12 After Action

I was in bed, paying off a massive sleep debt while fighting a fever at the same time. Marta allowed me to get up long enough to bathe and eat and, later on, to take the occasional visitor. It felt like people were lined up outside my door waiting their turn to thank me for the rescue, which was both obnoxious and undeserved: It didn’t feel right to get so much of the credit when my companions had taken so much of the risk. I hadn’t even known the colony was in trouble until Rachel told me. The only evidence of them was a note promising grievous bodily harm if I didn’t follow Marta’s instructions exactly. They were away somewhere, and would return.

The story of Mike’s betrayal took a while to fill in. He and some followers had been agitating to get the Sojourners abandon their nomadic lifestyle all together and set up a permanent colony in Norcali. This was a long-running disagreement he had with Father Caleb, Marta, and Lars. For the council the issue always came down to “move or die," but lately the argument wasn’t working on everyone. The Sojourners had picked up a half-dozen new members, who brought with them rumors of a kingdom in Colorado where people lived in safety in cities behind layers of fences, protected by a military. The newbies hadn’t been to these cities or seen them for themselves, but Mike took the rumors as proof that a different life was possible, and indeed preferable to the one he currently lived. He and his followers wanted to leave but were not happy with the severance package the council offered, so they pretended to delay their departure until summer when there would be more resources to take with them and travel would be easier.

Mike was a watch leader and had his own crew, access to weapons, knew cache locations, and he was intimate with the periphery of the Farm. His team was the first to spot the shamble. Disabling the perimeter motion detectors was easy. The settlement didn’t know it was in trouble until people were already dying. The houses on the west side were hit first: a few people hid in the nearest root cellars, where we found them later shot dead by the traitors. Most people ran for the safe house. When they got there, they discovered the garage door was jammed open and the water supply had been drained, so they ran to the less-fortified fallback building. Zombies knocked down several of the smaller houses, probably following peoples’ scent. Sneaking away with three vehicles and the bulk of the supplies wasn’t risk-free under the nose of so many zombies, but Mike’s crew waited until the shamble was focused on the fallback building then raided all of the outer homes. These facts were enough to earn Mike and Co. a rating of “murderous” on the bad-o-meter. Turning off the power and phones raised them well into “gratuitous evil” territory. The Sojourners were stuck on the second floor with no water, no working pumps, no radio and might have all died of thirst if children hadn’t found a way to get onto the roof to harvest snow. If help hadn’t come in time, either in the form of us or freezing weather, zombies would have knocked down the building and killed them all.

Whenever I asked about Rachel they told me she was working. She had taken a team of four, including Sandy, south looking for gas and other supplies. A new couple, Douglas and Tasha, took a few hunters and a truck up into the hills looking for turkey or elk to replenish our supply of meat, while the remainder worked on repairing buildings and disposing of bodies. The weather was too warm to be out so much, but the work couldn’t be delayed if we were going to survive the next cold snap. On day five Doug and Tasha’s team returned with three trucks, a quantity of gasoline, and an impressive haul of fresh meat. Rachel and Sandy were still gone.

The father gave his Sunday sermon, but it was for us and not over the radio. He spoke movingly of the lives lost, the years cut short, our struggle to secure a future, the great plan that God must surely have for us, and our rewards in heaven. I was moved to prayer for the first time in years, not from a sense of the nearness of the divine but from desperation of its remoteness. “We could really use a hand down here,” I said to Living Jesus. “If things don’t go better than this, we’re all finished. Amen.” Judging from their faces, most Sojourners knew more uplifting prayers than I did.

The next few days were all fever and a burning thirst. Some child or other was constantly at my bedside to feed me packed snow when I wanted it and to read to me even when I didn’t want it. In my dreams I kept demanding Lars’ Ghost to raise Rachel on the shortwave, but he said there had to be radio silence. I hadn’t known him very well in life, except through his superb work with the barley, yet we sat together for hours now that he was dead, on a snowy field from which mountains thrust up on the horizon, and we were surrounded by the shades of former Sojourners. They were serene, those dead Sojourners, content for an eternal moment, consigned to that far plain until the time Living Jesus called them up.

Snow fell, in my dreams and out.

The fever broke on the eleventh day, in the dark hours of a morning which slept under a foot of fresh snow. My attendant drowsed folded in a chair wrapped in several layers of blanket, a thin waif of a boy we called Ginger. He was tiny for his age, but perhaps that was for the best. A small frame is easy to feed and quiet as it goes a-hunting. I have seen him, spear in hand, face the zombie terror and pith its brain expertly; yet I also saw him that morning in the slack slumber of youth. We had bought him a few more days at least, hadn’t we? A chance to sleep like that, careless. The freeze would come, and he could sing and play like children should. If we wanted to give up our fight for life, then we had to abandon him. Worse, we had to surrender even the possibility of him. I watched Ginger sleep for a long time, and my chest did that thing again, ached around my heart, a sign it was still too small for the life I was trying to lead.

I found some clothes and moved into the kitchen where Tasha was on duty, monitoring the alarms. She handed me a mug of something brown and hot from the stove which I guessed was elk broth. I drank four mugs of the glorious stuff while Tasha pretended to read her book instead of watch me, then suddenly felt tired and wanted back in bed. I gave her my best nod-smile to acknowledge her kindness, and received a dazzling smile in return. Douglas must live for that smile, I thought.

I dreamed again. I was still on the Farm, but where houses used to stand were great mounds of zombie bodies. Mountains of them. They weren’t ominous or threatening: they just were. Rodin’s Thinker had walked off and left his rock behind so I borrowed his spot. I sat, and pondered the mounds for a long, long time, wondered why they were there, what they meant, and what I was supposed to do with them.

When you've been sick for a while, getting well brings with it a kind of clarity, like you've been away from your own life for a while and, in coming back, you see it differently. What I saw differently was that I missed the two women in my life, that I worried about them and I wanted them back. I wanted to hear Sandy's reading or endure one of Rachel's mockeries, sleep next to them. I was assured they had had been heard from and they were fine, but I was still impatient to see them for myself.

On day twelve, a cold day, Marta cleared me for light duty. I was permitted a shower and shave, a half hour of exercise, then one hour of work which consisted entirely of explaining how and why the sleep ray worked to the assembled Sojourners. When I started drooping I was ordered back to bed.

Sometime after noon I got up and stood on the porch, waiting for my girls. I had no reason to expect them just then, but ten minutes later Rachel came driving up in a huge Ford 150 pickup truck, followed by Sandy driving the wagon. They both had passengers, and full loads.

Rachel was the first to park and jump out, but Sandy came at a sprint and reached me first, hit me at a dead run and knocked me over, and we both landed in the snow with a soft thrump.

"Welcome back, Sandy." I knew I was grinning like a fool, but that's what you do when you miss someone and then they just show up. You definitely don't punch them.

"You're all right!" Sandy's arms wrapped around my ribs and gripped tight.

"I'm all right," I laughed, "I slept a lot."

Rachel came close and bent down, to get a good look at my face. "You definitely look better." Her eyes shifted from me to Sandy and back again, and she made stroking motions with her hands. When I didn't do anything, her eyes widened in impatience.

I can take a hint, when I understand it, and on this occasion I understood I was supposed to be comforting Sandy. It hardly seemed fair when I was the one who had been sick, but I patted her on the back anyway.

❖ ❖ ❖

“We started with the caches, everything west and south of here,” Rachel told the assembly. Few enough Sojourners were left to all fit in the living room of the main house. People sat scattered about on random furniture, cross-legged on the floor, or leaning against the walls with arms crossed. The council sat in plain chairs in front of the fireplace facing the community: Father Caleb and Dr. Marta, with myself taking Lars's place. My position was due entirely to the zombie sleep ray and momentary popularity, and not for any real leadership skills.

Rachel went on, “They took everything from the Palmerville Drug Store, the Quick-Stop on 95, and the Mountain Farm. They left a clear trail, so they weren't expecting to be followed.

“We caught up to them in Weiser. They were living in a mansion, a pretty good setup with a fence all around. We watched them for a while but all they did all day was get drunk. There’s a Costco down the road and they took all the liquor from it they could carry. There were ten of them and only four of us, so we had to be careful.

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“There used to be a big church in Ontario. When the congregation turned someone chained all the outside doors, so there’s maybe five hundred zombies all shut up together.” Father Caleb and I remembered that church, and we must have reacted to Rachel’s news because Marta looked across at us both. When we had found the place years before, the Father hadn’t wanted it disturbed. “I sent three people to open the church and lure the shamble out to the mansion. I kept one man on lookout. Sandy built an antenna to lure them once they got close enough. I don’t understand how it works exactly, but to a zombie it feels like a human nervous system. She and I went on the grounds at night and planted the radio next to a weak area of the fence, and cut the gas lines on the cars. When the shamble got close enough, we turned on the radio and the lure team sped off.”

I wasn’t watching Rachel during all of this, I was looking at the assembly. Anger and grief hadn’t passed, exactly. We, the survivors of six years of plague, added our latest losses to the ever-deepening reservoir of bad experiences. Now Rachel was about to add to them, in her own way. Some people looked eager for vengeance. A few who had been close to the traitors looked down or away. The rest calmly waited for news that their enemies (once their comrades) had been killed. It would satisfy nothing, except it would make them safer.

“You can guess the rest. The zombies homed in on Sandy’s signal, broke the fence, destroyed the radio when they tried to eat it, then stormed the house. Most of the traitors were eaten. A few tried to escape on foot, but we had their exits covered. There were no survivors. We waited around until the next freeze, killed off the zombies, and packed up the goods.” Rachel took her seat, among the other Sojourners.

A period of quiet followed her report, to allow each person time to consider their own heart. If someone was moved to speak they could, but only after the quiet period passed. I bowed my head in unison with the Father and the doctor.

I had a hard time seeing past my anxiety over my friends' safety. They had the right to defend the people they cared about, and if there was killing to be done then Rachel was a good person for the job. It’s so much harder to see someone you care about in harm's way, but that was a difficulty I would have to face now that I was tangled up with Rachel and Sandy emotionally. Chances were high that one of us would die, and the others would have to put down the zombie of a friend. Abigail's death had sent me into solitude for years, and I still wasn't quite right.

Sandy’s sudden invention of a zombie attraction device was a surprise to me, but it shouldn't have been. When I was looking for a zombie knock-out frequency I had also found zombie enticement frequencies. I had documented them like we documented everything. If she had the frequency, then she knew how long an antenna to make and how to generate the signal. I had her soldering connections and copying circuit diagrams for weeks. In between that and sweeping out the zombie parts from the lab, I shouldn’t be surprised she learned something. I had to push my feelings for Sandy aside for the moment, as well. I might just be keeping Lars’ seat warm, but I didn’t want to dishonor him by misguiding the community.

When Father Caleb’s head came up, so did mine and Marta’s. I realized then, when I could see all of their faces, I knew only half of the survivors from years prior. Of the twenty-odd Sojourners from my time in the group, fewer than a dozen remained. A pity, I thought, that I couldn’t have kept one of the traitors’ zombie for testing. I still lacked a baseline.

An older woman stood, Zeta I think her name was, a newcomer. “When I joined this community I thought one of the rules was we didn’t kill people over goods. I liked that. It’s part of why I stay here. I am disturbed, no, alarmed, that we’ve suddenly decided it’s okay to kill just to get our things back. I would like the council to explain itself.”

“We don’t kill for supplies,” the Father said. “If all Mike and his band did was steal some supplies and leave we might not have done anything. We definitely wouldn’t have killed them.

“They caused peoples’ deaths by opening the fence. They shot the Faulkners to get their supplies. They cut off power and comms to the safe house, which they knew would put everyone else at risk. I’m grateful to have our things back, but that wasn’t the main purpose in sending out a team.”

Someone I knew, a man named Jared, stood next. “I’m glad they’re all dead. I know vengeance is supposed to be left to God, and I’m sorry Father, but they deserved to die for what they did. They deserved worse for what they did to us. We all lost people we cared about. Loved ones. Family. Anyone who does what they did deserves a lot worse.” He sat, and heads nodded all around.

“It wasn’t about vengeance,” I said loud enough to be heard over the murmuring. “It wasn’t even about justice, really. We know from experience that anyone willing to kill over food or fuel will do it again and again.” I looked at Marta, “do we still do entrance interviews?” She shook her head.

“For a couple of years we did extensive interviews of everyone who joined. Remember when we asked you all those questions, Jared? You came in with that group from the McClure Center.” Jared definitely remembered. He spent five months with a group in a women’s correctional facility, which was secure until it was overrun by one of the early mega-shambles. His brother and his brother’s wife sat near him, nodding. They too had spent days in interviews.

“We weren’t just collecting intelligence on other settlements. We wanted to know why communities fail, all the different ways they fall apart. One of the patterns that emerged is bad actors keep acting badly. Once somebody starts killing for little or no reason, they keep on doing it. They become a predator that’s out of control: you have to put it down. More often than not, they’ll come back and victimize the same people again and again. Even if they don’t come back, they’ll find someone else to brutalize.

“If it could be done with minimal risk to our own people, killing Mike and his people was good policy. No fighting fair, no even chances, no honorable duels or anything like that. Just wipe them away before they do to anyone else what they did to us.” That it felt good to get some vengeance was a bonus, but I didn’t need to tell them that. I made a note to ask Rachel her feelings on the subject: did she think they got off too lightly?

“Why?” someone asked, intruding on my thoughts. “Mike was with us from the start. We were his family. Why do this? Why turn on us?”

“Ambition,” said Marta. “He wanted to give orders for a change, instead of taking them. He’s been trying to get policy changes for a while, big ones, but he never had the votes. He must have gotten fed up. By making his followers kill, he made sure they could never come back to us so they would have no choice but to stick with him.”

The meeting adjourned soon after. Nobody asked, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion some of Mike’s followers didn’t know what they were getting into. Even so, if they had been braver they would have killed Mike when they realized what he was up to.

The council gave our makeshift family unit, Rachel and Sandy and me, the smallest house on the south side of the farm. It was just a cracker box house with two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a minuscule kitchen but it had been new when the plague started. There was a wood-burning stove, and the roof didn’t leak. Clean, dry, warm, occasionally running water, and several days supply of food. It had everything you could wish for in a small, post-apocalyptic house.

Idaho isn't the arctic, but warmth isn't something you can take for granted on winter nights. The three of us bedded down together, as had become our custom since HuSH Labs, near the stove. Whomever woke in the night had to feed the fire a few sticks and slide the air vent to one-quarter open before going back to sleep. This way we kept ice out of the house but didn't use too much fuel. In the morning we would have good coals to start a new fire.

That first night in our little house on the Farm, I thought to put a new d-ring in the floor for Sandy and her handcuffs but decided to ask her first. I couldn't imagine Rachel had been restraining her when they were out hunting Mike and his band of traitors.

The handcuffs had always been a complicated subject with us. They were ostensibly for my safety but they had been her idea, and she had wanted them long after I stopped worrying about her intentions.

"Do you still need this?" I asked, holding up the steel loops.

Sandy gazed at them for long moments before shaking her head. "No, I'm okay without them."

I tossed them aside, but I saw how Sandy's eyes followed them, how she worried what it might mean. "You can have the middle tonight. Keep us warm, okay?" That brought a smile out of her, at least part way, a few motes of happiness breaking through her perpetual caution.

As we arranged ourselves I caught sight of a mark on Sandy's skin, a bruise just over an inch wide that circled her arm above the bicep. I took her hands in mine and sniffed at them, then put my face near hers and sniffed again. Firearms propellant. "Has Rachel been teaching you to shoot?"

The caution was back in full force again. "Yes. A woman has to have skills, right?" She looked to Rachel for support.

"Good," I said. I stroked the place where the rifle sling had been drawn tight around her arm to give a firm shooting posture. Back when I had first found her, a little bruise wouldn't have stood out. Months of care, food, and moderate work had changed her to the point where a bruise looked out of place. I could hardly see the frail and nearly broken thing I had taken from the marauders half a year ago except in her face: the caution was ever-present. She was fairly open when it was just the three of us, but went quiet around other people.

I touched the small red rectangle on her neck where a hot cartridge had ejected and landed on her. "We should find you a hat with a brim, so the brass doesn't land on you." Sandy bobbed her head and, quick as a field hare, burrowed down into the center of the bed. She was the first asleep that night, boneless and hot, her expression a happy one. She had spent several days afield hunting traitors, had helped to kill them all, and then dispatched dozens of zombies after. Now she was sleeping as peacefully as the innocent Ginger.

"Thank you," I whispered to Rachel, as we lay opposite each other across Sandy's limp and sleepy form, "for teaching her, and helping her. I'm surprised you took her on a manhunt, though."

"She asked to come." Rachel kissed the sleeping woman on her cheek. "I didn't want to put my new little sister in danger, but she had something to prove. I'm glad she was with us, too. She's tough, you know? She has to be to survive everything she's been through. She won't let anyone destroy the life she wants without a fight. She's determined, just like her hero. "

I recalled the books we had taken from the library in our first days together. We had read through both series more than once at that point. "Would that be the boy wizard, or the girl detective?"

Rachel smiled at me with the knowing, "you don't really get it," kind of smirk women give to men when we fall behind in the conversation. "The boy wizard, of course."

It was me. I was Sandy's hero, according to Rachel.

"Never meet your heroes," I reminded her, "they always disappoint. She'll wise up eventually and move on."

"Or, she knows exactly what she wants." Rachel sat halfway up, to look me full in the face. "You still see a hurt animal that can't think for itself, but every day she makes a choice to stay with you. And ask yourself this: would you want to trust her to anyone else?"

I thought of all the men among the Sojourners one by one, and imagined how I would feel if she went to live with any of them instead of me. Most could be dismissed because they were too old, or already married, or gay. There were others I didn't trust. As for the remaining few … I wouldn't like seeing her with them. It was a hurt and ugly feeling, just a hypothetical, but it made Rachel's point for her.

The next morning, I noticed the handcuffs weren't where I had thrown them.