William was going through the inmates’ non-existent pockets, meaning he was finding weapons and other items rolled into T-shirt sleeves, taped to the men’s skin, or secured with torn strips of cloth. He found a self-seal bag enclosing a photo taped to the chest of one of the men—a deep, dark-skinned youth, barely more than a boy, with hair barely a fuzz on a scalp almost shaved on one side; his head on the other side was a bloody mess.
The photo showed an older woman. Hair straightened, wearing a feathered hat and a fancy dress suit, she stood on the steps of a small country church, her hand on the shoulder of a small, serious child of perhaps eight.
William looked from the boy in the picture to the boy on the ground. With the shell-blown side of his head not visible from this angle, he could see the resemblance: the full mouth, the wide doe-like eyes, lashed like a girl’s. William shrugged. War was Hell. He dropped the baggie on the ground, hesitated, and then took it and taped it as neatly as he could back on the kid’s chest.
This all took place within sight of the prison grounds. The militia men did not know (though they guessed) that the prisoners had slaughtered the guards once the rebellion began. The guards depended on handheld radios, and on a system of doors and partitions which opened and closed automatically. In the first few weeks, as the machine sickness had infected their devices, they’d gradually lost their communications.
The inmates had starved. Some had sickened, and a few of those had died. Many had been injured or killed in the fights that broke out among men crammed in too little space—a few of them killers, all of them scared, most of them made more furious by the lack of food and medical care. When the toilets backed up and the water stopped running, more of them died in a reeking, self-perpetuating nightmare epidemic of diarrhea and dehydration.
Most of the guards had left by then. After the first group of men kicked down the first steel door and there were no reprisals, the prison belonged to them by nightfall. The luckier guards had had their throats cleanly cut. The less lucky, the ones who preyed on their charges, enjoying the power, extorting and humiliating them—well, they died more slowly.
The militiamen tossed the last body into the ditch. Shawn was dragging the second of several twelve-foot branches he’d hacked off a dogwood with his knife. He was the first one to go down.
The others turned towards the guard tower, and Robert immediately perceived their amateurish mistake. “Sniper! Take cover!”
William had hit the ground at the first shot, and by pure luck, his location put a fencepost between him and the sniper. He lay belly down in the dirt, panting in horror, terrified to move. Paul was the next to go down, and Rick dove atop the corpses in the ditch, avoiding being hit by a fraction of a second. Robert drew a breath to shout another command. What that command would have been, William would never learn; Robert’s chest would never hold a breath of air again.
After a few minutes, he heard Rick’s voice from the culvert. “Hey! Is anyone there?”
William was afraid to call out in reply. His pants were wet where he’d pissed himself. His stomach itched, and he didn’t know if it was ants crawling on him or just sweat trickling or grass where his shirt might have gotten pulled up. He just didn’t want to move at all, because he feared the sniper would be able to make out his form and draw a bead on him if he moved.
Hours seeped by, saturating his limbs with a deep abiding ache. His hands were asleep. He finally risked bringing his arms down to his sides and made a slow shift in his hips to ease his back and knees.
No shots rang out.
The sun approached the horizon, and chill breeze began to stream over him. Nights were getting cold, and he might develop hypothermia if he tried to sleep rough. He resolved to wait until dark and then make a break for camp. He laid his face down awkwardly on the grass, trying to find a way he could breathe and not have to move his neck every couple of minutes.
Just then, Rick cried out again, his jaw quaking with the juzh-juzh-juzh of someone losing body heat. “Help! Is anyone up there?” The ditch was not that deep; a tall man, like Rick was, could see out of it standing up. Which meant Rick must have hurt himself when he went over the edge in a panic.
William hadn’t happened to look down in the ditch to see if there was water in it, but if Rick was hurt bad, and wet, he might not have the luxury of waiting a couple more hours until dark to make his escape.
William made his decision. “Rick, buddy.” He yelled. “It’s me, William! You injured?”
“Yeah, man. I broke my ankle. It’s bad, dude! I think I see bone.” He was trying to keep the fear out of his voice, but he was not successful, and William didn’t blame him.
“Hang on,” William said, “I’m coming!” He brought his arms up again and slithered forward a foot or so. He paused for one deep breath, invoking God in a whisper. When no bullet hit him, he opened his eyes and resumed the sinuous belly crawl. Definite gap between shirt and pants, he felt it now as his belly scraped along. At least he was moving. He expected each moment to be his last.
The fifty-foot crawl to the culvert seemed to stretch much longer, but he made it to the edge and looked over.
There was Rick, alright, perched atop two dead bodies lying Xed over each other. William saw that one of them was the boy who he’d re-taped the photo to, but he couldn’t tell if the photo was still there. Rick had his right knee drawn up to his chest, his hands wrapped around the ankle. William could see red smears of blood amongst the mud on Rick’s hands.
“Hey, buddy! I’m here for ya! Can you stand up?”
“I think so. It’s pretty muddy.” Rick levered himself upright on his left foot, holding onto the branch. He raised his hands up for help, and William saw there was no way he would be able to scramble up the almost-vertical embankment with only one good leg. William would have to stand so he could haul him out.
He gathered himself stiffly after so many hours on his belly and squatted, taking Rick’s hands and leaning his weight backwards to drag the older man out of the muck. Rick got the knee of his injured leg over the rim of the ditch, and the next moment, lay sprawled on his belly, panting and shivering. William reached out and grabbed the branch, sticking out upright from the culvert, intending to cut it down for use as a crutch.
Two shots reverberated. William somersaulted into the ditch. Rick just died where he was.
#
Thus began the first and last war of the Seventh Arkansas Militia versus the escapees of the Grimes Correctional Facility. It was a short, bloody war, concluded in a few short skirmishes, a war of an enraged but undisciplined, under-equipped and under-supplied force in a superior position besieged by a well-equipped, cohesive group of naïve amateurs.
It was a war of atrocities on both sides. It was the type of war which Herbert Spencer, the Victorian eugenicist and opium fiend who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” might have delighted in, in that two populations whose fitness to exist was challenged by many, eradicated one another. In Sun Tzu’s words, the entire conflict was fought on serious ground, for the enemies did not realize that in the final analysis, they were fighting themselves.
Nipped
Two weeks after Jeremy and D.D. left, in early September, was not an unusual time for the first freeze in central Indiana. It was, however, not expected that the temperature would plummet into the single digits (Fahrenheit) and stay that way for two weeks. The denizens of Sutokata rushed their livestock into winter stalls that were not yet prepared for them, but the chickens were almost a total loss. Buried under a pile of their dead coopmates in the corner, only three brave hens were found alive. Vegetables were harvested as frozen rocks and thawed to mush when brought indoors. Fruits froze on the trees. The ground froze solid, and soil amendments were left in heaps.
“The sky has never looked this way so early.” Snowbear scowled at the heavens, as though to prompt them to behave more politely.
“What way?” said Amit. He’d been savoring the smell of the apple
sauce cooking inside, the collective working day and night on preserves, doing their best to salvage the heaps of ruined fruits.
“It has the look of a January cold spell. See that white fuzzy line?” He pointed just above the horizon. “That’s a layer of suspended ice crystals. You don’t usual see that until after Christmas.”
“I didn’t notice that before.”
“This is bad. We were going to be marginal over the winter anyway with no seed corn available. Now we’ll have no eggs and no Fall greens. What will be worse is if we don’t get a long thaw later in the month. Not getting all the manure and compost turned in now is going to mean we won’t have much production next Summer either. That’s on top of the fruit trees freezing back, with their sap still up!”
“You worry too much, my friend!” Amit said.
“Ha! You’re usually the worry wart of the two of us.”
“You’ve had a lot on your mind. For all your planning and scheming, this year is the first time Sutokata is having to go it alone, really alone. You should have more faith in yourself. This is what you’ve been preparing for all these years.”
Snowbear shook his head. “Maybe I’m reading too much into the sky. Maybe it’s a positive change to do with the fact that we’re not burning fossil fuels any longer.”
“Another way to think of it is that almost all the fossil fuels have all been burned up at once. Shouldn’t that make it get warmer instead of colder?”
“Hmm. Well, at the very least, it might make the sky look different. I shouldn’t read so much into a single freak cold snap.”
“No, my friend, you shouldn’t. Life is too short to worry about things you can’t control. This is a wonderful time of year. Smell the sweetness of that applesauce!”
You Can Go Home Again
The next morning, Jeremy woke with the sunrise. His eyelids were heavy; he’d been disturbed by the shrill yapping of coyotes a few times during the night. The screening around the stilts under the home had kept them away, but still. The Yucatan hammock looping from the floor joists above had turned out to be surprisingly comfortable—once Ryan had shown him how to get in without dumping himself on his head on the concrete. Ten-thousand-year-old technology for the win! Getting out was a new challenge. His fingers and toes had gotten entangled, but after some thrashing and twisting, he managed to get on his feet.
Ryan came down the stairs. “Taking the gals to the beach again today. I’ll be back in a bit.” Lori and Missy were a few steps behind him.
“Thanks for your hospitality,” said Jeremy, “but I’ll be on my way over to Joanne’s now.”
Ryan stepped up to him and gave him a convincing handshake.
Jeremy squeezed back, bemused at how much his grip had weakened in the weeks he’d been on the road. There was plenty of hard work to do in the fall at Sutokata, but for all it made him stiff and achey at the end of the day, twisting the throttle on the four-wheeler didn’t really challenge him much. He was ready to earn his keep at Joanne’s place. He was sure the old woman with her ravaged lungs would have plenty of need for things done around the sprawling B & B.
Jeremy packed up everything on his ATV while Ryan hitched the mules. Missy stood solemnly watching, blinking in the early-morning light. Jeremy mounted up, nodded to Lori, “Thanks again, ma’am,” gave little Missy a wave, and pulled off down the sandy trail. He reached the remains of the main road along the peninsula, gravel almost completely ground into the sand, and headed to Joanne’s place.
When he got to the B & B, it looked almost like he remembered, except that the lawn chairs and chaises underneath the big main building were just a neat stack of aluminum frames, the vinyl mesh completely dissolved away. The wood porch swing still hung from the joists overhead. The expansion-mesh elevator stood at ground level, full of shovels and hoes and edgers. Obviously, that wouldn’t work anymore, even if she had power, since the insulated wires would be shorted out, so she was using it as a storage shed.
Closer scrutiny showed signs of degeneration: a stair tread that was splintering from normal exposure to the sun and rain and wind; a windowpane replaced with cardboard (he wondered what she’d used to hold it in place, since tape, made of plastic, was no more). He cut the engine and stayed a few minutes.
Sure enough, the curtain on the glass window in the doorway at the top of the stairs opened a little. Moments later, Joanne threw open the door, a huge smile bringing out the peaks and valleys of her wizened face, her brown eyes sparkling as ever. “Jeremy!” she croaked. She had a memorable Philly Yankee accent, and a voice ruined in a ventilator accident in her nursing days.
She stepped onto the landing and started down the steps, but he stopped her. “No, you stay there.” He took the steps two at a time and enfolded her in hug. He hadn’t realized how happy he’d be to see her. His own mama had passed in a car crash when Jeremy was still a young man, and so Joanne had kind of adopted him while he was staying with her working on the house foundations after a hurricane.
“How have you been? Let me look at you!” she rasped. Standing on the step above, Joanne was eye-to-eye with him. She put her hands on his shoulders now and took a good, long look. “A bit thinner than I remember. Come on inside and let me fix you something to eat.”
Jeremy smiled. Joanne was true to her Italian upbringing; it was never a question of whether a guest was hungry, for she would inevitably feed them something.
He followed her in the house and looked around. It was neat and clean, the overstuffed leather furniture intact, the wool rugs unscathed. The shiny polyurethane on the wood floors was long-gone, leaving a dull surface behind, and the artificial Christmas tree in the living room was now pushed into the corner, a pathetic wire skeleton left after all the plastic vegetation had rotted away with the machine sickness.
“I’ll take that outside that for you.” He nodded at the tree.
“Later, dear.” Joanne was scooping seabutter into a metal pot and sprinkling something on top of it—sesame seeds, maybe. She stepped out through the screen door onto the capacious deck and lit a small fire in an open-topped chiminea, atop which an old steel satellite dish had been repurposed to make a serviceable stove.
Jeremy made a mental note to see if he could scrounge up an actual woodstove to install for her. He was sure she must have had some unpleasantly chilly days during the south-Texas winter since it all went sideways. He’d try and make sure she didn’t have to shiver during the one coming up.
She stirred the concoction for a few minutes, and a delightful smell arose. She set the dish down on the granite counter in front of Jeremy. It was as delicious as it smelled, flavored with garlic and filled with crunchy seeds—not sesame, but flax.
“Great breakfast!”
“You like it?”
“It’s delicious. This seabutter is really growing on me!”
“I know. It’s a miracle, really. With no boats or trucks coming in, we’d of been in big trouble if it hadn’t started washing up. Nobody knows what it is, and whoever figured out you could eat it must have been desperate, but we’re glad to have it.”
“Lot of desperate people lately.” Jeremy scooped the last bite up and left the spoon in the bowl. “The fella I stayed with last night almost whupped me with a tire iron when he saw me.”
“Who was that, then?”
“Guy name of Ryan. Wife, Lori; little girl, Missy.”
“Oh, yes, the Willises. Nice people. I’m not surprised Ryan took a swing at you. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“People from Houston drift in every now and then. Most of them are just looking for someplace safe to live and something to eat. But some of them are gang-bangers, escaped prisoners, ex-cops, lunatics…”
“Oh, I know,” said Jeremy. “I’ve been to Indiana and back since you seen me. The big cities aren’t anyplace you want to be nowadays. And we met some scary characters in the country too. I worry about DD on her own out there.”
“The very same.”
“I thought she’d hit the road without telling you goodbye!”
“Well, yes. We kind of hooked back up again. It’s a long story.”
“Well, I’ve got time. Come sit down and tell me the whole thing.”
On the sofa, Jeremy explained how DD had stumbled up to his disabled truck out on Pelican Island, looking half-dead after a beating by some type of law enforcement spooks in an abandoned warehouse. He told her how the two of them had gone up to the off-grid community, Sutokata: “Kind of part hippie commune, part survivalist camp, and part tech incubator,” was the way he described it. “She’d kept in touch with her college friends who lived there.”
“And you two broke up?”
“Not really. We just went our separate ways, is all. She headed for Florida, and I wanted to come back here.”
Joanne tilted her head in puzzlement. “Weren’t you worried about her going off all alone like that?”
“Yeah, but DD can take care of herself.” Jeremy shrugged. “Looks like you’ve had folks looking out for you.”
“Well, the Mormon couple next door had food storage and their kids were gone, so they look after me and try to convert me. I still make my jewelry, and every so often, someone comes by to trade some fresh produce or a chicken for a birthday or anniversary present for his wife or mother.” She sighed. “I’ve had a few bad, scary episodes since my inhaler melted, but there’re some herbs that help. I wear a mask when the air is dusty or mildewy. I’m still hanging in there, touch wood.” She tapped the coffee table, also dull without its lacquer.
“Well, if you’re amenable, I could stay here and swap room and board for helping you out around the place?”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 36