Fight for Power (24 page)

I brought us around until the smoke was dead ahead and visible to both of us. At least I thought he could see it now.

“Over there. Can you see the wisps of smoke rising up in the air?” I asked.

“I see it. Looks like somebody is burning garbage. With no collection they have to dispose of it somehow,” Herb said. “Burning makes the most sense.”

The engineers seemed to be able to turn almost anything into something we needed. Even so, we were burning some garbage ourselves, whatever we couldn't compost or recycle in some way.

As we closed in, the smell kept getting stronger and more putrid. There was no point in getting any closer, so I banked to the side to curve away from it.

“No,” Herb said. “Get us closer … and lower. I need to see.”

“Sure.” I didn't see the point, but I wasn't going to argue. Still, why did he want to get closer to burning garbage? At least if I swung to the right we could come at it from upwind.

As we closed in, I recognized the place—it was a park off Dundas Street. The park was a sort of depression, like a bowl, with slopes rising up on three sides, topped by trees and bushes at the edge of the top rim. I'd played baseball there before—although nobody was going to play baseball there again for a long time. The whole infield was covered in smoldering garbage. It extended beyond the infield.

I banked, circling the park from the north, moving counterclockwise. As I continued to curve around it the smoke blew back into our faces. It smelled awful but familiar, like burned meat at a barbecue.

I looked down. It wasn't smoldering garbage—it was human bodies, a half dozen or so, burning in a fire being tended by a small crew.

“Oh my God,” I mumbled. It was a makeshift crematorium and burial ground. “They've disposed of hundreds of bodies down there,” Herb said.

There were bodies everywhere, tangled and twisted and blackened, with white bones sticking out, some burned to a crisp, some still wearing the remains of charred clothing. The sight, the smell, brought back memories of what Brett and his crew had done weeks ago after our attack on the bridge.

I banked sharply away and pulled back on the yoke. I needed to get up and away and into fresh, unstained sky.

 

22

I rested, my back against a rock, basking and baking in the sun. It was warm and wonderful, and I felt myself starting to drift off.

Then I jerked awake and got to my feet. A sleeping guard was no guard. I'd had another night with too little shut-eye and too many images. Pictures in my head of more dead, more bodies. I'd spent the evening with Lori and Todd, playing penny-ante poker, trying to get the images from my flight with Herb out of my mind, but even hanging out with those guys couldn't drive away those scenes. Why had it bothered me so much? It wasn't like I knew any of them, or knew what had happened to any of them; it wasn't like I hadn't seen death, over and over and over. Still, the smell seemed to linger in my nostrils.

I shifted the rifle from one shoulder to the other and started to walk alongside the riverbank. Behind me was a group of our people fishing, some using rods and others nets. The nets were made from a bunch of old volleyball nets we had found at the elementary school, with lengths of rope tied on the ends to make them wide enough to stretch across the river.

I was one of a dozen armed guards protecting our crew. We were far from the only people fishing along this stretch. Leonard and his family were just upstream from us. Along with them were Madison and her mother and some others from the tent town that continued to grow on our southwest corner. Lori had told them we were going down to the river—and I'd had word sent out to Leonard's grandfather. While we weren't officially there to guard anybody except our own people, we were still going to take care of them as best we could. It didn't cost us anything, and if they could catch some fish it would make them more able to fend for themselves, which was in our best interest.

People were continuing to beg at our gates, and we could see that those passing by were becoming thinner and thinner. It was getting harder for people on the walls to keep saying we had nothing to give, nothing to share. It was one thing to defend against men with guns, another to turn away women and children who simply wanted something to eat.

It was even harder to think about those people living within sight of our walls—people like Leonard and Madison and their families. These weren't just anonymous strangers passing by, but people we knew, even cared for.

But hunger was becoming an issue inside our walls as well, with complaints growing. Rations had become smaller, and people were blaming Ernie—like somehow he could snap his fingers and there would suddenly be more food.

What they didn't know yet was that the committee had decided that daily rations were going to have to get even smaller in the coming weeks. Our stores of basics like flour and dried beans were getting low, and the only way to stop from running out of food completely until the big harvest in the fall was to stretch out what we had. I would have liked more food, too, but I was surprised at how little you could get by on—even if you were doing something really physical, like working the fields.

Ironically, now that some of the fields were starting to be harvested, it seemed to be even harder. People could see food and were wondering why they just couldn't have more of it. What they didn't think about was that some of the food we were growing was going to have to last for an entire year, until the fall harvest of
next
year. Winter would come eventually. I guess some people didn't want to look that far in the future. Grumbling stomachs clouded judgment.

I'd heard the discussions in the committee, heard the breakdown on supplies, and understood that even if we kept rationing the food there was not going to be enough to get us through the year. Nobody knew how long this was going to last, but so far there had been no sign, no indication that anything was going to happen to “save” us. If we were going to survive, that survival was based solely on what we were doing inside our walls—and of course the things we were trying to do today to bring in more food.

I'd noticed that the hungrier people got, the more irritable they became. Things that hadn't bothered anybody before now caused arguments and fights. Small disputes, fights in the school yard between kids, happened almost daily. My mother had to send more and more officers to respond to dust-ups between neighbors, husbands and wives, parents and kids. Rather than pulling together, people were starting to pull apart.

Yet in a strange way, things were going too well for the neighborhood, there was too much calm. Who would have thought that a lack of a problem was a problem? Not that we were wishing for it, but Herb had predicted that a big, visible outside enemy would have actually settled people down and brought them together.

We weren't relying solely on food being grown, of course—teams were going out daily to scavenge. Howie often led a team out during the day to search for things that we needed. They'd gone “old tech” and used the Yellow Pages phone book to locate stores that might still have some of what we wanted. It was interesting how looted and stripped stores still had some things of value hidden among the rumble that remained.

A whole group had learned about foraging in the fields and forests. They were looking for things like chicory, pine nuts, spruce needles, leaves that could be used for salads, roots that could be boiled like potatoes. Hunters had killed a few more deer, but more meat was coming from sources nobody wanted to talk about. I hadn't seen a squirrel within our walls or a dog outside of them for a long time. Traps and snares had been fashioned that caught rabbits, raccoons, and birds. Who would have thought that I would be eating starlings and raccoons—and enjoying them? Meat, any meat, was welcome. Somehow beans and potatoes and greens didn't fill the hole in your stomach that meat did. I would have killed for a big steak. Maybe I shouldn't have been thinking things like that, but I knew I wasn't the only one.

Today was more of the same. It felt good to actually be doing something about our situation. Fish certainly seemed more appetizing than some of the other meat we'd been eating. The salmon were running, and we hoped we could bring back enough to stretch our food supply.

There was also another part to our people being here—they were outside the neighborhood, some of them for the first time in weeks. It was like watching prisoners who'd been released from their cells. But while they may have been feeling freer, the outside world was getting more dangerous by the day.

The away teams were continually coming across bodies. Everybody had heard stories of bodies not just tucked away in corners or in abandoned buildings but left out on the streets, clearly the victims of some kind of violence. It meant that at times like this we had to be even more careful—we couldn't afford even one guard to fall asleep in the sun.

I caught sight of Lori and we waved at each other. She was standing by to help load the catch into the truck. Todd was out again with an away team today, foraging. It was rare that those guys didn't bring us back something useful, even if it was just information. They only went out in daylight and in groups of at least twenty-five, often more. Very different from Brett and his boys.

Each evening, just before last light, the ten members of Brett's night patrol would set out. There was something eerie about them, all dressed in black, even their weapons rubbed down with dirt and their faces blackened. They often snuck over the walls instead of through the gates. Brett said he didn't want anybody out there to see him coming. I thought he was getting even more paranoid, but whatever they were doing seemed to be working. They often came back with supplies—sometimes weapons and ammunition they'd “liberated” from groups they'd encountered.

Brett and his squad—who were all in their early twenties—hung around together all the time. They used one guy's house as their headquarters. They reminded me of a football team, but with guns instead of helmets and pads. Actually, they wore their body armor all the time and kept their weapons strapped to their sides, ready to leave at a moment's notice.

I'd also noticed something else about them. None of them seemed to be losing any weight or complaining about being hungry. I couldn't help but wonder—were they bringing back everything they found? Then again, when you considered what they were doing, maybe they deserved a little more. They were still bringing back things that the community needed, and they were risking their lives to do it.

My mother told me that Brett's squad reminded her of the SWAT—special weapons and tactics—team she worked with at her precinct, who always had a little extra swagger in their step, even for police officers. She said Brett and his squad had to be a little cocky to do their job, but she was trying to make sure they stayed in line.

There was a whistle behind me. I turned back to see several of our people, in big rubber hip waders, start across the river, bringing one side of the net to meet the other. We'd soon see what the net had caught. Everybody close at hand had stopped in their tracks, watching, waiting, and hoping. The waders reached the near side, and others on the bank helped them pull in the net from both ends. As the net reached the shallows, I could see something bubbling at the surface of the water: fish, dozens and dozens and dozens!

Once the net was completely out of the water, people began laughing and yelling while holding fish above their heads. It was incredible to see everybody so happy. And then I got worried.

I looked up and down the river. We'd caught fish—and everybody's attention. That wasn't good. It was best that people who weren't from the neighborhood not see what had happened, but out here, in the open, that wasn't possible.

I pulled the rifle off my back. I wanted those people who were watching not just to see the fish but also to see the weapon, to notice all of us with weapons. I wasn't afraid of Leonard and his group or Madison and her family, but there had to be others in the woods along both sides of the river.

Suddenly, I noticed a half dozen figures standing atop a ridge that marked the highest point along the river. They weren't directly above us, but they were way too close for comfort. They were posed there like statues, silhouetted against the sky. I couldn't tell if they had any weapons, but there was something unnerving about the way they stood so still and seemed to be peering down on us.

With a hand signal, I caught Howie's attention, and then pointed to the watchers up above. He stared in their direction, and also seemed unsure of what to make of them. With my head rotating on a swivel I hustled over to him.

“What do you think?” he said.

“There's something about them I don't like.”

“Me neither.”

“Should we settle down our folks?” I said.

“They're just happy. Can you blame them?”

“I just don't want to get anybody who's desperate and hungry to try to get any of our fish … or us.”

“You're right,” Howie agreed. “I'll lead a group up there to chase them away.”

“No, you need to stay here. I'll do it.”

Howie hesitated for an instant and then nodded. “I'll get you ten guards. The rest stay with me.”

I turned my attention to our observers, still peering down at us. I tried to will them away. If they left, I wouldn't have to go up after them.

*   *   *

Howie went over and gave some orders. A few of the sentries shouldered their weapons and started in my direction. Suddenly the thought of having only ten people with me didn't seem enough; having thirty guards in total out here didn't seem enough.

In my mind I was seeing not just the few figures poised at the top of the hill but hundreds of armed men, ambushing us from out of the forest. Those men—the people who had escaped from the compound—were never far from my thoughts, and I knew they were out there somewhere. If they came charging out of those woods right now, we couldn't possibly stop them. Still, I had to think about what we
could
stop.