It's Better This Way (2 page)

A group of five came around an old Chevy truck and walked towards us, guns leveled at us from their hips the entire time. When they were fifty feet away, the leader of the group told us to turn around and go back to Boise. My father begged with them to let us go on, at least go through their small mountain town so we could continue on to the next and see if they would offer us refuge. The leader wouldn’t budge. My father started yelling at them, alternating between insults and pleading with them to at least take me in. Instead, the man in charge gave us thirty seconds to turn around and head back the way we had just come from.

At twenty seconds, the five rifles that had been pointed at us from the hip switched to their shoulders, five eyes sighting my father along the barrels. I turned and started walking back down the road, grabbing my father’s coat sleeve to get him to follow. He shrugged me off and when I tried to grab his arm again, he turned on me and shoved me down, going on about how it just wasn’t right that these people wouldn’t take us in, we could work, we were useful. He rounded back on the five men and began walking towards them screaming like a madman. I sat with my ass on the asphalt, shocked to watch my father falling apart before a whole gang of men with guns and hard looks in their eyes that promised they’d make the hard choices without thinking twice.

The count reached zero and I watched five guns unload bullets into my father from twenty feet away. He danced a sickening little pirouette before falling over on his side. He was dead before his head cracked open on the pavement. Five rifles swung around towards me. I closed my eyes and felt hot urine flood my Levi’s. Instead of the sound of gunfire, I heard the leader start counting down from thirty again. I ran at least ten miles, snot and tears congealing on my face. I finally had to stop when my thighs were on fire from the friction of cold urine and rough denim rubbing back and forth.

CHAPTER 3 - Thoughts of Home

I woke from the nightmare that has plagued me since the day it happened. The fire had burned down past coals and was growing cold. Tony stirred for a few seconds then went back to as relaxed a sleep as one can get on cold, rocky ground. I flipped over onto my back to stare at the sky. Twenty three years after light pollution became a faded memory, the sky was still the most breathtaking thing I had ever witnessed. As a kid, my dad, Sandra, and I would go up into the Sawtooth Mountains and do some sky gazing on an old telescope that he’d had since he was a kid himself. We had to travel farther and farther each year to find true dark as Boise continued to expand.

It was funny in a way to think that in the span of about ten minutes, the skies once again became the same as when Plato, the Israelites, and even the first men had looked at them. The line of the Milky Way always made me think of the bulls, wondering where they had come from. If they could find us, could there be other alien beings within the bright cluster of stars I could see every night, looking for them? For a year or so after it happened, I fantasized that some benevolent race would come and help us fight off the invaders. After another year, I had made up my mind that since the bulls ignored us as if we were insects, they must be obeying some galactic law, which meant none of the other powers within the galaxy were going to do anything about it.

I could see the glow of dawn coming, so instead of trying to sleep anymore I got out of my bag and rummaged around for firewood. By the time the first fiery line of sunlight broke over the central wastes, I had water boiling and the last scoop of coffee brewing. Anytime one of our scavenger crews found the stuff, it got locked away in the main pantry of the big house. It was worth more than gold these days. The only people who were given a coffee ration were the scouts. A few of the citizens probably grumbled about how they deserved it, as well as a few of the crew members who had unearthed it by chance somewhere. Scouts needed to be the most alert and sometimes had to walk or run for hours. Bulls were easy to spot, but other humans bent on taking what you had were sneaky, clever animals. Besides, the penalty for filching goods, especially coffee, was banishment. The same as for stealing it from anyone else on the way back to The Farm or stealing it once it had been locked away in the pantry.

I cringed at the thought of banishment. I’d seen it more times in the nine years I’d been a citizen of The Farm than I liked to remember. I’d voted for it against others that had stood accused of some crime or other more times than I wanted to think of as well. The terror in their eyes as they were stripped completely naked and marched down the road for a mile before being told to get lost would give me nightmares for a week or two after. The escorts would never shoot the banished either, no matter if attacked. It was the severity of being forced out naked and not even being humanely killed that served as a warning to everyone else. Over the years scouts and crews and more than a few farmers and ranchers found the naked corpses of those that didn’t have what it took to survive with absolutely nothing. Which was most of them, I’m sure.

Once in a while though, a cunning few somehow survived, usually by lasting long enough to find the closest occupied home and lying in wait until the perfect time to ambush, murder, and steal. Rape was almost always a given if the ambushed had been unlucky enough to be female. Most banished took the hint and relieved the dead of everything that would help them survive a long trip away from The Farm and even the central wastelands. The Farm had a fairly long arm of influence, and it had become an important hub in the network. The few who didn’t get the hint usually came back into our territory and tried to exact revenge. Sometimes they got some revenge, but in the end they always died. Once in a great while one of the banished would manage to get his hands on weapons, food, and enough followers to make things difficult for everyone around the region, including us.

The council would ask Mom to give the okay for a kill squad to hunt down the self-proclaimed king, messiah, god, whatever he called himself. Once it had been a banished husband and wife, and their religious fervor had ignited a lot of deaths on both sides until Tremaine killed them both with a shotgun before being torn apart by
the flock
, as their faithful called themselves. That was a couple of years before I stumbled along and joined The Farm, but the lesson ran deep. Even if the madman wasn’t one of the banished, we still hunted him down and took his life. We simply couldn’t afford a strongman in the area making trouble. Usually the ‘trouble’ ended with too many humans dead.

The Farm had spent the time from the day of the invasion building up inventories, weapon stocks, food, seed, non-electrical equipment, books, everything they thought they would need to survive in the middle of Oregon with no contact with anyone outside of how far they could ride a horse or a bike. It had started as a sort of pot farm and hippie commune before the invasion. After, it became a destination for anyone that could follow the rules and wanted to live. Life outside of The Farm was almost always much more brutal and harsh. Jenna White, Mom to everyone now, was the original owner of the 1940’s farmhouse and outbuildings that sat on one hundred sixty acres of rolling hills farmland.

Because of Mom and her hippie clan from Portland, The Farm now housed almost four thousand humans on a couple thousand acres. There was no more BLM or county sheriff to come around and tell you where to put fences. The people with the guns decided where to put up fences. Mom had the final word on just about everything, though there was a council that varied from nine to more than fifty, depending on what was being decided, that got to decide what rules to make, what quotas to set, who got what work assignments. When crimes or issues affected everyone to the point the council decided it was best to have a full vote, all of us would congregate on the giant (and usually overgrown) lawn that was still kept on the south side of the main house. At four thousand citizens it could get a bit crowded, but even during the most debated issues that required a full vote, there had never been more than three thousand of us gathered.

Everyone was assigned a job to do for a year. If you didn’t want to do the job, you had one chance to exchange it with someone that the assignment team agreed could handle the job you were refusing. If you refused a swap after you’d requested it, or refused to do your job for any reason other than a medical reason, you got banished. If you stole anything, you got banished. If you physically hurt someone against their will, you got banished. If you raped someone, you got castrated and cauterized, then banished. If you killed someone, you got banished to The Cage.

The Cage was an iron cage, crafted by our blacksmith Dredge, placed at the intersection of the main road that ran in front of the main house and the road that led out to LR40 and on to Eugene. Murderers were stripped
and had their hands and feet bound before being put inside the cage. Where they stayed until they died. It was disturbing to walk past The Cage every day and see the change from the previous day as the person inside died slowly of starvation, dehydration, and exposure. I’d only had to witness such an event twice in my nine years.

The last time it was a teenage girl who cried for days when she wasn’t wailing in sorrow or screaming in fury or fear. It rained every day for a week then, and the poor girl stayed alive longer than anyone else ever had. Most only lasted five days. Some of the heartier ones were said to have lasted as long as seven days. Misha, the teenager, had finally clocked out after thirteen days. Thirteen agonizing, slow, painful days. I saw her in my dreams sometimes. But she’d murdered a teenage boy who had taken her virginity before spurning her.

By the evening, we were only about ten miles short of The Farm. Since we were coming back from the northwest, it was desolate and there were no outlying houses or shelters. Coming back from the south was the best, with friendly farmers or others who traded with us, offering a bed and a meal and any news traveling along the network. They knew we would come running with guns raised if anything happened in their neck of the woods. The outliers didn’t have to live by our rules, and we didn’t preach our rules to outsiders, whether they were close enough to be considered locals or if they’d journeyed from far away places like Portland, Reno, or even the Bay Area.

We simply told them our rules, and told them if they wanted to trade with us, wanted us to protect them against mobs or brigands, they had to abide the most basic ones of ‘don’t hurt people’ and ‘we are all in this together’ which sounded like some hippie shit from the 1960’s but Mom insisted on it. I think the fact that we actively hunted down anyone who had a taste for power or any other kind of evil made the survivors within a hundred miles appreciate what we did even more and helped keep the region stable. We were the only law where there was none.

Tony made the fire while I worked on getting something to eat ready. It would be another round of MRE’s, but they were nutritious and some weren’t half bad. I liked Tony. We’d been scouting as a pair for seven months now. In five months when I got a new assignment, I’d miss him for sure. We typically said less than a hundred words to each other during our forays around the wasteland to keep an eye on things. I didn’t even know his last name.

Last names were a funny thing these days honestly. A lot of the kids who were born after the bulls arrived opted for a single name now. Kortanna. Jennimyer. There was even a fifteen year old kid who called himself Megatron after some old cartoon I guess. Tremaine was the big inspiration for the single name trend. He’d died to cleanse the region of exactly the kind of thing that the Farm would sacrifice everything to be rid of.

After a beef stew and applesauce meal from the foil pouches, I leaned against a rock and fired up the pipe. We were close enough to home that only the truly foolish would try to ambush us in the middle of the night. Not that there wasn’t a decent share of truly foolish, but ten miles was practically home base considering the reach that The Farm had. Tony puffed a bit with me, and we sat silently, watching the galaxy come to life above our heads. I wanted to ask him his last name, where he came from, why or how he ended up at the Farm. Instead, I wondered again about Sandra.

CHAPTER 4 - A Scavenger and His Sister

After watching my father get riddled with bullets, I made it back to Boise. I was hungry, thirsty, dirty, and mostly insane. I waited until night to sneak back into our house. It had been sacked, but like most homes on the street from what I could tell, it hadn’t been completely trashed. I slept upstairs near the window of my father’s bedroom. If I heard anything I could go out the other window and down into the side yard, as well as watch the main street from up high. Running water was a fantasy, but there was a small stream that ran behind the house a few over from ours. I found an empty plastic gallon jug in the garage, along with a nice pile of human excrement on the hood of my father’s BMW.

I drank the water, regretted it by nearly shitting myself to death for the next two days, then decided to go exploring through the neighborhood. I needed food, clothes, and most of all guns. I needed to acquire a bike or a horse or something to somehow make it to Corvallis to find my sister. I tried to keep at bay the images of her being raped and killed by the new powers controlling wherever she was. As I moved house to house, I found more dead bodies than food or guns. Most houses still had plenty of clothing left in them. I sampled a pile of brand new athletic socks and an unopened bag of boxer-briefs, tossing them all into my new backpack that had been overlooked at the Morgansens’ house. By the third night I found a nice pair of hiking boots for when my current pair went belly-up, as well as a Mormon cellar.