here. The dogs need a rest anyway, and this is as good a place as any.” Nathan had kissed Cyndi then and her stiffness had drained away. “Okay, but be careful. Please.”

  “And bring Elm back in one piece.”

  Nathan had raised an eyebrow.

  “Have you not seen his back room?” Cyndi had asked, pointing across the kitchen to a door set deep in the wall. There’d been a tribal blanket hanging across it, and a tomahawk hanging on leather straps hanging from the door handle.

  “No, I haven’t seen the back room, and judging by the axe there, neither should you.”

  Cyndi had sighed, but nodded in acknowledgement of the point. “I went in there by mistake, still getting oriented to the house. But, Nathan, come and look.”

  Nathan had been able to see Elm through the window in the yard, firing his crossbow into a far tree, then reloading the weapon and handing it to Lucy for her to have a go. Lucy had fired and the bolt had slammed into the tree, leading to Lucy whooping and Freeson applauding.

  “Come on, see for yourself.” Cyndi had pulled Nathan away from the window, towards the door. The tomahawk had swung and chinked against the doorframe as Cyndi opened the door.

  Inside the door was a room, perhaps six feet wide, but eight long. Lined with jars and boxes. The smell of the room had insinuated itself in Nathan’s nose as the images assimilated. It was rich and redolent of dried vegetables and tobaccos, sweet with the smell of cured meats and smoked fish. The glass jars were filled with all manner of dried matter, curled and gnarled. Barks and leaves, grasses, seeds, and fungi. Nathan had scratched at his head. “Ingredients? Food? A pantry from a weird horror movie?”

  “No,” Cyndi had said, hardly able to disguise the excitement in her voice. “A pharmacy.”

  The sled zipped across the powder, staying off the roads. The dogs, fully rested now, were more than happy to get going; they’d yelped and barked with joy as Tony had helped Nathan put the team back together.

  Elm was impressed with the speed they were making across country, too. Although they were still some miles from Chicago as they left Brookdale, the night had given way to a sky that lay stained with smoke from the city’s burning buildings. Nathan had spent a disturbed night’s sleep without much shut-eye, and on occasion had thought he’d heard the thump of explosions way off in the distance. As it had not disturbed anyone else in the room, he hadn’t been sure. He’d ha
lf-hoped the sound would wake the snoring Freeson, but it hadn’t, so Nathan had just nudged him with a foot and he’d rolled over.

  But aside from the smoke, the air was crisp, and the dogs seemed not to be feeling the cold at all, happily pulling the sled to Nathan’s commands as directed by Elm’s occasional shouted direction.

  They crossed the highway several times on their winding route, but didn’t stay on it. At their first traversing of the highway, there had been two freshly burnt-out cars. Still steaming. The fighting, if that was what had caused these vehicles to be destroyed, was possibly getting closer—and Nathan didn’t want to risk running into anyone hostile.

  They crested a rise and found Pinkersville laid out below them. Nathan used the glasses to check the deserted streets for signs of life. He offered the binoculars to Elm next, but the older man shook his head and only looked through narrowed eyes down onto the town.

  “I don’t need your lenses to tell me the town is clear. Come on.”

  They tied up the dogs and the sled, and then walked the last half mile on foot, trudging through the virgin snow. Elm almost loped like a wolf, his legs longer than Nathan’s, and the mechanic had to hurry to keep up.

  “You and your wife, you didn’t have to sneak about this morning, you know—all you had to do was ask to look at my stock. I ain’t got nothing to hide,” Elm said out of the blue as they came into the fringes of the town. It was a ghost place of burnt-out homesteads, gutted stores, and broken glass crunching beneath snow. It had been abandoned for some time. The wind whistled along the streets with a mournful wail and made the moment less awkward than it might have been. But Nathan hadn’t expected Elm to choose now to confront him, however softly, about his and Cyndi’s trespass.

  “We didn’t mean anything by it. My wife went in there by mistake, and she just wanted to show me is all.”

  Remembering he didn’t want to give too much away about Cyndi’s interests and skills, he added simply, “She just thought it was cool. Back in Detroit, we stayed in a place that had a room full of stuffed animals—you know all that taxidermy bit—it’s just fascinating what people collect, you know?”

  Elm snorted. “Your wife moves like a cat, she is bright with intelligence, and I saw the way she cared for the baby last night, and how she is alert. She has more than a passing interest in that room. I figure she knows exactly what is in it. Am I right?”

  Nathan didn’t see any point in lying—Elm was of course pretty much spot-on, and so it didn’t matter what Nathan might not want to give away about Cyndi. Her abilities seeped out through every action she engaged in. “She has some knowledge, yeah. Herbs and things. She has to…”

  “Your son is asthmatic; I would assume she learned as much as she could to make sure, if the medicine he takes runs out, she’d have a backup ready to go.”

  “Yes. She did.” Nathan’s head dropped. How busted was he now? He’d fallen at the first hurdle.

  They crunched on in silence, the streets around them empty of all life, or any signs of recent occupation. After a hundred yards more, Elm stopped, smiled, and looked at Nathan. “I understand, son. If I had a wife like yours, I’d want to keep her light under a bushel, too. Don’t worry, I have no one to tell. My wife is long gone, and I reckon you’re a decent enough fella. I like you, Nathan. You have a goodness in you, clear to see. Like you at your age, I was looking to carve my place—of course, I didn’t have the Big Winter to get in the way of that or show me that making the smallest mistake could have the largest consequences. Back before the Big Winter, men like you had space to fail. No longer. I’m lucky I did all my learning and failing before the safety to fail was taken away from all of us… get down!”

  Nathan dropped to his knees as Elm leveled his crossbow and fired above the mechanic’s head. Nathan was reaching for his gun, thinking they were under attack or in some kind of danger, but all he heard was the thud of the bolt hitting something in the air, the death squawk of a fowl, and the phhhht of a feathered body plummeting to the snow.

  The pheasant was not a plump creature, and the bolt had been overkill in terms of bringing it down, but Elm declared the bird to be “good eating” as he strung the carcass to his belt before they continued on deeper into town.

  The Dodge dealership was at a crossroads. Whatever trucks and cars it had sold before the town had been abandoned had long since disappeared. They walked directly into the showroom through smashed windows. There were drifts of snow inside the building, going all the way to the back wall. They had to dig through a few feet of it to get access to the door to the building’s storage facility.

  Many of the shelves had been looted, and there wasn’t a lot of gear left for Nathan to put into his rucksack, but he picked up a socket set, a few tools, a thermostat, and a couple of spare fuel lines.

  “You should come back here and get the rest of this stuff when you can, Elm. It might come in handy in the future.”

  Elm nodded sagely, running his fingers along the gray metal racks. He picked up a few boxes of spark plugs and a solenoid. “If I take it all, there will be nothing for others. That’s the problem in Chicago—everyone wants to take it all. When that happens, there are problems.”

  Nathan took the veiled rebuke on the chin. Elm was right. If anyone took everything—his group included—then people became more desperate and were more willing to fight and cheat and steal to get what they needed. “You’re not wrong. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. Just remember to leave something behind for the next person. Otherwise, what kind of world will we be leaving our children?”

  They made their way out of the Dodge dealership and back along the way they had come. And they heard the snicks of the chambering guns before they saw the men.

  They were coming from the doorway of a derelict but not burnt suburban ranch house. There were five of them, all with black Heckler & Koch MP4s at their shoulders. They were in uniform and, as the lead guy got close—a blond, thin-faced man with broad shoulders and narrow hips, like a triangle stuffed into some pants—Nathan saw his nametape said ‘BRETT’ and that his chest badge marked him out as a National Guardsman.

  The other four were similarly attired, and looked lean, mean, and hungry. “Put down your weapons. Now!”

  Nathan stole a look at Elm, who nodded mutely. They laid their pistol and crossbow on the ground in the snow.

  “Looters,” Brett said, waving the muzzle of his MP4 around like he was using it to point out equations on a blackboard.

  “Hold on there…” Elm started, but Brett lifted his gun to his shoulder, his eyes blazing, and his fellows split their aim. Two on Nathan, two on Elm.

  “Did I give you permission to speak, Redskin?”

  Elm bristled but shook his head.

  “Now, you and your squaw here, empty your rucksacks.”

  When the rucksacks were empty, Brett toed through the boxes, tools, and packets. “As I said—looters.”

  Brett put the safety on his MP4 and let it swing by his side, and Nathan figured him for the kind of officer who would make his pronouncements with both fists on his hips, turning stiffly, full of himself and desperate to show everyone how in charge he was.

  Nathan was soon proven correct and had to stop himself giving a little grin as Brett did exactly as prophesied. “The town of Pinkersville and its environs are part of the Third Tactical Chicago Enclave. Anyone found here looting or removing material without a registered permit, signed by General Hollister, is to be arrested and taken back to HQ for questioning.”

  “Permission to speak,” Elm said.

  Brett blinked. He hadn’t been expecting anyone to talk, especially after having given them orders not to. “Listen, Redskin, what could you possibly say in this situation to stop me from cuffing you right now and dragging you back to our vehicle for a little ride?”

  “There’s nothing I can say, but there is something you can read.”

  Brett raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And what might that b
e?”

  Slowly, and with great care, Elm said, “Inside my sheepskin. There is a letter, signed by your general, giving me full permission to be here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of me.”

  “And who exactly are you?” Brett’s tongue flicked nervously at his lips.

  Here was a man who was wary and scared of the name of Hollister being invoked, Nathan saw, as he’d caught a slight tremor in Brett’s bottom lip as he’d spoken.

  “I am The Wolf of the Elm, Chief Wind Follower of the Lakota People. I’d probably stop using your racist epithets if I were you, Brett. Me and Hollister go way back. My daddy was a Code Talker with his daddy.”

  Nathan could see Brett wasn’t sure if this was all BS or not, but he wasn’t going to take the chance. “Show me your authorization, then.”

  “That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said,” Elm said, with a growing timbre of control in his voice. He had significantly turned the tables on Brett, and the smile playing on his lips showed Nathan that he might now be enjoying the encounter.

  Elm held one hand up high while he used his other to slowly lower the zipper on his jacket. When there was enough space for his hand, he reached inside and pulled out a manila envelope. Not saying a word or lowering his other hand, he held out the envelope to Brett, and Brett reached out to accept it.

  Later, when Nathan recounted what happened next to Cyndi and the others, he’d say he could have sworn he must have been blinded by lightning from a clear sky and deafened by thunder from another dimension, because no sooner had Brett’s fingers touched the envelope than he was in a tight hug with Elm, a serrated Bowie knife about to sever the spine below the base of his skull, his other hand having already having turned Brett’s MP4 around and pointed it at the other National Guardsmen.

  Nathan could only assume Elm had moved as fast as the wind, that the envelope had been used to disguise the knife, and that Elm, as well as being wise, kind, and as sharp as a scalpel, was also as mean as a rabid dog. Willing to play dirtier than a boxer with a horseshoe in his glove.